Taxidermy: Bengal Tiger Head Mount (Panthera tigris tigris), circa 1920, Northeastern India, a large adult head mount, glass eyes, mouth agape, re-mounted upon a Rowland Ward style shaped oak shield, width 52cm, overall height 69cm, previously as a mounted skin rug. This is the head of a Tiger shot in the 1920s by a young Anglo-Indian air force officer named Alfred Charles Henry Sharp, known as “Bobby” to his family. Family anecdote says he was flying over the Northwest Frontier at the time, which would place the tiger’s origin somewhere in what is now western Pakistan. Bobby was to become a much-decorated RAF fighter pilot and military problem-solver. RAF records note his “great courage and gallantry” including on one allied raid in 1943 during which Bobby, now Air Commodore Sharp, was acting as an RAF observer on a B-17 but ended up manning the guns of the American plane to drive off “repeated attacks of hostile planes” over an “important enemy installation.” Air Commodore Sharp displayed “courage, coolness and complete disregard of personal danger” according to the official RAF record of the incident, which earned Bobby his citation for a Silver Star signed by President Roosevelt. As he rose through the ranks, Bobby also seems to have played a role in helping the US military to use Britain as a base during World War II, helping them “avoid the fractions of procedural differences” through his “extraordinary ability to combine frankness with friendship.” Another American medal was given for this work, since it "accelerated the application of the United States Air Power upon the common enemy." Bobby retired from the RAF in 1953, moved to Massachusetts, took a job with the Martin aircraft company, but died of a heart attack just three years later. The tiger was left to his family in England in the form of a rug, of which just the head remains