File hippo shape collage pro 3.1 full2/20/2023 ![]() ![]() Unfortunately, when the animals were unloaded, it seemed a calamity had occurred. The strange cargo – a Noah's ark of reanimated creatures – was headed to Quex Park, Birchington, to be posed for posterity as part of a new diorama being constructed for Major Percy Powell-Cotton, big game hunter, collector and scientific naturalist, in his private museum. Inside the truck was a veritable menagerie of taxidermy animals including a rhino, topi, hyena, wolf and leopard. On 6 September 1909 a carefully packed carriage truck left Victoria station, London, bound for East Kent. Drawing on the work of Garry Marvin, Sam Alberti and Merle Patchett, this article stalks Powell-Cotton's taxidermic project across various sites of capture, production and display (what I call necrogeographies) to illuminate the sinuous contours of imperial natural history and the stories of pursuit, production and performance lurking beneath the skin of the reanimated animal. ![]() ![]() As such, the reanimated animals of empire, posed on the walls of the country estate or arrested in museum cases, represent valuable historical artefacts ripe for unstitching. As various scholars have pointed out, taxidermy offers up a vivid and striking ‘afterlife’ of the animal with a unique (and some might say unsavoury) ability to elucidate our environmental and cultural relations with other species. This article considers the practice of taxidermy and its relationship to the ‘golden age’ of big game hunting, the science of natural history and the dramaturgical codes of empire by looking at the collecting exploits of one man, Major Percy Powell-Cotton (1866–1940), and his attempts to preserve the spoils of the hunt in the ‘great indoors’.
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