Rowland Ward: The Jungle and the Showman

The Sporstman’s Handbook

In June 1880, Rowland Ward published what would become one of his most enduring legacies: the Sportsman’s Handbook to Practical Collecting, Preserving and Artistic Setting-up of Trophies and Specimens, together with a Synoptical Guide to the Hunting Grounds of the World. The Field, the Country Gentleman’s Newspaper, reviewed the book on its publication date with considerable enthusiasm, noting its extraordinary scope. The contents listed included guidance on the care and preparation of virtually every category of animal trophy, from antelopes to fish, from birds’ eggs to elephant tusks, with chapters on the use of implements, on skinning, on curing, on keeping specimens in spirits, on packing and transmission.

The Handbook was a masterstroke of commercial publishing wedded to genuine encyclopaedic ambition. It served multiple purposes simultaneously. As a practical guide, it was without equal in English; no comparable work existed that so comprehensively addressed the needs of the sportsman-naturalist in the field, from the moment of the kill to the moment of presentation in the drawing room. As a marketing document, it was equally brilliant. Every page implicitly referenced the services, products, and expertise available at 166 Piccadilly. The book taught readers to understand the complexity of what Ward did – and in doing so, it educated them into becoming his customers.

The book went through many editions and was substantially revised and expanded over the years, each new edition carrying fresh material and updated information on the hunting grounds of different regions of the world. By the thirteenth edition, covering Africa, it had grown to encompass detailed records of game trophies, guides to the identification and measurement of species, lists of notable bags, and advice on specific regions. The very existence of this ongoing record-keeping function, maintaining an authoritative register of trophy measurements, gave Ward a quasi-official status in the world of big-game hunting that no rival could easily challenge.

The Handbook was not Ward’s only publication. The Jungle establishment was also a bookshop, and Ward published and sold natural history works across a broad range. But it was the Handbook that defined his intellectual contribution to the field and that secured the institutional reputation of his establishment as the highest authority in the sporting world on questions of trophies, specimens, and the natural history of game animals.

Self promotion: the manufacture of reputation

Rowland Ward was, as one contemporary account put it, “a master at self-promotion.” This is not a criticism: in the Victorian commercial world, the capacity to construct and maintain a public reputation was a new, and essential business skill, and Ward exercised it with intelligence and sustained effort over his long career.

His principal instrument of self-promotion was the accumulated press quotation. His promotional pamphlets and catalogues were filled with reviews drawn from dozens of publications of the day such as The Times, the Daily News, the Morning Post, the Daily Chronicle, the Sportsman, the Daily Telegraph, the Morning Advertiser, the Standard, Sporting Life, the Globe, the Court Journal, the Manchester Guardian, South Africa, and the Graphic. These were not selected casually. They were curated to provide an overwhelming documentary case for the supremacy of his work. The effect on anyone opening his promotional materials was of confronting a great wall of institutional endorsement, paper evidence of a public reputation that stretched across the entire range of the Victorian press. It is said that he employed a press assistant who came into the shop every morning to scour the press and pull out and collate anything related to Ward’s business.

The technique was particularly visible in connection with his two great jungle dioramas – the one created for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, and the later version displayed at the Empire of India Exhibition of 1895-96. Each generated pages of press commentary, and Ward preserved and reprinted that commentary assiduously. The Times had said his jungle scene “will certainly be the first of the many attractions to which visitors will turn.” The Daily News declared the scene “rendered with true tragic power.” The Morning Post called it “one of the leading attractions of an exhibition which is already full of marvellous things.” The Daily Chronicle pronounced it “fitted up with the most perfect completeness.” The Sportsman judged it likely to “prove the most attractive feature of the exhibition.” The Daily Telegraph gave “perhaps the first place” to the jungle scene, declaring it would “certainly prove one of the favourite sights of the vast show.”

By the time of the second jungle display, at the Empire of India Exhibition, the press was, if anything, more enthusiastic still. The Daily Telegraph declared it “a veritable triumph of the taxidermist’s art – a tableau of jungle life which is entirely fresh and, in every way, remarkable.” The Standard described it as “an especially fine representation of an Indian jungle, with its characteristic vegetation and animals and wild scenery.” The Manchester Guardian said it “surpasses in interest any of the excellent exhibitions of the kind previously shown.” The Times recorded that the number of persons who visited Ward’s jungle in that exhibition was ten thousand five hundred, making over two hundred thousand visitors since the opening of the display. These were not trivial numbers.

Ward collected medals and diplomas of honour for artistic work from a remarkable series of international exhibitions: London 1862, Paris 1862, Vienna 1873, London International Fisheries 1883, Calcutta 1883-84, London International Health Exhibition 1884, London Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886, the Anglo-Danish Exhibition 1888, and the Royal Military Exhibition 1890. Each new medal was added to the growing list in his promotional materials. By the turn of the century, the front page of his pamphlet, with its list of royal appointments and international honours, read like the curriculum vitae of a major institution.

The Great International Exhibitions

The International Fisheries Exhibition, 1883

Ward’s involvement in the great Victorian international exhibitions was not limited to natural history and jungle dioramas. At the International Fisheries Exhibition of 1883, held in London, he was a prominent exhibitor, and The Field’s extended review of that exhibition singled out his display of cutlery – lobster-claw fish knives and related objects – as among the most distinctive and novel items on show. The review noted that his salad bowl, supported by genuine lobster tails and bearing the characteristic coral and cream tints of the shell, was “strikingly beautiful and novel.” These objects occupied the intersection between natural history specimen and domestic utility that Ward had made his particular commercial territory.

The Fisheries Exhibition also earned Ward one of his medals and diplomas of honour for artistic work – a recognition that extended his reputation beyond the world of big-game trophies into the broader decorative arts. It was characteristic of his ambition that he treated these different categories of exhibition not as separate compartments but as interconnected opportunities to demonstrate the versatility of his craft and the breadth of his commercial imagination.

The Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886

The Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 was the summit of Ward’s reputation as a creator of spectacular public displays. The exhibition was organised by the British Royal Commission to celebrate the resources, products, and manufactures of the British colonies and the Indian Empire, and it ran for six months at the Exhibition Buildings in South Kensington, including the Royal Albert Hall. Rowland Ward was commissioned to create the exhibition’s most ambitious single display: a reproduction of the Indian jungle, encompassing the fauna and flora of the subcontinent in a setting designed to communicate the ecological richness of the empire to a metropolitan audience.

The scale and ambition of the undertaking were extraordinary. Ward collected the scenery and the life of a world “scattered over an area of many thousand square miles” and compressed it into a limited exhibition space. The central feature was a trophy from Cooch Behar, formed by His Highness the Maharaja, the most prominent element of which depicted a tiger hunt. There were trophies designed to represent generally the fauna and flora of India, with representative animals and birds grouped to illustrate their life habits. There were also trophies in the courts of Ceylon, South Africa, Canada, and Queensland.

The Queensland display was particularly carefully described in the exhibition catalogue. It comprised a trophy of animal life with scenic background, featuring marsupials and wingless birds of the region, as well as the duck-billed platypus. The cases had been specially constructed of wood grown in Queensland, to exhibit the applicability of the timber. The whole was “designed and arranged, and the Animals Modelled, by Rowland Ward, F.Z.S.”

The response of the press was uniformly rapturous. Every major London newspaper had a reviewer at the exhibition, and virtually all of them agreed that Ward’s jungle was the standout attraction. The language used – “forgotten in presence of,” “lost in admiration,” “true tragic power,” “the most attractive feature of the exhibition” – was the language of artistic spectacle, not of craft exhibition. Ward had achieved something that transcended the category of taxidermy altogether: he had created an immersive environment that functioned as both natural history education and aesthetic experience. Over two hundred thousand people saw the display during its run.

The Selous Collection and Ward’s Private Exhibition

Among the most remarkable survivals associated with Rowland Ward’s business is a small handwritten card, preserved as a piece of institutional ephemera, (and now contained in the collection of Jon Saggerson) which reads: “The Hunting Trophies collected by Mr. F. C. Selous during his recent exploration of South Central African regions beyond the Zambesi will be set out for Private Inspection at 166 Piccadilly, London W. from June the 14th to the 16th and Friends.”

This card is a document of intersection between two of the most significant figures in the Victorian sporting and natural history world. Frederick Courteney Selous was by any measure the most celebrated African big-game hunter of his age – a man who had spent years in the Matabeleland and Mashonaland regions, who had accumulated a collection of trophy specimens without parallel, and who became both a professional hunter and a distinguished naturalist whose collections enriched some of the finest museums in Britain.

The relationship between Selous and Ward was practical and symbiotic. Selous regularly shipped specimens to London, and Ward was the natural recipient: the establishment at Piccadilly was equipped to receive incoming goods from overseas, to clear them at the docks, to preserve and mount them, and to display them. Ward’s workshop was, in effect, the London terminus for the great streams of natural history material flowing back from Africa, India, and the wider empire.

The private exhibition invitation, restricted to “friends” of the establishment, held for just three days, is tantalisingly suggestive of the social register within which Ward operated at this level. The trophies were not being offered to the general public,  they were being shown to an invited clientele, people who moved in the world of sporting aristocracy and colonial administration, people who would recognise the significance of Selous’ name and the quality of the specimens on display. Ward was functioning not merely as a craftsman but as a cultural broker, mediating between the hunter in the field and the collector and institution in the metropolis.

The Field’s account from April 1881, discussing Selous’ adventures and his connection with Ward, confirms that this relationship was established and publicly known well before the private exhibition invitation was issued. Items were at that point in Ward’s workshop being prepared – the natural predecessor to any subsequent private viewing or public display. The 1881 date fits neatly into the period during which Selous was conducting his major expeditions “beyond the Zambesi,” and Ward was the natural London outpost for these remarkable collections.

The Country House and the Domestic British Market

Ward’s clientele was not exclusively composed of maharajas, African hunters, and the grandees of imperial administration. A substantial and steady part of his business was the domestic market: the country houses of England, Ireland, and Scotland whose owners required trophies preserved, mounted, displayed, and occasionally supplemented with the newer, stranger specimens arriving from overseas.

The Country Life article of October 1993, looking back at the Ward legacy from a century’s distance, captured this domestic dimension with particular vividness. It noted that “from Victorian times until the Second World War, no British country house was complete without a collection of weird and wonderful sporting – and not so sporting – trophies.” The fashionable dinner table of the 1880s, the article explained, was the place for lobster-claw table services designed by Ward himself – a touch of the natural world, refined and rendered elegant, suitable for the most formal of social occasions.

Ward designed and made a full lobster-claw table service – fish knives, forks, salad servers, all incorporating genuine lobster claws as handles – that was described by his own marketing copy as “not only very beautiful but has a suggestive appearance that is most attractive.” Guests who struggled to manage the handles could console themselves with the knowledge that Ward had also campaigned persistently for the use of lighter and more accurate weapons on big-game hunts, to avoid waste – a perhaps unexpected expression of conservation concern from the man who mounted the results of the hunt for display.

Ward’s hoof trophy designs were an especially popular branch of his decorative business. Animal hooves – from horses, stags, big game – could be adapted into letter-weighing machines (Registered No. 24423), match-box holders (Registered No. 24421), door stops, and table bells (Registered No. 24422). More than fifty such original designs could be inspected at 167 Piccadilly, and Ward published a separate illustrated pamphlet on the subject entitled “Observations on the Preservation of Hoofs and the Designing of Hoof Trophies”.

The Country Life review also touched on what it called “Ward’s shark speciality” – a toothy jawbone serving as a mirror frame – and noted the tradition of Ward’s lamp holders, in which antelope skulls were fitted with electric light fittings to serve as unusual table lamps. The article’s listing of these objects was half-amused, half-admiring: it understood that Ward had operated in a cultural moment that had now passed, but it recognised that the objects he had created were extraordinary expressions of their time.

Legacy, Decline and the Long Afterlife

The history of Rowland Ward Limited after its founder’s death in 1912 is one of long, gradual decline punctuated by moments of renewed energy and adaptation. The Best brothers ran Ward’s through its last years as a flourishing concern, employing at one point some forty taxidermists, working primarily for sportsmen returning with trophies from East Africa. The trade remained viable until Kenya’s ban on hunting in the mid-1970s effectively killing the East African supply chain.

In 1986, the company became part of the gun makers Holland and Holland, who maintained some of the most impressive beasts at their shooting school in Ruislip. By the early 1990s, taxidermy in Britain had become what the Country Life article described as an “almost exclusively freelance occupation.” The curiosity value of genuine stuffed animals still guaranteed Ward’s three dioramas of stuffed African wildlife a prime place at the Natural History Museum and more than three hundred thousand people queued to see the dioramas when they were first shown in the 1890s.

The long afterlife of Ward’s reputation rests on several foundations. There is the Record Book – the comprehensive register of trophy measurements that Ward had maintained through successive editions of the Sportsman’s Handbook and its successors, which had become the definitive record of trophy hunting achievement and is still being cited and updated by the sporting community today. There was the Natural History Museum connection, where Ward’s dioramas occupied a permanent place in one of the world’s great scientific institutions. And there is the broader cultural memory of The Jungle itself, a place that had functioned for decades as a kind of secular temple to the British sporting tradition.

The Country Life article of 1993 – itself a kind of elegy for the Ward tradition – noted that Ward’s main London rivals, Gerrards, had moved into the business of supplying stuffed props for the theatre and film industry. Others had benefited from new markets that Ward himself had partly anticipated: the demand for ornamental koi carp mounting, for instance, represented a continuation of the fish-mounting tradition that had been one of Ward’s (and others’) specialities. Ward had pioneered a method of presenting mounted fish “as though suspended naturally in water,” without background or visible support – a technique he described as “peculiarly beautiful for screens” and “very successfully applied to doors and windows.”

The Empire’s Curator

In the end, what Rowland Ward represented – and what he built – was something that no single professional categorisation can adequately summarise. He was the empire’s curator in the most literal sense: the man who collected, preserved, classified, displayed, and made sense of the animal life of the British imperial world. In a period when the empire was acquiring territories, resources, and knowledge at a pace that outran the capacity of formal institutions to absorb and organise, Ward provided an informal but extraordinarily effective system for the collection and presentation of natural history material.

The Jungle was, among other things, a kind of informal museum – one that operated on commercial rather than charitable or institutional funding, but that performed many of the same functions as the great natural history collections of the period. The specimens that passed through his hands, the records he kept, the standards he established for trophy measurement and display – all of these contributed to the accumulating store of knowledge about the natural world that was one of the intellectual achievements of the Victorian age.

He was a man of his time in ways that must be acknowledged honestly. The world he served – of big-game hunting, of trophy-collecting, of the wholesale killing of large and rare animals for sport and decoration – is one that the twenty-first century regards with considerable scrutiny and regret, and rightly so. The animals whose heads and skins and hooves Ward so artfully preserved were animals killed in vast numbers, in many cases contributing to the decline of species that has continued to accelerate in the century since his death.

The empire whose cultural products he so expertly curated was an empire built on violence, extraction, and the suppression of indigenous peoples and cultures.

However, none of this diminishes the skill, the intelligence, or the creative originality of what Ward achieved within the terms of his time, but it means that any honest assessment of his legacy must hold the admiration and the critique in tension. He was brilliant at what he did. What he did was also part of a larger story – of empire, of extinction, of a particular moment in the relationship between the human world and the natural world – whose consequences we are still living with today.

What remains, beyond the scrutiny and regret by most, is the record: the hundreds of mounted specimens in museums across Britain, the great dioramas that still draw visitors, the editions of the Handbook that still sit in the libraries of sporting estates, the records that still shape the language of trophy hunting, and the name – Ward, The Jungle, Piccadilly – that remains, even now, one of the most resonant addresses in the history of natural history. Rowland Ward was the showman of Piccadilly, and the empire’s curator. He was extraordinary at both.