Constantine John Philip Ionides (1901–1968), nicknamed "Bobby" and then "Iodine",[1] was a British-born naturalist and herpetologist known as the Snake Man of British East Africa.
[3][4] Constantine John Philip Ionides, known as "Bobby" from early childhood, was born in Hove, a suburb of Brighton, on the south coast of England.
[7] She spent some of her childhood living with this grandfather, who was the favourite uncle of Constantine P. Cavafy,[8] held by some to be the greatest Greek poet since ancient times[9] Aikaterini's mother, Bobby's grandmother, came from another prosperous Anglo-Greek family, one of three sisters memorialised in Ralli Hall.
[11] At about this time, he was impressed by the life of Frederick Selous, the hunter and conservationist[12] whose real-life adventures inspired Sir Henry Rider Haggard to create the fictional Allan Quatermain character.
[13] Bobby decided that he too wished to become a professional hunter, and began to hunt the wild animals of the English countryside, and to teach himself taxidermy.
He left the army once his hunting became financially self-supporting, becoming a so-called white hunter, which for the most part involved guiding wealthy Americans.
[20] The second, Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane, describes the months she spent at his spartan home in the bush, participating in his snake hunts.
[21] Peter Matthiessen's 1981 book Sand Rivers (ikkustrated by Hugo van Lawick) describes a foot safari into Selous, guided by Brian Nicholson, who had apprenticed under Ionides and succeeded him as warden in charge there.
[28] Even in 2020, scholars such as evolutionary biologist Richard Shine and Stephen Spawls, author of The Dangerous Snakes of Africa, cite Ionides as a "pioneering East African naturalist" and use his field notebooks for analysis half a century after his death.