An Irishman's Diary

AN INDIAN Sikh named Ungan Singh was the first recorded victim of a pair of serial killers whose inhuman activities terrorised railway workers in East Africa over a period of several months in 1898.

Their exact number of victims will never be known. But it is thought they slaughtered and ate as many as 140 people before finally meeting their own nemesis in the form of an Anglo-Irish soldier called John Henry Patterson, who shot both of them dead in separate incidents after a prolonged hunt.

The story of Patterson's role in apprehending the villains – a pair of man-eating lions – is told in a new book called Courage and Conflict,by Ian Kenneally: the sub-title of which is Forgotten Stories of the Irish at War.

This latter description is somewhat stretched by the case of the lions, whose theatre of war was the construction of a railway across the Tsavo river in Kenya: part of Britain’s attempt to consolidate its colonies in the region against the growing interests of Germany.

And far from forgotten, the events have inspired three films in the intervening century, most recently The Ghost and the Darkness(1996), which took its title from the nicknames given to the notorious killers, and which won an Oscar for sound effects.

But the story of the Tsavo lions and their eventual downfall certainly merits inclusion in a book about Irishmen in conflict.

Patterson's heroics were mentioned in parliament by the then British prime minister. And as for his adversaries, The Spectatormagazine wrote in 1900:

“If the whole body of lion anecdote, from the days of the Assyrian Kings until the last year of the nineteenth century, were collated and brought together, it would not equal in tragedy or atrocity, in savageness or sheer insolent contempt for man, armed or unarmed, white or black, the story of these two beasts.”

It is variously speculated that the Tsavo lions developed a taste for humans because of poor burial practices among the native railway workers; because an outbreak of rinderpest had destroyed most of their usual prey; or because, as was discovered later, one of them suffered from a dental abscess that precluded eating conventional lion meals.

Whatever the reason, they took to their new diet with a vengeance.

Fences and fires were no deterrent. And with some 3,000 workers spread out in camps along a mile of railway, there was always a wide choice of targets.

As the Westmeath-born Patterson mounted nightly stakeouts in areas where he thought the lions might strike, he frequently heard the screams of victims elsewhere along the line, by which time it was already too late.

It’s easy to see how the story lent itself to Oscar-winning sound effects.

The lions would announce their arrival at the edge of camp with deep-throated roars, followed by silence – what Patterson called “nerve-shaking” silence – as they closed in on a potential victim.

Then there would be the blood-curdling shrieks as yet another railway worker struggled uselessly to escape.

The rest of the camp could at least relax then, until the next time; although the night’s horror didn’t end with the victim’s demise.

As Kenneally writes: “The lions carried their prey only a few yards [before eating] and the remaining workers could hear every bite and crunch....”

Patterson was Kipling’s kind of man, clearly: the kind who built the empire.

After shooting the lions, he had them made into a pair of rugs, which decorated his home for many years until Chicago’s Field Museum paid him $5000 for their remains.

The museum reconstructed and stuffed the carcasses, which are still displayed today.

And although the mounted versions are not quite as big as the monsters described by Patterson, one of which took eight men to carry, the museum gallantly concedes that they would have bigger in real life.

Both lions were male, despite lacking manes: a regional or genetic quirk.

Most of the stories in Courage and Conflict are of more conventional Irish military adventures: from the San Patricios who fought for Mexico in the 1840s to the mutineers of the Connaught Rangers in 1920.

And most of the protagonists emerge as heroes, doomed or otherwise. But in the interests of balance, the book also touches upon the role of one Michael O’Dwyer, or Sir Michael O’Dwyer as he became, in the infamous massacre at Amritsar.

That slaughter of hundreds of civilians in 1919 is usually attributed to Brigadier General Dyer, who indeed gave the orders, and later defended an action that Winston Churchill called “monstrous”.

But O’Dwyer, born in Tipperary, was Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab at the time, and fully approved of Dyer’s decision. Many considered him ultimately to blame.

And the two men’s combined actions were later recalled in official British documents as “an era of misdeeds in India”.

O’Dwyer and Patterson may have been opposite sides of the coin of Anglo-Irish colonial history (although their attitudes to the natives with would not have been dissimilar).

But the former’s story had an ominous echo of the Tsavo tale. His perceived crimes in Amritsar eventually caught up with him, when he was assassinated in London in 1940. And not surprisingly, the man who carried out the attack was another Sikh, this time Udham Singh.