Jim Corbett

Jim Corbett was born in Nainital and knew the Kumaon jungles as few ever have. He shot the man-eating tigers and leopards no one else could face, wrote Man-Eaters of Kumaon, and ended his life arguing for the tiger's protection. India's oldest national park bears his name.

Edward James Corbett was born on 25 July 1875 in Nainital, where his family kept a winter home at Kaladhungi in the foothills. He grew up reading the jungle like a book, and between 1907 and the late 1930s the administration repeatedly called him when a man-eater terrorised the hills.

His hunts are the stuff of legend and of his own understated prose: the Champawat tigress, blamed for over four hundred deaths; the Panar leopard; and the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag, which stalked the pilgrim road for eight years. He hunted alone, on foot, and often at night, and he took no reward.

Corbett the hunter became Corbett the conservationist. He photographed tigers rather than shooting them, lectured schoolchildren on the jungle, and pushed for the Hailey National Park established in 1936, which was renamed Corbett National Park in his honour in 1957. Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944) became a world bestseller. He moved to Kenya at independence and died there in 1955; his Kaladhungi cottage is now a museum.