Frederick Nicholson Betts

Who was Frederick Nicholson Betts?

Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Nicholson Betts was a British Indian Army officer and an ornithologist.

F. N. Betts known to friends and family as 'Tim', was born in Launceston, Cornwall in UK. He studied at Winchester College 1920-24. He went to Ceylon and worked in the tea plantations there and later in the coffee plantations in Coorg. He joined the army in India as a Captain in the Punjab Regiment and in 1940, was posted to Eritrea. He was later posted Lt. Col. (Intelligence) in the V Force in Burma, a guerrilla and intelligence unit in north eastern India which made use of Assam Hill tribesmen. Here he met Ursula Graham Bower, an anthropologist studying the Nagas, whom he married in 1945.

In 1946, the government of India made him the first political officer of the Subansiri area between the Assam plains and the McMahon Line (the boundary between India and Tibet). His first task was to march 60 miles into the interior to establish a supply drop zone and to set up a base which could provide supplies for the administrative setup there amid tribes such as the Nyishis and Apa Tanis.

A year after India's independence, he moved to Kenya and served in the veterinary service in the Western Masai Reserve. He later moved from Kenya to the Island of Mull in Scotland where he farmed the Ardura Estate and spent time studying birds, and in 1967 he moved again to the New Forest in Southern England. He died of a stroke when out riding in New Forest in 1973.