A typical Thomas Kinkade painting

The San Jose Mercury obit noted:

His paintings are hanging in an estimated one of every 20 homes in the United States. Fans cite the warm, familiar feeling of his mass-produced works of art, while it has become fashionable for art critics to dismiss his pieces as tacky. In any event, his prints of idyllic cottages and bucolic garden gates helped establish a brand — famed for their painted highlights — not commonly seen in the art world.

“I’m a warrior for light,” Kinkade told the Mercury News in 2002, alluding not just to his technical skill at creating light on canvas but to the medieval practice of using light to symbolize the divine.

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Art Critic Jerry Saltz did not have very kind words for the deceased or for his artistic pronouncements.

The reason the art world doesn’t love Kinkade isn’t that it hates love, life, goodness, or God. We may be silly or soulless or whatever, but we don’t automatically hate things with faith and love or that other people love. We’re not sociopaths. (Well, most of us aren’t.) The reason the art world doesn’t respond to Kinkade is because none — not one — of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They’re all cliché and already told. This is why Kinkade’s pictures strike those in the art world as either prepackaged, ersatz, contrived, or cynical. Unoriginal rote things done in his perfectly conventional, balanced people-pleasing way produced these confected conglomerations of things people wanted to think they wanted to think about, democratic paintings whose meanings are hidden from no one, whose appeal is to not to vex or disturb, to produce doubt or newness. As Kinkade said, “I work to create images that project a serene simplicity that can be appreciated and enjoyed by everyone.” Joan Didion wrote that Kinkade’s pictures “typically feature a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.”

Kinkade’s “serene simplicity” wasn’t limited to his ideas about imagery. They had everything to do with what Andy Warhol called “business art.” Kinkade was willing to go the full Warhol. He mass-produced his pictures, making prints and images painted by factories filled with assistants. A recent ad advertised “a Master Highlighter Event … an 8-hour personal stage appearance by a certified Thomas Kinkade Master Highlighter. At the event, a highlighter enhances images of the gallery’s choice.” Needless to say, these are the very things that artists like Kinkade, and of late David Hockney, have railed about when they’re done by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, or Damien Hirst. In fact Kinkade makes Koons & Co. look like a boutique. After all, Jeff Koons never built his own gated communities in California, with houses and grounds in the likeness of his paintings, with starting prices at $425,000. (As for creating serenity, it’s often mentioned that Kinkade “has a long history of cursing and heckling other artists and performers … that he openly groped a woman’s breasts … and once relieved himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure while saying “This one’s for you, Walt.”

Hat tip to Victoria Ordin.

Bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs died yesterday at age 88. Times obituary

Cumberland Gap

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Fireball Mail

Hat tip to Bill Laffer.

The constitutionality of Obamacare needs extreme assistance.

When professional spinners on the left like Peter J. Boyer start explaining why the Supreme Court’s killing of Obamacare would really be a good thing for Barack Obama’s reelection chances, you can kind of tell that the realization that the Supreme Court is not likely to rule their way has pretty well sunk in.

Apart from the fact that Republicans would lose their most animating issue in the presidential race, the overturning of the health-care reform law would free Obama of the burden of having to mount a broad defense of his health-care plan as a centerpiece of his campaign. The president, who can read polls, managed to absent himself from any public observance of the reform law’s second anniversary last week. A Supreme Court invalidation of the reform law’s individual mandate, the feature that Americans find most odious (PDF) would allow Obama to embrace the issue anew, focusing on those portions of the reform (such as the provision allowing families to keep their children on their policies until they reach the age of 26) that most people actually like. Obama’s Democratic allies, meanwhile, could hammer home the importance of deciding who will be making the next appointments to the Supreme Court.

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The Hill quoted a major liberal analyst, who was about as pessimistic on Obamacare’s chances as it’s possible to get.

Jeffrey Toobin, a lawyer and legal analyst, who writes about legal topics for The New Yorker said the law looked to be in “trouble.” He called it a “trainwreck for the Obama administration.”

“This law looks like it’s going to be struck down. I’m telling you, all of the predictions, including mine, that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong,” Toobin said Tuesday on CNN. “I think this law is in grave, grave trouble.

Toobin’s observation came on the second day of oral arguments at the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

Earlier that day, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who could be the deciding vote on whether to uphold the law, told Solicitor General Donald Verrilli that there appeared to be a “very heavy burden of justification” on aspects of the law, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Toobin described Kennedy as “enormously skeptical” during the arguments Tuesday.

The Telegraph obituary of Lord St. John (pronounced “SinJin”) of Fawsley represents another classic of the genre, affectionately remembering the career of a delightfully flamboyant, yet reactionary, politician, wit, and scholar.

The Royal Fine Art Commission, of which he served three terms as chairman from 1985 to 1999, described itself as “the ultimate authority for consultation on matters of taste and aesthetics” — a remit which fitted Lord St John to perfection. Like Oscar Wilde, he put his genius into his life, affecting the flamboyant mannerisms of an Edwardian aesthete (proffering his hand in papal fashion, lapsing into Latin, deliberately mispronouncing modern words). At his Northamptonshire rectory he amassed an impressive collection of Victorian bric à brac and royal memorabilia, including photographs and mementos of the Royal family and a pair of Queen Victoria’s undergarments.

Irrepressible, witty and disarmingly immodest, Lord St John was an expert on much else besides aesthetics. In the 1990s, during the break-up of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, he became known for his frequent television appearances in which he would give the nation the benefit of his expertise on the attendant constitutional implications, a role in which he claimed extensive knowledge of the inner workings and private thoughts of the Royal family.

It was never entirely clear how much direct access he had, though he was certainly a great friend of Princess Margaret, whose framed likeness, prominently displayed behind him, graced many an official photograph. But that did not stop him assuring the nation that, for example, the young princes bore no grudge against Camilla Parker Bowles, or that the Prince of Wales was a loyal member of the Church of England with no intention of converting to Islam. When criticised for his willingness to pontificate on any royal issue, however trivial, he explained that his motivation was a “desire to do what one can to help the monarchy and help the Queen”.

In his role as Arts Minister in Mrs Thatcher’s first administration, Norman St John-Stevas was said to be one of the only cabinet members allowed to tease the Prime Minister, whom he referred to as “the Blessed One”, “the Leaderene” or (unaccountably) “Heather”. He liked to tell the story of how he asked to be excused from a meeting because he had a reception to go to. “But I’m going to the same function,” protested Mrs Thatcher. “Yes, but it takes me so much longer to change,” replied St John-Stevas. …

His time at the Royal Fine Art Commission was not entirely uncontroversial. The Commission had been a dozy quango which, for many years, could hardly even be bothered to produce an annual report, and it was hoped that his appointment would inject a bit of panache and excitement. It did, and he changed the public image of the Commission considerably. But critics accused him of turning it into a personal publicity vehicle (one annual report featured no fewer than six full-colour photographs showing the chairman striking one pose after another in the company of the great and good), and of allowing his own wayward preferences to take precedence over the views of the experts.

There was, for example, the affair of the Millennium wheel on the South Bank (now known as the London Eye), which was the subject of a blistering public attack by the Commission, even though at least three commissioners strongly supported the design. After a bad-tempered meeting at which Lord St John was reportedly rude to the architects concerned, the Commission’s secretary, Sherban Cantacuzino, wrote to the architects saying: “I am sure that he enjoys putting people down, all of us have suffered from his bullying.”

Problems magnified after Lord St John was elected Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1991. Academic politics proved highly diverting, and his frequent absences from the Commission’s offices in London raised eyebrows. In 1994 the government called in the retired civil servant Sir Geoffrey Chipperfield to examine the Commission. His conclusions were devastating: the Commission acted arbitrarily and was not respected, and the chairman’s office and car were over-lavish for a publicly funded body. Any other chairman would probably have had to resign, but Lord St John defied all predictions and was reappointed for a third term in 1995.

His time at Emmanuel College, from 1991 to 1996, was equally tumultuous. It was said that the dons of the historically Puritan institution first had doubts about whether they had chosen the right man when several of his friends were caught naked one night in the Fellows Garden swimming pool. While he certainly raised the college’s profile (albeit particularly in such outlets as House and Garden and Hello!), there was controversy on the high table over the lavish refurbishment of the Master’s Lodge and an expensive new extension to the college which some saw as a monument to the Master rather than a useful addition. …

Lord St John was also accused of spending an excessive amount of time with a small clique of mainly public school-educated young men who, it was alleged, were favoured with introductions to royalty and captains of industry, to dinners at White’s, private theatrical performances at the Master’s Lodge and long, affectionate letters. Such special privileges were extended to very few. Other undergraduates would recall the Master cutting them off in mid-sentence with some disparaging remark in Latin. To bitchy colleagues in other colleges, Emmanuel became known as “Mein Camp”.

Second only to royalty in Lord St John’s affections was the papacy. One of the rooms in his house was virtually a shrine to Pius IX, and in 1982 he published Pope John Paul II: his travels and mission. He himself was known to appear at official functions wearing the insignia of a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem (he was Grand Bailiff and head of the order in England and Wales).

In Who’s Who Lord St John described himself, somewhat superfluously, as “unmarried.”

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Rafal Heydel-Mankoo.

Jackal feeding on dead lion.

The American left responded with characteristic class yesterday when confronted with the sudden death of prominent conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.

Twitter erupted with unconcealed expressions of liberal delight at news of the death of a political opponent.

Typical examples:

AlmightyBob ‏ @AlmightyBoob : @AndrewBreitbart haha youre dead and in hell being a gay with hitler

Dave Lartigue ‏ @daveexmachina : Andrew Breitbart has died. Honestly, good riddance. He helped poison the country where I live and we are better off without him.

DAC ‏ @dac2527 : Satan calls Andrew Breitbart home… Good riddance!

The most prominent leftwinger to comment on Twitter was Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) who contributed: “Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart dead.”

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The response on Twitter was pretty bad, but Rolling Stone’s Nicholas Kamm had a go at topping all that in a gleeful farewell piece titled: Death of a Douche.

So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.

I say this in the nicest possible way. I actually kind of liked Andrew Breitbart. Not in the sense that I would ever have wanted to hang out with him, or even be caught within a hundred yards of him without a Haz-Mat suit on, but I respected the shamelessness. Breitbart didn’t do anything by halves, and even his most ardent detractors had to admit that he had a highly developed, if not always funny, sense of humor.

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Still, in many ways, an even more impressive example of seriously bad form was turned in by the perennial-critic-of-conservatism-pretending-to-reside-within-its-ranks Andrew Frum.

And this is where it becomes difficult to honor the Roman injunction to speak no ill of the dead. It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous. When one of the leading media figures of the day achieves his success by his giddy disdain for truth and fairness—when one of our leading political figures offers to his admirers a politics inflamed by rage and devoid of ideas—how to withhold a profoundly negative judgment on his life and career?

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The oleaginous Frum only really succeeded in lighting Ace’s fuse, and Ace responded by slapping Frum around in print the way Samuel Spade (Humphrey Bogart) handled Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)>

Andrew Breitbart died today. But he took David Frum’s last shred of credibility with him. …

David Frum exceeded Andrew Breitbart in one measure only, span of life.

But not in life.

David Frum will die as he lived, gray, timid, small, spiteful, cramped in thought and bent in spirit, slender of talent and obese in self-regard, unloved, unnoticed, unremembered and unread.

Postmortem tributes to the late flamboyant journalist Christopher Hitchens became so prolific and fulsome that they actually provoked satirical parody from Neal Pollack in Salon.

Hitchens spoke out against war, and also for war. In a span of five years, he bore witness to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the explosion of the Eiffel Tower, and the construction of the new holographic Eiffel Tower. He had acid in his pocket, acid in his pen and acid in his veins. Then Darkness fell, on Sept. 11, 2001. We’d all moved to America and gotten totally rich.

Hitchens changed that day. For months, he’d wander the streets at night, looking to drunkenly berate someone who disagreed with him about the evils of Islamofascism. Occasionally he’d attempt to strangle young journalists, who admired him unquestioningly, with their own neckties. But he was right. He was always right. Even when he was wrong.

The night they killed Osama bin Laden, he showed up at my apartment, drunk but lucid, quoting T.S. Eliot, Longfellow and, of course, himself. We stayed up watching CNN, which was actually pretty boring. In the morning, over a breakfast of corn flakes and whiskey, I said, “Well, I guess that’s the end of Islamofascism. Good job!”

Hitchens went into my kitchen, took a cutting board off the counter, and threw it into my forehead, drawing blood.

“Don’t be an imbecile,” he said. “The struggle never ends. Also, you must remember that there is no God.”

I needed four stitches that day. Hitch put them in himself, with his teeth. What a friend he was.

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I thought that the funereal commemorations, at that point, had gone about as far as they could go, but, no, life was still able to top art.

Along came an essay from (of all people) paleocon classicist Victor Davis Hanson (the California Cato) informing us that he, too, had been a friend of Hitch. Did anyone who writes in Britain or America not drink with Hitchens (–or worse)?

Provoking the question: which is the wilder and funnier story, the fictional parody above or the actual testimony of a live eyewitness?

Christopher once asked me whether the classics community, my readers, and my Democratic family had become disgusted with me in the same way that the far greater global literary and left-wing world had with him over Iraq. I could only answer, “Well, yes, of course, but it is a matter of degree, since I am not sure how much they knew or cared.” He smiled, “Well, if they did, at least, that’s good news, Victor. We are judged better by our enemies than our friends.” I disagreed about that.

Like many Englishmen, Christopher had a great reverence for classics; he made it a point once to have me over to dine with the great Sophoclean scholar Bernard Knox, and on another occasion a Latin-quoting Jerry Brown (who remembered that I had written him a note in classical Greek in 1976). Christopher’s daughter was a gifted Latin student, and he often peppered me with academic questions about Thucydides and Aristophanes. He oddly seemed interested in the scholarly minutiae that others considered the equivalent, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, of a dog walking on two legs (impressive, but for what purpose?): Could the average Greek have followed Pericles’ Funeral Oration as it is “transcribed” by Thucydides? How did the parabases actually work on stage in Aristophanes’ plays? For a radical, Mr. Hitchens had great reverence for traditional education, especially its emphasis on rote, grammar, and syntax.

I was more surprised about Christopher’s interest in agriculture, but then, in my experience, the English — and Christopher seemed to me as English as anyone born in Britain — seem to treat farming with the same special reverence they extend to dogs and Greek. He once asked to visit me for a weekend on our farm, and was fascinated about raisin production, tree fruit, tractors, and the economy of rural central California. I kidded him that out here driving a Massey Ferguson with a tandem disk was seen as far more impressive than reciting a stanza of Kipling, and he flared up and answered, “But why, man, one at the expense of the other?” But often of course they are.

When he arrived in rural Selma, out of drink and angry that he had exhausted his usual favorites, I warned him there was no way I could buy all his accouterments out here, and I was not going to drive all the way up to Fresno to find them. He rattled off a number of carbonated-mineral-water brands that he apparently knew well from Mexico, and announced, “Victor, there is a global brotherhood of quality drinkers that reaches even here that you are apparently not aware of.” He then insisted that we drive into the local barrio and find a “good” liquor store. Finally at one of the most run-down places imaginable we found two dusty bottles of exactly what he was looking for. “Why the surprise?” he scoffed.

Christopher Hitchens (center), between friends Ian McEwan (left) and Martin Amis.

Electronic and print media are absolutely filled with tributes to Christopher Hitchens, who died this week of esophageal cancer aged 62. Hitchens seems to have known, and won extravagant admiration for his wit, his writing, and his panache from just about everyone in the international republic of letters.

David Berlinski (father of the lovely and talented Claire), I thought, delivered the most poetical, comparing Hitch’s conspicuously gallant departure, conducted deliberately on the record and before his enormous readership in print (final example), to that of the great William Marshall.

Christopher Hitchens chose to greet death publicly. Had he thought of it, he might well have invited an orchestra. We signed books together after our appearance in Birmingham, and to admirers on his very long line inquiring after his health, Hitchens replied that he was dying. It was a response that inevitably took his interlocutor aback, the more so since it was true. I followed his interviews and read his essays about cancer and death. I found them moving. But they do not evoke the man. In his portrait of William Marshall (Guillaume Maréchal), The Flower of Chivalry, Georges Duby describes William “advancing calmly toward death” in full public view, his friends and retainers at his side, “proud of having been the instrument of the final, the fugitive, the anachronistic triumph of honor.”

Having contracted a terrible illness in the twenty first century, Christopher Hitchens returned to the thirteenth century in order to have it be seen to its end.

“I want to put a ding in the universe.” – 1981 (probably)

Stay hungry, stay foolish (his mantra, adopted from the final Whole Earth Catalog)

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Captain Rescorla in action at Ia Drang, Republic of Vietnam, 15 November 1965.
photograph: Peter Arnett/AP.

Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cyprus. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.

Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”

The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.

The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.

For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.

Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.

In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.

On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.

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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right.
photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.

Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.

A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.

Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.

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His hometown of Hayle in Cornwall has erected a memorial.

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2,996 was a project put together by blogger Dale Roe to honor each victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 3,061 blogs committed to posting tributes to each victim. Never Yet Melted’s tribute was to Rick Rescorla, and is republished annually.

Earlier this month, the most remarkable female secret agent of WWII passed away in a royal home for disabled veterans at the age of 98. Her ashes will be scattered, at her own request, at the former Gestapo headquarters in Montlucon, in central France, where she once led a successful attack.

Her war-time actions are believed to have saved thousands of allied lives. Her resistance network rescued hundreds of Allied airmen, some of whom she personal escorted to the coast. The maquis under her command killed at least 1400 Germans. One German casualty was a German sentry which Nancy Wake personally killed with her bare hands. The Gestapo called her Die Weiße Maus and she headed their most-wanted list with a reward of 5 million francs on her head. Nonetheless, she survived the war, and became one of the most decorated female combatants of WWII. Her life eventually was the basis for a successful novel and film.

Daily Mail:

A male comrade-in-arms in the French Resistance summed her up as: ‘The most feminine woman I know, until the fighting starts. And then she is like five men.’ She lived up to both parts of that compliment.

So feminine was she that when escaping from pursuers on one notable occasion, she dressed in a smart frock, silk stockings, high-heeled shoes and a camel-hair coat, arguing that she didn’t want to look like a hunted woman.

In that same outfit, she jumped from a moving train into a vineyard to avoid capture at a Nazi checkpoint.

And so aggressive was she that, after being parachuted into France as a Special Operations Executive agent, she disposed of a German guard with her bare hands and liked nothing better than bowling along in the front seat of a fast car through the countryside, a Sten gun on her lap and a cigar between her teeth, in search of Germans to kill.

Passionate and impulsive, with a tendency to draw attention to herself, she was not the ideal undercover agent. Her superiors didn’t think she would last long behind enemy lines.

But Wake proved them wrong and died this week, aged 98, in a nursing home for retired veterans in London. Her death brought to an end a life of such daring, courage and glamour that she was the inspiration for the Sebastian Faulks novel Charlotte Gray, which was made into a film starring Cate Blanchett.

Wikipedia article

His Imperial and Royal Highness Crown Prince Otto of Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Austria), sometime titular Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia (20 Nov 1912 – 4 July 2011)

Hat tip to Rafal Heydel-Mankoo.

Kingsley-Heath with lioness shot in Ethiopia for killing livestock.

John Kingsley-Heath was educated at Monkton Combe School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was commissioned into the Welsh Guards at age 18. He was wounded during service in both France and Palestine during WWII. After the war, he joined the Colonial Administration in East Africa. His passionate interest in wildlife and travel led him to hunt extensively in nearly all the countries of the African Continent. He became an Honorary Game Warden and Park Warden in several countries and played a major part in opening Botswana to tourism. He accompanied many famous people on safari and was a director of Ker & Downey Safaris and Safari South. He was closely involved in securing some of the extraordinary photography in the films ‘Hatari’ and ‘Sammy Going South’. He was a licensed professional hunter for 45 years and a bush pilot for 30 with some 5,000 flying hours, and continued to lead safaris at the age of 80. He was Director of Field Operations of the East African Wildlife Heritage Fund and donated to that organization the proceeds of the sale of his rifles at Christie’s on April 24, 1996.

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The Telegraph‘s obituary recalls Kingsley-Heath’s hand-to-hand encounter with a lion:

[I]n August 1961, when Kingsley-Heath was leading a private safari along the Kisigo river in Tanganyika[, f]rom inside a blind (a shelter for hunters), he turned to see a huge, maned lion crouching behind him not 15ft away. As it gathered itself to spring, Kingsley-Heath shot it, and the lion fled. He and his gunbearers gave chase and found the wounded creature lying on its side, breathing heavily.

It was down, but not out. When Kingsley-Heath’s client opened fire, the lion made a single bound of 22ft 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 pistol grip; the lion staggered. As his gunbearers and client ran for cover Kingsley-Heath struggled on to his elbows to get clear.

“Too late,” he recalled, “the lion was upon me, 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. Next it clamped his foot in its jaws, crushing the bones in it by twisting his ankle.

One of the gunbearers arrived, threw himself on the animal’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 later. “I knew that if I did so, I might die.” Instead, after an agonising and protracted medical evacuation, followed by surgery and a bout of malaria, he eventually recovered.