A date for your diary. On 22nd January at 2.30pm I will be giving a lecture and slide show at the Royal Geographical Society in London on the remarkable story of Willie Read and his 1912 hunting expedition from Srinagar in Kashmir to Barnaul in Siberia – a journey of almost 3,000 miles.

Regular readers will recall my articles earlier this year about how I identified Willie Read as the creator of a set of magic lantern slides that I had purchased. My talk at the RGS, entitled A Magic Lantern Mystery Tour, and presented as part of the ‘Be Inspired’ series organised by Eugene Rae, will give me the opportunity to talk about my findings in public for the first time. It will also be available online. Free for RGS/IBG members and £5 for others. More information here. Hope to see you there.

John Massey Stewart, whose book on the Atkinsons greatly added to the growing literature on the travels of the intrepid couple, passed away on 26th October at the age of 90.

Mr Stewart’s book, Thomas Lucy and Alatau Too: The Atkinsons’ Adventures in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe, was published in 2018, and – as the title suggests – remains the only publication that offers a perspective on the couple’s six years of travels throughout the Russian Empire.

He was an authority on Russia and the former Soviet Union and had visited the USSR/Russia dozens of times. In 1961 he and David Ashwanden, made a wonderful journey across the Soviet Union in a Mini Minor lent to them by the British Motor Corporation. They travelled from Leningrad south through the Ukraine to Odessa, by ship to Yalta and ship again to the east coast of the Black Sea through Georgia and over the Caucasus. The journey resulted in Mr Stewart’s first book, Across the Russias (Harvill Press, 1969).

During the course of his life Mr Stewart created an extensive collection of images of Russia, particularly in the form of postcards that illustrated subjects such as peasant life in Imperial Russia under the Romanovs and on to the 1917 revolution and the Soviet regime, as well as costume, rituals, traditions, the arts, architecture and places. He also took many photographs himself, all of which can now be accessed through the Mary Evans Picture Library. He also donated his papers to the Royal Asiatic Society. His funeral will take place on Friday 24th November 2023 at St Michael’s Church, South Grove, London, N6 6BJ at 1.30 p.m.

I was delighted this week to take part in a couple of online seminars for school students from Pavlodar Secondary School No 26 in northern Kazakhstan. Several of the students have started a project to trace the journeys of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson through their country in the 1840s. I would like to thank their teacher, Kalamkas Zhangazina for organising the seminars so efficiently. And to Arman and Dilnaz, I would like to say Senderge jumysta sattilik tileimin. Iske sat!

School students from Pavlodar Secondary School No 26 and teacher Kalamkas Zhangazina

I am delighted to announce that Kashmir Pen has just published an article by me about my quest to find the identity of a British hunter, who mounted an extraordinary hunting expedition from Kashmir into Central Asia at the beginning of the 20th century. You can find my article, Solved! The Mystery of the Unknown Hunter and the Kashmiri Shikaris, here. My thanks to Kashmir Pen editor Mushtaq Bala, without whom I would not have been able to solve this fascinating puzzle. Thanks also to Dr Mohd. Amin Malik and Dr Abdul Qayoom Lone for all their assistance during my visit to Kashmir.

A great crowd of over 100 people turned out in London yesterday to hear me give a slideshow and talk on my travels in Central Asia in the footsteps of the Atkinsons. The talk was hosted by the Globetrotters Club, which has existed for more than 70 years and specialises in those who are interested in travel that is off the beaten track.

Thanks to everyone who came to what was a very enjoyable event.

The purpose of my recent trip to Kashmir was to identify a European hunter who mounted a remarkable expedition through Central Asia, as illustrated by a superb set of magic lantern slides that I had purchased a few months back. Fortunately, I had been able to identify one of his Kashmiri guides (shikaris) shown in the photographs and then, through a series of fortuitous connections, make contact with the shikari’s descendants.

It turned out that this shikari, Raheem Lone, was widely regarded as one of the greatest of his generation. So much so that the hunter even took him to England at the end of the expedition. Later, the Roosevelt brothers Theodore and Kermit, sons of the American president at the time, took him to China on an expedition. Famed for his eyesight and strong organisational skills – not the mention his mastery of Central Asia languages – Raheem Lone stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries, as the many letters of recommendation still held by his family testify. It was one of these letters that allowed me to identify my anonymous hunter as Captain ‘Willie’ Ronald Read MC, DFC, AFC and bars, a much-decorated 1WW pilot.

But in fact Raheem Lone was not the only shikari of great repute in Kashmir at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of his great friends, also from Bandipore in the north of present-day Kashmir, was a man called Ghulam Hassan Bhat, who died in 1952.

Like Raheem, Hassan Bhat (as he was known) was very familiar with the routes from Kashmir up into the Pamir Mountains and from there onwards to Kashgar and the hunting grounds of the Tien Shan Mountains in present-day Kazakhstan, where many an English army officer took leave in order to shoot ibex, maral deer, Marco Polo sheep and game. At the beginning of the 20th century these areas were still largely unknown and unmapped.

So it was a wonderful surprise to be taken by descendants of Raheem to meet the descendants of Hassan Baht, who today still live in Bandipora. The two families are close. That is how I met 94-year-old Ghulam Ahmad Bhat, Hassan’s son, and his grandsons, Ibraheem and Mohammad. At their wonderful house I was shown yet another folder of letters, this time from Hassan’s clients. As with Raheem, they included some hugely important names.

In particular, I noticed the name of William J Morden. Morden was a leader of the 1926 Morden-Clark Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He had been deputed to collect specimens for the museum from Central Asia and the story of the 8,000-mile expedition is told in his book Across Asia’s Snows and Deserts ( G P Puttnam’s, New York, 1927). Incidentally, the book contains three photographs of Hassan Bhat, taken during the expedition.

There is no doubt that Bhat impressed his employers. In a recommendation dated 23 September 1926 Morden says that Hassan Bhat is “an excellent hunter, an excellent caravan leader and a good servant. He is conscientious and the hardest worker I have ever known. He speaks a very useful amount of Turki and the various local dialects of this country, besides English.” In fact, as his descendants told me, he spoke seven languages.

In another letter written directly to Hassan, expedition co-leader and Museum deputy director James L Clark states “Mr Morden and I are to lunch with Mr Kermit Roosevelt next Monday. We always talk about your fine cooking when we get together and all want to come back some day.” He was still writing to him many years after the expedition finished. E A Waters of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Harvard thanked him in 1930 for looking after him and his wife on a trip to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan. “We feel that all things considered we cannot speak too highly of Hassan Bhat’s services to us and we are already planning a trip to the Tien Shan which we should not think of taking without him.”

So there you have it. Both Hassan Bhat and Raheem Lone have between them dozens of testimonials from some of the most prominent hunters and specimen collectors in the world. The animals they shot are still on display at museums in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. Without their skills it is doubtful if their clients could have shot a thing or found their way through the difficult terrain up into Central Asia. Their descendants, whilst no longer supporting the kind of extensive hunting trips that happened in the past, are proud of the achievements of their forbearers, who knew some of the world’s most remote places better than almost anyone else.

For the last couple of months I have been trying to identify a hunter whose remarkable collection of magic lantern slides, illustrating a ground-breaking journey from Kashmir to Siberia, I recently purchased. Two weeks ago I got on a plane to Kashmir in order to try to solve the problem by speaking to people who may know something of the story. And I am delighted to announce that the outcome was positive!

But first, more about my trip to Kashmir. I particularly wanted to speak to the family of the shikari (hunting guide) whose identity I had confirmed, due to his participation in an expedition organised by the Roosevelt brothers, Theodore and Kermit, to Central Asia in search of specimens for various American natural history museums. This shikari, Raheem Lone, I have since found out, was regarded by many as one of the best of his generation, with a wide knowledge of Central Asia and the languages in the region.

I received a wonderful reception in Srinagar from Dr Mohd. Amin Malik and Dr Abdul Qayoom Lone, both descendants of Raheem. Mr Mushtaq Bala, editor of Kashmir Pen, also gave me tremendous support. It was in his magazine that I first read about Raheem Lone and his involvement with the Roosevelt brothers.

Dr Malik had in his possession a large file of letters sent to Raheem by grateful clients that he had taken on shooting expeditions into the mountains. They dated from 1896 until the 1920s and included glowing references from the Roosevelts, as well as many others, most of whom were British Army officers. From these I thought I would have a good chance of identifying my hunter.

The day after meeting the relatives, Dr Malik took me to Bandipora, about 50 miles north of Srinagar, where we visited the house that Raheem built to entertain his guests. Although empty at present, it is a wonderful building. Members of the family, including Dr Umar Qayoom Lone, live nearby and Raheem himself is buried in a grave only a short walk away.

Later we visited the home of Ghulam Ahmed Baht, whose father Ghulam Hassan Baht, was also a famous shikari and close friend of Raheem Lone. More of Ghulam Hassan in a separate article. Ghulam Ahmed is 94 and still remembers Raheem, who died in the 1950s, very clearly.

On my return to England last Saturday I began to examine the letters that I had copied from Dr Malik. Several were from a person who was a good candidate for my hunter. He wrote of having enjoyed his journey to Central Asia with Raheem, which took place in 1912, and also sent him letters from Egypt and elsewhere asking after him. His name was Captain, later Wing Commander, William Ronald Read (1885-1972) of the Royal Flying Corps/RAF.

Read is a World War I flying ace and war hero, awarded the Military Cross, Distinguished Flying Cross and, almost uniquely, the Air Force Cross (three times!). His family home, Gorse Cliff in Shoreham by Sea, was used as a hospital for Sikh soldiers during WW1. Originally a soldier in the Royal Dragoon Guards, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in April 1914 and later fought in France and Palestine and was several times wounded in action. In September 1930 he was appointed to be Commander of RAF Boscombe Down before retiring the following year. Below are some pictures of Read during his RAF days.

As you can see, the resemblance with my anonymous hunter is unmistakeable:

One final point. In one of his letters to Raheem, Read mentions that the trophy heads he obtained in Central Asia and which are shown in his magic lantern slides, were still with Rowland Ward, who specialised in mounting such trophies. We should also remember that one of the slides mentions his “record Ovis Littledalei 57 1/2 inches”. Having looked at the Rowland Ward records for the period up to 1914, we find the following:

Second on the all-time list, with a length on the front curve of 58″ is W R Read, our man. I guess his trophy was re-measured on his return to the UK. I should add that Read also mentions that Raheem Lone visited his house in Shoreham, so my thought is that the latter completed the journey with Read from Kashmir all the way to Omsk in southern Siberia, afterwards travelling to England, before returning by sea to Kashmir. (Lone also travelled to China with the Roosevelts, but I will tell that story another time).

There is much more to this story, which I will tell over the coming days. But for now, I can announce without any doubt that our mystery hunter is WW1 war hero Captain ‘Willie’ Ronald Read MC, DFC, AFM and bars. What a story!

Little-by-little we are getting closer to identifying the mystery hunter mentioned in previous posts. Already we have been able to identify his shikari (guide) as Rahima Lone, well-known for guiding the Roosevelt brothers and other prominent personalities in the early years of the 20th century. I have been reading the accounts of hunters and travellers who crossed the Pamirs during this period. Many have already been ruled out, due to their routes or intentions. However, today I made another little discovery that may help find our elusive trophy-hunter.

In 1941 a 19-year-old Norwegian apprentice called Wilfred Skrede decided he would make his way from Oslo to the training camp for the Norwegian Air Force at Little Norway in Toronto, Canada. His route was unusual, in that he went across Russia and Siberia before heading south through Xinjiang, across the Taklamakan Desert, then across the Karakorums and Himalayas to Kashmir, and thence from Mumbai via a ship to Singapore and then New York.

Some years after the war, in 1954, he published an account of his journey in English, called Across the Roof of the World (Staples Press, London, 1954). Looking through the book today I was struck by one photograph in particular entitled ‘Kazaks on the way to Kuldsha‘. Here is its:

As soon as I checked with my collection of 87 slides from the hunter’s journey I realised it was identical to one of them, as you can see below:

The Skrede photo is credited to the Royal Geographical Society in London. The hunter’s slide has a different caption, ‘A yurt on the Pamirs‘, but is otherwise identical. My guess is that this caption is more accurate that that of the Skrede photo. The ‘Kuldsha’ (actually Kuldja and now known as Yining) he mentions is a long way to the north in the Ili Valley and it would have been out of sequence amongst other slides of Hunza and Kashgar. Skrede used none of his own photographs in his book, but used several from the RGS and others by Sir CP Skrine and Col R Meinertzhagen. Presumably the RGS gave him permission to use a slide already in their collection. So the next job is to find out if the RGS can identify the slide and then, presumably, the identity of the photographer. Watch this space…

The search for the identity of the mystery hunter mentioned in previous posts continues. However, I think I have made a small breakthrough, in that I have been able to identify one of the shikaris (local hunting guides) that he used. Having drawn a blank on identifying the hunter himself – it does not appear to be Ellsworth Huntington, Percy Church, Captain HHP Deasy, Col. Charles Spurling Cumberland, Ralph Cobbold, Major RL Kennion, Capt. JNP Wood or any of the other well-known authors of books on hunting in the Pamirs and Central Asia – I set out to see if I could identify the shikaris he used. On the slides, one is named as Ramzana and the other as Rahima.

In the East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1926), a book written by brothers Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt about a specimen-collecting expedition they organised to the Pamirs in 1925 to collect mountain sheep for the American Museum of Natural History, they mention that one of their shikaris was called Rahima Loon. This immediately rang a bell, as the fourth magic lantern slide in the mystery hunter’s set of 87 is titled Rahima, my Shikari. This is it:

Theodore Roosevelt, whose father was US President from 1901-1909, included as the frontispiece for his book a picture showing himself and his brother Kermit (in the middle of the photo), together with two shikaris. Inside the book there are further pictures of the shikaris, one of whom is named as Rahima Loon. Rahima Loon is on the right, with his brother Khalil on the left. There are further pictures of him in the book.

As you can see, there is a strong likeness between the two Rahimas, right down to the detail of the jacket they are wearing, which appears to be the same in each picture. Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt is effusive in his praise for Rahima. Referring to the quality of shikaris he says: “The best of these was Rahima Loon, our head shikarry. He had the dignity that is peculiar to the best type of Oriental. He was tall and slight, with a black beard and hawk nose. He knew game and its habits thoroughly. He also had courage…”etc.

Roosevelt also mentions something else: “Thus, with Rahima and his brother Khalil, native hunters whom I had secured through Douglas Burden, the important members in our party were assembled. These last two had been Burden’s shikaries during a most successful hunting trip which he made a few years ago. He cabled them from New York and they were awaiting us in Srinagar…”. William Douglas Burden was a well-known collector for the American Natural History Museum and first brought Komodo Dragons to the USA. He also hunted at Abadabur in the Astor valley above the Burzil Pass for ibex and markhor specimens in 1923. My first thought was that perhaps Burden was our hunter. Below is a picture of him from the AMNH archive.

However, as you can see, there is not a close resemblance to our hunter. I have also checked out Burden’s book, Look to the Wilderness (1956), in which he is profuse in his praise of Rahima, who, he says, was “one of the foremost travellers of Central Asia, whose diffident ways and steadfast persistence brought the rewards we were after.” Burden also mentions that he recommended him to the Roosevelts. Below is his photo of Rahima Loon, which matches the photos of our hunter and the Roosevelts – note the jacket.

Either way, the fact that we now know that the shikari Rahima Loon was used by both the Roosevelts and Burden places our timeframe more clearly into the early-mid 1920s, rather than earlier as I first thought. That he was highly thought of by American hunters may mean there were others who used him. Is there an association of shikari in Kashmir who may have records that go back to the 1920s? I wouldn’t be suprised. Anyone who can suggest further avenues to explore that would enable us to identify the hunter is welcome to get in touch.

Just in case you need cheering up in this cold weather! My good friend Amara sent me this video of his brother and nephew taking a winter ride across the open steppe in the Gobi-Altai region of Mongolia. What a place! Enjoy!