During his life in East Africa, Ray was associated with three Game Wardens who were also outstanding and extraordinary men (fig 21 a-e).
Charles Francis Massy Swynnerton was born in India and educated in Britain, immigrating to Southern Rhodesia at the age of 23 where he became a farm manager in the Chipinga District. A born naturalist, he became renowned over the next 20 years for his contributions to the flora and fauna of the region, many of which are associated with his name (eg. Swynnerton’s Robin). He was appointed the first Game Warden of Tanganyika in 1919, becoming Director of Tsetse Research at Shinyanga in 1929 (ref Wikipedia). In Tanganyika his name was a byword for his knowledge of the ecology. He was killed in an air crash in 1938, at the age 61, on his way to Dar where he was to be awarded the CMG.
Captain Montague Shadworth Seymour Moore, who won a V.C. at the 3rd Battle of Ypres in 1917, served with the Hampshire Regiment in Russia and Turkey until 1921 when he joined the King’s African Rifles and was posted to Tanganyika. Five years later he joined the game department under CFM Swynnerton and was appointed resident game ranger at Banagi in the Serengeti. While there he achieved a certain notoriety for feeding prides of lions from the back of game department vehicles in order to provide a photographic bonanza for visitors, with the aim converting them from routinely massacring all the local wildlife while on safari.
He later became head of the game Tanganyikan game department until his retirement in 1951, after which he lived in Nyeri, Kenya until his death from the complications of diabetes in September 1966, aged 69. His wife Audrey (Nee Milton) wrote a moderately successful book (entitled Serengeti) about their life together at Banagi, and their son Charles served in the Kenyan game department in the 50s and 60s.
I surmise that in the picture of the Game Department staff taken in 1938, Philip Teare is on the L, and Monty Moore (relatively younger, well-known hat) is on the R (fig 21c). This would also be consistent with Monty’s appointment as Game Warden at about that time. He himself was succeeded by Gerry Swynnerton in 1950. He died in 1966 at the age of 69. [Editors note: Dr John Moore, grandson of Monty Moore, doubts that the person in the photo next to Philip Teare is in fact his grandfather, there being no resemblance to other photos of him at the time.]
Gerald Henry “Gerry” Swynnerton was born in 1913, at a mission station near Melsetter, S. Rhodesia, and educated at Lancing College in Sussex, his father’s old school. He was admitted to Hertford College, Oxford, but left without completing his degree. After studying Mammology at the British Museum and the Berlin Zoological Museum, he joined the Tanganyika Game Department in 1939. In 1940, he enlisted in the Army, serving with the Reconnaissance Unit of the KAR in Abyssinia until 1943, achieving the rank of major. That year he married Lorna Bousfield in Nairobi. He became senior Game Ranger in 1948, succeeding Monty Moore as Game Warden in 1950, and I have no doubt that he was largely responsible for Ray being offered the Serengeti post.
Besides Lorna and he being close friends of my parents, Gerry, with his amiable, kindly disposition and shrewd, observant eye, was a favourite with my sister and myself. Unlike my father, who loved very large mammals, Gerry was interested in everything – lizards, snakes, mice, insects, birds, and one of my fondest memories is when he accompanied us on a picnic to the mountain pool at Morogoro, where we spent hours following him around whilst he dug frogs out the bank or put his head into cavities in the rocks, looking for anything of interest. His awful car accident and later untimely death from a heart attack at the age of 45, was a shock to the white society of the time.