The Born Free legacy
A rare, almost saintly man.” This was how the renowned ITN foreign correspondent and author, Sandy Gall, described George Adamson in his biography of the man made famous around the world by the 1966 film, Born Free, starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers. I must have watched that film a dozen times during my childhood years, because in the 1970s it seemed to be a staple of the Sunday afternoon TV feel-good film slot. Everyone knows the story of George Adamson and his wife Joy, and Elsa the lion, and their Land Rover. Or at least they think they do. But there is far more to George and Joy’s story than the film will ever reveal, no matter how many times you watch it.
George Adamson was born in India in 1906. His Irish father, Harry, was an engineer who ran the Rajah of Dholpur’s army and was also building him a railway. When he retired from India, Harry bought a coffee plantation in Kenya and George joined his family there once he had completed his schooling in Cheltenham. It was soon obvious that George would not be happy growing coffee, and he spent the next decade drifting from job to job. He worked on a sisal plantation, as a farm bailiff, a milk roundsman in Nairobi, a barman, a government locust officer, a livestock trader, and a bus driver, which involved driving the 360-mile return journey from Nairobi to Arusha in neighbouring Tanganyika (now Tanzania). For much of the route there was no road to follow. The bus venture failed when one of his first cargoes, a bulk quantity of matches, self-combusted after the matches had rubbed together as the bus bounced across the bush. George then had stints as a
