In 1949 tigers remained numerous in remote rural areas, and in southern Trengganu they were killing cattle and even children. For two years, from 1949 – 51, Arthur Locke spent his spare time tracking down tigers, shooting 22 of them, often operating in the dark seated on a precarious little platform up a jungle tree 12 feet off the ground. When he published an account of his experiences illustrated with photographs of the tigers he had shot, it quickly became a best seller. This book also includes a chapter on ‘Superstitions and Legends’ that contains rare information and Malayan tiger lore.

The Author

Arthur Locke was born in 1910. At the outbreak of war in 1939, Locke enlisted in the army and went to France before withdrawing with the rest of the British forces from Dunkirk in 1940. In 1949, he was appointed British Administrative Officer (East) based in Kemaman and put in charge of the largely-rural southern districts of the Malay kingdom of Trengganu. Locke was remembered, perhaps for the wrong reasons, as the official who first spotted Maria Hertogh (of the infamous Nadra adoption case which sparked off a riot in Singapore in 1950) at a school competition in Kemaman and promptly alerted the authorities as to her whereabouts. After he retired as Financial Officer to the Malayan Armed Forces in 1959, Locke returned to England where he went into private enterprise and indulged in his passion for fly-fishing in rural Hampshire.

Contents

Foreword by the Rt. Hon. Malcolm MacDonald

1. Background
2. Distribution, Size and Habits
3. Diet, Kills and Area Covered
4. Tiger Hunting
5. My First Tiger
6. The Kijal Twins
7. Man-Eating Tigers
8. The Jerangau Man-Eater
9. Superstitions and Legends

Index