Big-game hunter became the hunted and survived

JOHN Kingsley-Heath, a legendary figure of the African bush who ran African safaris for more than half a century, and as a big-game hunter survived many hair-raising encounters with the fiercest jungle animals, has died of kidney failure in Cornwall in England. He was 84.

In one encounter in Tanganyika in August 1961, Kingsley-Heath turned to see a lion crouching, ready to spring, less than five metres away. He fired a shot at the beast and it fled, with Kingsley-Heath and his gun bearers giving chase. They found the wounded lion lying on its side, breathing heavily.

When his client opened fire, the lion leapt more than six metres towards the two men. Kingsley-Heath dropped to the ground and smashed the barrel of his .470 rifle over the animal's head, breaking the stock at the grip the lion staggered.

As his gun bearers and client ran for cover, the lion jumped on Kingsley-Heath. "I smelt his foul breath as, doubling my legs up to protect my stomach, I hit him in the mouth with my right fist as hard as I could. His mouth must have been partly open as my fist went straight in."

With a single jerk of its head, the lion broke Kingsley-Heath's right arm as he punched it with his left fist, the lion bit clean through his left wrist, breaking the left arm and leaving the hand hanging by its sinews. It then clamped his foot in its jaws, crushing the bones by twisting his ankle. Finally, one of the gun bearers threw himself on the lion's back and stabbed it repeatedly with a hunting knife. With Kingsley-Heath's foot still locked in its mouth, the lion was finally shot dead.

The client reappeared, and with his rifle blew the creature's jaws apart so that Kingsley-Heath's foot could be removed.

"I was bleeding heavily . . . shaking uncontrollably, felt cold, and was likely to lose consciousness," he wrote. "I knew that if I did so, I might die."

After an agonising and long medical evacuation, followed by surgery and a bout of malaria, he eventually recovered.

Kingsley-Heath was born in Jerusalem, the son of Colonel A. J. Kingsley-Heath, formerly commissioner of police and later attorney-general of Kenya.

After high school, he joined the Welsh Guards and was injured by a bullet while serving as a captain in France he was later wounded by a landmine in Palestine. After the war he studied history and law at Trinity College, Cambridge, and economics at London University. A hockey blue at Cambridge, he later played for England he also played rugby for Blackheath.

Kingsley-Heath was appointed a Colonial Service district officer in Tanganyika, and then, in 1949, to the East Africa High Commission in Kenya. He travelled extensively in Kenya, Tanganyika, Somaliland, Uganda, Ethiopia (he is pictured there with a lioness he shot that had been attacking village herds), Eritrea, Sudan and Arabia, as an administrator specialising in locust control, and as an honorary game warden.

He saw no contradiction between legal big-game hunting and conservation. "For much of the period, game animals were plentiful everywhere," he noted, adding that his conscience never bothered him.

"My hunting was done in accordance with the laws of the land and permissions were based on facts that supported wildlife policies."

When, in 1978, it became clear that growing human populations were endangering game stocks, he stopped. "It was time to make a change, and I did so."

In 1956, before Kenyan independence, he was befriended by Syd Downey, who invited him to join Ker & Downey Safaris, the luxury tour operators. Kingsley-Heath became a director, responsible for opening the company's offices in Tanganyika and for making a survey of wildlife potential in Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Mozambique.

As his reputation grew he was hired to accompany many famous people on safari, and to manage wildlife on the films Hatari (1962), starring John Wayne, and Sammy Going South (1963) with Edward G. Robinson. In 1964 Kingsley-Heath joined another company, Safari South, in Bechuanaland, playing a major part in the development of tourism there.

Over the next 14 years he survived perilous near-misses with every member of Africa's so-called "Big Five" lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino. Perhaps his most bizarre adventure occurred in Kenya, near the Galana river between Nairobi and Mombasa. It was there, in 1967, that Kingsley-Heath and a client were tracking a bull-elephant "carrying good ivory". Once the elephant had been killed, the client and a gun bearer leant back against the trophy only to feel it shift behind them. Puzzled, they looked around to find a rhino nudging up against the body.

With nowhere to run or hide, the two men were forced to take refuge on top of the dead elephant where, to their horror, they were repeatedly charged by the rhino, a protected species that they were unable to shoot. Finally, as the elephant rocked back and forth under this assault, the client "could stand it no longer" and shot the rhino, forcing Kingsley-Heath to make a embarrassed call to the chief game warden.

"Strange things happen, stranger than fiction," came the reply, but with photographic evidence of the multiple gore wounds in the dead elephant, their tale was believed.

Kingsley-Heath and his wife, Sue, ran 800 hectares on the slopes of Kilimanjaro when not hunting (growing wheat and raising beef cattle) when they decided to leave Africa in 1978 and farm in England.

They then played a major part in introducing Texel sheep from the island of that name in Holland into the British national flock.

And, with the support of the Prince of Wales, Kingsley-Heath developed a Cornish Lamb Consortium for Cornish farmers fighting against abattoir and supermarket price domination.

In 1990, he was asked to return to Africa, where he was appointed chief park warden of the Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda he later became assistant director of national parks, staying for six years. He continued to lead safaris into his 80s, accompanied by his wife and in later years by his son Nigel, but their quarry on these occasions were photographs not trophies. Meanwhile, at home in Cornwall he planted his farm with thousands of trees to promote the natural wildlife around him. His book, Hunting the Dangerous Game of Africa, was published in 1998.

His wife and three sons survive him.