Frederick Grant Banks

Frederick Grant Banks (Alumnus, 1895)

Lincoln College Rugby First Fifteen, 1895. F. G. Banks (Captain, centre).

Frederick Grant Banks (Grant Banks) was born in Croydon, Surrey, in 1875, and emigrated to New Zealand as a child. Educated at Christ’s College in Christchurch, he later studied at Canterbury Agricultural College (now Lincoln University), where he was enrolled in 1895. At Lincoln, Banks was not only a member of the Students’ Council and First Fifteen rugby team, but also the holder of the 1895 ‘440 yards’ handicap race at the College, a record that stood for at least a decade. Little did anyone realise at the time that this speed would later serve him well in Africa, where sprinting was not just a sport, but sometimes the only sensible response to a charging buffalo or an irritable rhino!

Canterbury Agricultural College, 1895, Lincoln College Students (F.G. Banks among them)

Like many former students, Grant Banks maintained a connection with Lincoln after leaving by subscribing and personally contributing to the College Magazine. He wrote to the college twice, in 1897 and 1901, sharing reports about his adventures in Uganda.

Inspired at the time by Frederick Lugard’s Rise of Our East African Empire, Banks left Lincoln and New Zealand at the age of 21 and landed at Mombasa, Kenya in 1896 before the first sleeper of the Uganda Railway had even been laid. With a safari party, he walked the entire distance from the coast to Lake Victoria, an arduous five-month journey that marked the beginning of his life in East Africa. He described various animal encounters, some of which resulted in injuries, and his acceptance from local Sultans along the way through a ritual known as blood brotherhood.

Banks soon became involved in colonial administration and military affairs and served during the Uganda Mutiny of 1897 - 98 and the subsequent rebellion, after which he was appointed District Commissioner at Kampala. Though he later resigned, his life in Africa was far from over. He divided his time between ivory hunting, growing coffee and transport work, eventually becoming one of the most renowned big-game hunters of his era.  As adventurous as his life as a game hunter in Uganda was, he still lamented that he did not pay more attention to the subjects of botany and entomology while at Lincoln - knowledge that would have been very useful for his plantation development work.

He became known throughout Uganda as “Deaf Banks” owing to near-total hearing loss sustained in a buffalo attack.  He barely survived on his own in the bush for a month after the attack - reportedly saving his own life by washing out his wounds and applying a pomegranate poultice until he reached medical help.  Alongside this experience and many other encounters with African wildlife, he distinguished himself as a fearless and skilled hunter. Stories about him became legend: clinging to a mimosa tree while being gored by the buffalo; slapping an elephant on the rump so it would turn before he shot; or calmly remarking, under heavy German machine-gun fire in 1914, that there seemed to be “a strong wind today.” He was also said to have once ridden a young rhinoceros for a brief distance, described at the time as an extraordinary and almost mythical feat.

He was credited with killing over a thousand elephants, at first as a poacher in the Lado Enclave and later as a Game Ranger in Uganda, where he was employed to control raiding elephants that threatened villages and crops.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deaf_Banks_with_tusks_from_Lado_Enclave,_1905.jpg

Despite his rough profession, contemporaries described Banks as good-natured, well liked, and resilient. A contemporary remarked that he was as “jolly and full of fun as ever” when arriving in Koba after the buffalo attack; “with a wound in his side that one could put both fists into.”

Banks’s personal life was more complicated. He married Rose Emma Cox, a New Zealander, though the marriage did not endure. His later years were spent on his estate at Fort Portal, Uganda, where he continued to work as a Game Ranger until the 1930s. He died in Kenya on 10 June 1954, at the age of 78—one of the last great professional hunters of colonial Africa.

His legacy remains controversial: celebrated by some as a legendary adventurer and conservation pioneer but also remembered as a symbol of the colonial exploitation of Africa’s wildlife and landscapes. For Lincoln University, however, Banks remains part of the institution’s global heritage, a former student whose life illustrates both the ambition and complexities of New Zealanders abroad at the turn of the twentieth century.

F. Grant Banks