In 1956 there were ten staff in the Serengeti [Banagi]: one mason, one carpenter, five Rangers, one driver and two porters. Our transport consisted of one Land-Rover and one five-ton Bedford lorry.

In June 1957 Gordon Poolman joined us as Park Ranger Serengeti, with Connie, his wife. Gordon came from an old Kenya family and we had grown up together as youngsters at Nanyuki in Kenya. . . .

Gordon was an outstanding Warden, remained with us until 1963, when he resigned and went to live in England with Connie and their young daughter. Within a year he was dead from cancer.

In those days the Serengeti was closed to visitors during the long rains of March, April, and May, and Kay used to lay in two or three months� supplies at that time. And there we would sit, with the flooded Mgumgu and Orangi rivers on each side of the house, in splendid isolation, like Daniel among the lions.

The Grzimeks camped near Banagi throughout 1958, living in considerable discomfort in a metal uniport hut near the Mgungu River. Together we carried out the first aerial census of the Serengeti Wildebeest, and made many anti-poaching reconnaissance flights.

Tragically, Michael was killed in 1959 when his plane collided with a vulture over the Malambo Mountains. . .

Visitors to the park would often ask about the origin of the beautiful word 'Serengeti'. It is definitely a Maasai name, but it has been changed by both Swahili and English. Originally it was Siringet, but the English rendered it Serenget and the Kiswahili language added the final 'i'.

The word itself appears to be taken from Siringitu Meaning 'tending to extend', and is closely related another Maasai word 'siriri' Meaning straight or elongated. Either way, the sense of space is clear: the place where the land runs on for ever.

'We pushed on through the mountain woods, over a good even cattle track flanked on either side by thick walls of herbaceous vegetation. Starting at 9 am we passed through open grassland with marshy rills and with charming scattered groves.

At noon [on the 18th March, 1892] we suddenly found ourselves on the rim of a sheer cliff, and looked down into the oblong bowl of Ngorongoro, the remains of an old crater. Its bottom was grassland, alive with a great number of game; the western part was occupied by a samll lake. We went down the steep slope and started to pitch our tents at the foot of the precipice.

The abundance of game was really magnificent. Large herds of antelope roamed around and long maned gnus, light footed zebras and, singly or in pairs, the broad backs of rhinos. Although I am not a great Nimrod, during the day I shot one wilderbeest and three rhinos. From the neighbouring kraals, which appeared like dark circles in the grass, a crowd of thin Maasai women arrived, their heads shaved and their iron ornaments rattling: they had come to get meat.'

Baumann then [after March 18] climbed up the steep walls of the crater, and skirting Oldeani Mountain, made his way down the escarpment overlooking Lake Eyasi. He camped on a high ridge where he could look down from his tent and see its waters glittering in the sun - the first European to do so. Then, after visiting the lake, Baumann's safari continued by way of Lagaja [Lake Ndutu] in the Serengeti.

As late as 1909, James Clark of the American Museum of Natural History, when hunting along the Kenya-Tanganyika borders in the Nguruman area, looked south across the Serengeti, and was told that it consisted of

'low, hot, fever-ridden country with miles of low bush and little game or water ... a God-forsaken land.'

In 1923 Clark returned, walking with his safari from the railhead at Moshi past Arusha and climbing the rift escarpment near Mtu-wa-Mbu. Pushing on through the country of the Wambulu - the people of the mists - the safari ascended the south-eastern slope of Ngorongoro and after threading their way through the dense cloud forest, paused for lunch in a glade.

The party [James Clarke] camped for three weeks in the Crater, joined by a lone Englishman, Captain Hurst, who lived on the Crater rim and hunted lion with a pack of Australian Kangaroo hounds. Hurst had been mauled by a lion a few weeks before.

Clark's account of his first view of the crater is worth recording:

'Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a gigantic bowl twelve miles in diameter with huge sweeping walls rising to a wonderfully uniform height two thousand feet above the level of the bottom. One gazed down upon lakes and forests and plains that were so merged into uniformity by the distance as to seem like nothing more than a gigantic and amazingly smooth floor covered with a patchwork of different shades of green and tan, with here and there the sheen of sunlight on smooth water. I clung there gazing for minutes, making out this and that, and concious of wast numbers of black and white specks that looked very much as peper and salt might look scattered about the bottom of a bowl of dark green jade. I focused my glasses and to my amazement the specks came to life and resolved themselves into enormous herds of wildebeest and zebra. The brightly marked zebra were the tiny grains of salt. The dark wildebeest were the flakes of peper and even when my glasses had shown me positively what they were, I could hardly believe my eyes, so vast were their numbers.'

Sabe Hill, which lies 10 miles west of Banagi, is named after a famous Wondorobo hunter who lived there for many years.

The first really detailed account of what is now the northern extension of the Serengeti was written by Stewart Edward White, the America hunter. White was determined to penetrate westward beyond the Loita range, and in 1913, accompanied by A.J.Cunningham, another well known hunter, he set out from Nairobi with thirty porters and twenty donkeys

White made camp three miles downstream from the source of the Bolonja Spring, and his description of this area, the finest in the Serengeti, is worth quoting:

It is interesting to note from the account of White's safari how scarce buffalo were in what is now the parks's buffalo country. Possibly they had not yet recovered from the great rinderpest plague of 1897. For when I left in 1972 annual counts had established a population of at least 70,000 buffalo.

The complete absence of elephant is also interesting.

In 1901, A large raiding party of Masai attacked a group of thirty German askaris in the Ikoma area. [the Ikoma Fort is situated on top of the most easterly of a series of low hills called Nyabuta, about one mile north of the Grumeti River] The battle went on all day until evening, when the German troops withdrew into the Fort boma. That night the Masai attacked again but were driven off.

In about 1920, Leslie Simpson, a retired American mining engineer and part-time hunter, pioneered a route for motor vehicles from Norak via Barikatabu across the Sand River, and following the northern side of the Kuka Range to a place now known as Klein�s Camp, (then called Simpson Springs).

The name Seronera is probably derived from the Masai word siron Meaning a bat-eared fox. Thus Seronera is 'the place of the bat-eared foxes'

In April and May 1925 Simpson brought Stewart Edward White and two friends along this route [to Seronera], and built a semi-permanent camp somewhere near the spot where the popular Seronera Wildlife Lodge now stands.

In 1926 A F (Pat) Ayre and Philip Percival, two great professional hunters, led the Akeley Eastman safari to Seronera. They brought twenty Lumbwa spearmen from Kenya and filmed the spearing of six lions.

Al Klein, the American professional hunter who first came to Africa in 1909, took over Simpson�s Springs in 1926 and made a base camp there with a vegetable garden to supply his safaris.

Another book which gives an idea of the early hunting days in the Serengeti is Africa Speaks by Paul L Hoefler [the late Don Ker, of Ker and Downey was a lorry driver on the hunt described.] Hoefler�s book is the story of a hunting and filming safari in the Serengeti in 1928, and seems fairly typical of the exploitation of that area in the days before conservation.

In 1928, Martin Johnson camped for three months in the Seronera area making his great film Simba.

It was probably during the early 1930�s that the fame of the Serengeti lions began, due to the baiting and feeding of them by hunting parties. It is said in those days that one merely drove along the Seronera and the lions, hearing the cars, would follow, hoping for a meal. Sensational tricks were filmed, such as feeding lions in the back of trucks and filming through the rear window of the cab. One film company actually stuffed a human dummy with zebra meat and filmed a lion pulling the body from a tent.

Over 200 families, of which 82 were Masai, were established on the floor of the Ngorongoro Crater, growing maize and tobacco, diverting streams for irrigation and destroying vegetation. Apart from the Masai, none of these new arrivals could claim traditional rights of occupancy in the Park, and in 1954 their activities were banned. By the end of the year almost all the cultivation in the Park had ceased and most of the crop growers had been re-settled elsewhere.

In the Moru Kopjes in the Western Serengeti there were also nearly 100 families of Ndorobo with 10,000 head of cattle and 8,000 head of small stock. Unlike the Masai, who used this area seasonably, the Ndorobo had established permanent bomas, from which they took a steady toll of game with poisoned arrows. As a result of pressure from the Park authorities, the Administration and the Masai elders, the Ndorobo were forced to leave the Park in March 1955 and settle elsewhere.

I had just arrived at Banagi in November 1956 ....

One of my first safaris was to accompany the Professor [Pearsall] on his surveys in the Western Corridor. His safari was conducted by Don Ker, the well-known professional Hunter, and always one of the Serengeti�s most ardent supporters. Also on this safari were Hugh Elliott (later Sir Hugh), Dr. P.J Greenway the eminent East African botanical expert, and G.H. Swynnerton, Chief Game Warden of Tanganyika.

John Hunter of Oldeani also flew Professor Pearsall over large isolated areas in his private plane. John, one of the Park Trustees and later Chairman of the Board, was always in the forefront of conservation in Tanganyika, and his advice and influence played a very important part in the outcome of the future negotiations with the Government.

In February 1972, John Stephenson, at that time Chief Park Warden for the Serengeti, and I, were suddenly called to a meeting ...

Flying in the Serengeti could be said to have begun with Martin and Osa Johnson, who took their Sikorsky amphibian planes up from Cape Town in 1933 and covered 60,000 miles of Africa. .... They landed at Seronera and spent two weeks photographing lions.

But all good things come to an end, and in late 1966 we were told that the newly formed Serengeti Research Institute were taking over all game work in the Park, and that they were also to take over the Super Cub. And so, in January 1967, Bravo Lima was handed over after flying an impeccable 1,940 hours in the Serengeti. She did well for the Research Institute, and was finally sold to some missionaries near Musoma, who wrecked her in a banana shamba while attempting a short landing.

One aircraft, a DC3, collided with one of these [secretary birds] birds at Seronera aerodrome and landed with a shattered windshield and badly buckled cabin roof.

In 1969 Hugh Lamprey hit two vultures in a week while carrying out game counts in the Northern Extension.

Yes here I am in the bush again, rifles and tents and all

Settling back in the old routine, dawn and the early call.

The morning hunt and the midday rest and the walk at evenfall.

And every minute of every hour old friends come back to me

As the bush remakes its magic and the wild its witchery,

Everything I remembered and all as it used to be.

The leopard that crouched a-second a-snarl then vanished like a sulphur smoke.

The throb at the heart of the dead of night when the master lion spoke.

The snort and the crash and the thunder of hooves when the hidden buffalo broke.

The springing grace of the antelope, the deer with their gentle eyes,

The hundred songs of a hundred birds, small creatures and their cries.

These and the fortune of the chase and at last perhaps its prize.

All mine again - and the solitude, and the silent sunlit peace.

Comfort at heart and slow content, refreshment and release.

While day upon hourless day declares �thy mercies shall not ease�

her [Mary Akeley] book 'Lions, Gorillas and their Neighbours', an account of a collecting safari in 1926-1927

At the western end of the [Ngata Kiti] valley is a big granite rock called Ol Donyo Lairobi, home of the rare lammergeyer or bearded vulture. In the mid-1960�s the Conservation Unit tried to fence off the valley to allow the Masai cattle more grazing and to keep out the wildebeest. A five-stranded barbed wire fence was erected across the valley and up the hills on each side; but the futility of this experiment was amply illustrated in 1964 when the normal ebb and flow of the migrating herds came up against this fence. I was sitting on the hills that day, watching the wildebeest advance across the plains in long lines. When the great army reached the fence, the animals paused and spread out along its two-mile length. There was a cloud of dust, a swirl of movement, and suddenly the fence was down in a dozen places, with the wildebeest pouring through.

Ol Doinyo Lairobi (The Cold Mountain)

How can one ever adequately describe that country. The enormous solitary fig tree eight miles north of Lemuta, standing in the valley like a sentinel.

We began with 25 people at Banagi in 1956.....

The resident population in the Seronora valley, including the Serengeti Research Institute and the new Seronera tourist lodge eventually reached the staggering total of 1,700 people, excluding visitors.

Among many memorable visitors were Charles Lindbergh, Senator Robert Kennedy, HRH Prince Philip on the occasion of Tanzania�s Independence in 1963, President Tito, the King and Queen of Denmark, HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and many writers including William Tryron, Peter Matthiessen, Alan Moorehead, James Mitchener, and Robert Audrey.

In 1968 the Director decided that something more palatial was needed to accommodate the heavy inflow of VIP�s visiting the Park. A well-known firm of Nairobi architects was given the job of designing it with no expense spared. The was to be the guest house to end all guest houses - a superb new Taj Mahal. It stands today near the old Taj and every effort was made by Les Talbot, the best construction engineer the Parks ever had, to make it perfect.

'Dr Hugh Lamprey, Director of Research, was also on that visit as a man who is almost: �too large to be true - a handsome giant whose bell-like voice would steal any picture from Gary Cooper or boom through an Aldous Huxley novel: he is an Oxford biologist and complete man of action combined. He is to fly me over the game Migration tomorrow if Everest or F6 can spare him.�

One visitor did put pen to paper. He was the distinguished London drama critic Cyril Connolly, a large, pale man, fat and moonfaced, and extraordinarily out of place in the Serengeti. [see descriptions of Sandy Field and Hugh Lamprey.

Cyril Connolly described Sandy Field as �an ex-provincial governor, an astringent Wykehamical civil servant who is excellent company. He could be head of a Cambridge college, or an unflappable chief secretary in an Edwardian comedy; he prefers people to animals (an amiable eccentricity) and seems a shade too Stendhalian for the brute creation which forms the bulk of his satray.�

In 1947, my first job as a young Game Ranger was to placate the irate farmers of Nanyuki, who were bombarding the Game Department with telegrams about the hyenas that were nightly disembowelling their pedigree cattle.

On a lighter note, Hugh Lamprey was motoring near Seronera airfield one evening when he suddenly saw a strange green shape in the grass. A solitary hyena was circling it with interest at about forty yards range. Hugh drove over to investigate, and was astonished to find Sandy Field, the Chief Park Warden, lying curled up in the grass, clutching a large club and making gurgling noises. On hearing the car, Sandy hastily got to his feet and explained with some embarrassment that he had been carrying out an experiment. He had decided to lie down in the grass and moan like a man suffering a heart attack to see how close the hyena would approach. The strange shape seen by Hugh had been Sandy�s trousers in the grass. Sandy�s experiment was ruined, and he, Hugh and the hyena went their separate ways.

As George Schaller so truly says in the conclusion of his scientific report on the Serengeti lion:

�Ecological and aesthetic considerations aside, predators should be allowed to survive in National Parks without justification, solely for their own sake. Only by doing so can man atone in a small way for the avarice and prejudice with which he continues to exterminate predators throughout the world.�

On 12th May 1968, Hugh Lamprey, Director of the Serengeti Research Institute, was taking off in his glider from Seronera airfield when he saw a leopard come charging out of the long grass after the two cable which was rushing along the ground, towed by an ancient Humber car, some 700 feet ahead of the glider. From the cockpit, Hugh watched the leopard put both paws around the cable and then hang on like grim death as it was dragged along the ground. Hugh wondered whether to abort the take-off, but lifted off anyhow. The leopard, by this time astride the cable, was lifted ten feet into the air before falling back and bounding into cover.

The Serengeti Research Project was established in 1961 and centred around the Michael Grzimek Memorial Laboratory at Banagi. Two scientists arrived to study wildebeest and zebra respectively. At this stage in the development of the Serengeti, the balance between research and management was maintained. But this was not to last.

Finally in 1966 a large and expensive Research Institute costing over $600,000 to build was established four miles from Seronera, with a laboratory and housing for a director, deputy director, ecologist and up to twenty research scientists. The balance between management and research had finally been upset in no uncertain manner.

The arrogance of these scientists - with the ink hardly dry on their graduation papers - was unbelievable. I once heard them described at a Research meeting, chaired by a very eminent visiting Oxford professor, as �these brilliant young men at the height of their creative powers�! They obviously believed in this assessment and were sublimely confident that they had the answers to all East Africa�s game problems.

[Myles then goes on to describe how the scientists gradually increased the number of animals that they were killing as part of their experiments, until, partly following a visit by Martha Gellhorn, the policy was reviewed.]

Out of many hundreds of thousand of dollars spent on research in East Africa during the �fashionable� decade of the 1960s, little if anything has been achieved to my knowledge. Far better if the money was spent on anti-poaching and education. How much was spent on research in East Africa during those heady years? I have heard the figure of $10,000,000 quoted by a man in a position to know. He may be right. One thing is sure: it was a great confidence trick, and virtually nothing has ever come out of it to help the hard-pressed animals of East Africa.

In 1969, Martha Gellhorn, (third wife of Ernest Hemingway), was sent out to the Serengeti by an American Foundation which had funded the Research organisation to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars to report on their activities. Her visit happened to coincide with one of the buffalo massacres which so horrified her that she abandoned her commission and hurriedly left the park.

I collected the man�s skull [a poacher killed and mutilated by a buffalo] which was miraculously undamaged, and put it up in my office at Seronera with the following inscription underneath:

�This poacher was killed by a buffalo in the Tabora section.

UMMO COMEVOI SARETA COME NOI,�

which might be translated

�We were once like you and you shall be like us.�

In November, thirteen inches of rain fell on Seronera, and floods rose all over the Serengeti. ... the floods continued well into the following year.

The 1963 poaching season closed with torrential rains in December.

Aided by unusually dry Weather the 1965 poaching season began early

January and February 1967 were unusually hot, dry months in the Serengeti.

Exceptionally heavy short rains fell in December 1967...

This year also saw the arrival of John Stephenson, formerly Chief Warden for Mikumi National Park, transferred to Seronera. �Steve� was an old friend who I had known since my schooldays in Kenya. Later, he had played a major part in the demarcation of the new Serengeti boundaries in the 1950�s when he had been District Commissioner for Musoma. After independence he had joined us in the National Parks, and had been employed in the south, opening up the Mikumi, Ruaha and Gombe Parks.

'Steve' Stephenson, another veteran Tanzanian Parks Warden, who came to the Serengeti in 1970

In early 1972 I relinquished command of the Serengeti Field Force, and handed over to a citizen Warden. For a few months more I stayed on in an advisory capacity before finally leaving for my new posting in the Arusha National Park. Since I left, 33 non-citizen Rangers and NCO�s of the Field Force have been replaced by citizens, leaving a gap in experience which will be hard to fill.

'Africa is a land of wild beasts. The grandest forms of the animal creation have their habitation in that continent'

�These noble creatures roamed the earth long before the advent of man. They have a prior claim to their territories and a right to a permanent place in the sun. And they call for man�s protection and mercy.�

Sandy Field, Chief Park Warden in the Serengeti from 1964 to 1967, once saw a lorry arrive from Arusha loaded with furniture covered with hessian and conceived the idea of having a suit made out of it. The Seronera tailor was commissioned and, after three fittings, the suit was completed at a cost of 25 shillings. The tailor threw in a hessian tie for good measure. Sandy used to wear the suit occasionally, looking quite extraordinary and purple with heat.

When he reached the age of sixty, he was retired by the British Government, and we returned to our home in Kenya. ... and Myles was offered a job in the Masai Mara Game Reserve.

Sadly, Myles died before this book was published. Myles was strong, wiry and tough to the end, and he knew nothing of the heart attack that killed him painlessly in his 63rd year....

A number of our favourite camp sites along the Mara River are visible from the square-topped hill on which his stone memorial is place, under a fig tree. The bronze plaque bears a simple inscription:

Myles Turner 1921 - 1984

In remembrance of a life dedicated to the wildlife of Africa

I should like to record grateful thanks to David Babu, acting Director of Tanzania National Parks, and to Abercrombie and Kent Limited and Gibb�s Farm for their hospitality and assistance on the safari made to the Serengeti during the preparation of this book.

The sudden and untimely death of Myles Turner in Kenya�s Masai Mara Game Reserve on 27 March 1984 deprived Africa of one of the legendary figures of wildlife conservation.

Dr Hugh Lamprey, Director of the SRI from 1966 to 1972, remembers Myles from those days with affection and admiration, and the two men remained firm friends to the end. Some of the work carried out at the SRI required a number of animals to be shot for research - an idea that was anathema to Myles, who believed that all game in a National Park should be sacrosanct.

�Myles was the man who saw the path of decency.� says Lamprey. �He was the conscience of the Serengeti, and he hated to see it compromised in the name of science. ..... Myles never mixed freely with the scientists and this deprived him of the opportunity of reconciling the polarised views of the Wardens and the researchers on Parks management. On the whole he was prematurely dismissive of the work of the researcher.�

spent eight years with Myles as a Serengeti Warden in the 1960's

Myles brought back the poacher�s skull and it remained on view in his office, with the legend:

�I have been where you are now,

And you will be where I have gone.�