Biography

Naturalist, artist and author, born Friederike Victoria Gessner in Troppau, Austrian Silesia (now Opava in the Czech Republic) on 20 January 1910. She married (1935) the businessman and amateur ornithologist, Victor von Klarwill and together they escaped Hitler's occupation of Europe Germany to settle in East Africa (1937). She met the Swiss botanist Peter Bally, who later married Friederike Victoria von Klarwill and gave her the nickname Joy, which she adopted as her first name. Joy assisted her husband in illustrating a number of books on the African flora, based on his collections, and was later awarded the Grenfell Gold Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society (1947) for her work.

After an affair with Indian-born British game warden George Adamson, Joy Bally remarried (1944) and became Joy Adamson. Though she collected herbarium material, she is much better known as a zoologist, a pioneer of the introduction of captive bred animals to the wild (restocking) and author of Born Free. Becoming a leading conservationist, she helped launch the World Wildlife Fund in the United States (1962). She was honoured with the Award of Merit from Czechoslovakia (1970). On the 3rd January 1980, Joy Adamson was found murdered by a former employee. As a botanical collector, Joy Adamson should not be confused with the earlier British collector, John Adamson (1787-1855).