Background
He was born the son of Thomas Henry Clifton of Lytham Hall, Lancashire and his wife Madeline Agnew and was educated at Eton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge.
He was born the son of Thomas Henry Clifton of Lytham Hall, Lancashire and his wife Madeline Agnew and was educated at Eton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Eton College; Magdalene College.
John Talbot Clifton (1 December 1868 – 23 March 1928), known as Talbot Clifton, was an English landowner and traveller. He became a compulsive traveller who explored Canada, Siberia, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, Africa and South America, and was known for shooting wild animals and eating them. Some of the animals he shot were species new to science and were named after him, such as a type of wild Siberian sheep (Clifton"s bighorn) and a Canadian marmot.
He once dined on mammoth recovered frozen from the Arctic permafrost.
They had met in Peru, where she was also travelling. Talbot served as a Justice of the Peace for Lancashire.
After the First World War, during which Talbot had volunteered as a dispatch driver, the couple bought Kylemore House in Connemara, Ireland. In 1922 they bought and moved to live at Kildalton Castle on the Scottish island of Islay in the Inner Hebrides where his passion for shooting wildlife continued unabated.
They turned back in Mali but in 1928 he died in the Canary Islands on the way home.
Violet had his body embalmed and took it back to Scotland for burial at Cnoc Rhaonastil.
There he shot and injured a member of the Ireland Republican Army in an argument over the requisition of his car.