Returning to his home town during the interwar period, he became a prominent local landowner and businessman who also organised hunts for the elite of British India, including the then-Governor-General Lord Linlithgow, who became a close friend.

Surviving the Indian Mutiny of 1857, he retired from military service and married Mary Jane Doyle née Prussia, a 22-year-old widow of Anglo-Irish descent, in 1859.

[3] In 1862, Christopher William was appointed the postmaster of Naini Tal, a thriving hill station in northern India which had been untouched by the Mutiny.

[4] As Christopher William's salary was not large enough to support so many people, they supplemented their income through shrewd property investments, which Mary Jane was especially skilled at—she in effect became the first estate agent in Naini Tal, a valuable position in the rapidly-expanding town.

[5] Through his social connections and friendship with Henry Ramsay, the commissioner of the Kumaon division, Christopher William was additionally able to acquire a plot of land in the southern plains near Kaladhungi, on which he built a winter residence he named Arundel.

[6] Edward James Corbett, the eighth and penultimate child of Christopher William and Mary Jane, was born on 25 July 1875 in Naini Tal.

[10] After surviving a near-fatal bout of pneumonia at the age of six, he began his formal education in Naini Tal at Oak Openings School; there, training with the local cadet company, the ten-year-old Corbett's shooting impressed a group of dignitaries including the future Field Marshal Earl Roberts enough that he was granted a loan of a military-specification Martini-Henry rifle.

[16] He was then appointed, in 1895, to the contract of transporting goods across the Ganges at Mokameh Ghat: by structuring his workforce efficiently and forming strong friendships with his subordinates, Corbett managed to clear the preexisting backlog, to the surprise of his superiors.

This promotion gave him a large increase in salary, much of which he remitted to his family in Naini Tal, as well as access to the high-ranking travellers who often crossed the Ganges, such as Indian royalty and Chandra Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, the Prime Minister of Nepal.

He attempted to enlist when the Second Boer War broke out, but the railway authorities refused to release him from his contract, believing he was too valuable in his position at Mokameh Ghat.

[22] Landing in Southampton, Corbett and his men were soon transferred to the Western Front, where they were posted to numerous positions including La Chapellette near Péronne.

Corbett, now promoted to the rank of Major, explored London for a day before departing from Tilbury, visiting the pyramids of Giza on his way back home to India.

[27] After the Third Anglo-Afghan War finished in 1919, Corbett declined to return to the railways, and worked on a Kumaon house agency he had invested in and whose owner had subsequently died.

[29][30] Corbett became close friends with Percy Wyndham, the Kumaon District Commissioner, and with him fought banditry in the jungles; they also invested together in East African coffee.

[33] In 1920, Corbett retook the position of vice-chairman of the Naini Tal municipal board, which he had vacated a decade earlier due to local inactivity.

When he next approached the army in late 1943, they saw his potential as a source of knowledge: by February 1944, he had been appointed senior instructor in junglecraft at Chhindwara and recommissioned as a lieutenant colonel.

Survival techniques he taught included obtaining fresh water, distinguishing poisonous snakes and edible plants, trapping small animals, creating natural herbal medicines for wounds, fevers, stomach problems, and communicating by blowing through reeds.

[51] Although it had only claimed 125 victims, much less than the Panar Leopard, it received far more attention, being mentioned in the newspapers on multiple continents across the Anglosphere, in addition to nearly every publication in India.

On the final night he was due to spend at Rudraprayag—he had put off urgent business in East Africa for three months already—he baited and fatally shot the leopard.

This kickstarted his thoughts on what would become known as conservationism, although for the time being he continued to hunt for sport, shipping antelope trophies back to India and killing the famous large tiger called the Bachelor of Powalgarh in 1930.

[56] His biographer Martin Booth noted that Corbett never "truly resolved a conflict of ideals" between his love for the forest and animals and some desire to exploit them for himself, such as in his continuing organisation of tiger shoots.

He soon came to appreciate that unlike a trophy, which soon loses its colour and elegance, photographs lasted forever, did not result in an animal's death, and required somewhat greater skill—because the early cameraman had to get much closer than the rifleman.

[59] In a ten-year project, he constructed a "studio" around a jungle stream near his home, where he arranged foliage, hiding places, and hydrology to draw tigers to be filmed.

[61] In collaboration with Malcolm Hailey, governor of the United Provinces, he established an conservationist association named "The All India Conference for the Preservation of Wild Life".

As a "domiciled" Anglo-Indian, Corbett was inferior socially to any young women from Britain looking for a husband, especially considering his isolated and somewhat primitive life at Mokameh Ghat.

In 1902, she and Maggie, who was similarly jealous of any potential wife for Jim, managed to obstruct his courtship of a holidaying English girl he had fallen in love with.

[66] Within months of Mary Corbett's death on 16 May 1924, Jim fell deeply in love with a nineteen-year-old woman named Helen, who was on holiday in India with her parents.

[67] It was common practice for European men to have affairs with Indian women of good standing; it is possible Corbett did so, either at Mokameh Ghat or in Naini Tal.

[68] For many years, through love letters and private visits, he conducted an affair with Jean Ibbotson, the wife of his good friend William, who may have known about and condoned the relationship.

[73] After 1947, Corbett and his sister Maggie retired to Nyeri, Kenya,[39] where he lived in the cottage 'Paxtu' in the grounds of the Hotel Outspan, which had originally been built for his friend Lord Baden-Powell.