A Lion's Tale

"Have you ever shot a lion with a bandaged paw?"

Sipping a drink in the bar of Jerusalem's King David Hotel, Richard Usborne caught this strange snatch of conversation from a nearby table. He lost the rest of it in the buzz of barroom talk. That was in May 1941. In the next ten years, the world fought the bloodiest war in its history, the British Empire nearly went down to defeat, the King David Hotel (bar included) was badly damaged by a terrorist bomb. But Richard Usborne, an advertising man, never stopped worrying about what could possibly be the story behind that lion.

Last March Usborne suggested the mysterious question to London's Spectator as a topic for its Competition, a resolutely droll contest in which readers submit humorous essays and verse on set subjects. Spectator readers sailed off on a sea of whimsey, concocting hypotheses. One suggested that the beast cut its paw on a Coca-Cola bottle, another thought the lion was a character actor from a traveling troupe of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion.

Last fortnight, the Spectator got a letter from a former British army officer, one James Callendar Braithwaite of Grahamstown, South Africa, who had read the Spectator contest and identified himself as the man who had spoken the sentence in the King David bar. His story: while he was stationed in an army camp near Nairobi, soldiers had made pets of two lion cubs. "One of the brutes cut his paw on a piece of rusty metal," wrote Braithwaite. "This did not, naturally, improve his temper, and he nearly mauled the camp chaplain. After that he (the lion, not the chaplain) had to be destroyed . . . His paw was still sore, and still wrapped in bandages . . . when I killed him."

Last week, Mr. Richard Usborne's mind was once more at rest.

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