BORN FREE LIONESS PROFESSIONAL
Wikipedia, confirms that he worked at a series of jobs, which included time as a gold prospector, goat trader and professional safari hunter. In short, he was one of those lovable characters, sons of the Empire who, despite the fact that he couldn’t organise a piss-up in a pub, never gave up and went on to stumble by serendipitous chance into the kind of glorious global popularity that few have the good fortune to fall into. His first 20 years in Kenya were a string of abject failures and he took a cushy job “in the game department in 1938 to escape them. He was lazy and did more fundraising than conservation. He was a failure both in life and as a conservationist and relied on the generosity of others. His fame was largely as a result of his own self-aggrandising”. He took a job as a locust control officer but was sacked and failed in road construction because it was too hard”. He tried and failed in selling goats, running a mail service, farming beeswax and honey, labouring on a sisal plantation, barman, gold prospector and Mau-Mau fighter. “ killed animals for fun, sold ivory, and tried to organise hunting safaris. In reality, Elsa was a little orphan cub because George shot her mother! The real Adamsons sent Elsa’s two sisters to a zoo in Rotterdam – so much for living free. For a start, George Adamson wasn’t really the sage, bearded conservationist of popular imagination he was a colonial Mr Bean, born in India and sent to his dad’s coffee plantation in Kenya, where he was bloody hopeless. According to The Big Conservation Lie by Kenyans John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada, George:
And, of course, it was pure Hollywood fantasy.