The British were building a new railway to Uganda, and this pair of lions would come into the construction camps every night to grab workers out of their tents. They ate dozens of the men, easily getting past the camp's walls and traps.
We've talked about these lions before. But once you've gone back and read about the quest to defend the camp, we want to add a few more details. First is how, early on, the thousand or so local workers decided the smart thing was to get the hell out of there. Nowhere in camp was safe (even sleeping in the trees didn't work, since enough workers sleeping in a tree sent it crashing to the ground), so they gave their ultimatum, saying they wanted out. The British supervisor appears not to have let them leave. So to get a train to stop for them, they lay down in huge numbers in front of it. Then they piled inside it and escaped ... except for the segment of the workers who chose to stay; many of this segment ended up eaten.
Some of the early attempts to kill the lion failed in ways that made this whole thing look like a cartoon. One time, Colonel Patterson, the British army guy in charge, had a lion in his gunsights, but the gun misfired. Another time, he was perched in some scaffolding for safety when an owl mistook his head for a branch and sent him falling down, almost into the lions' clutches. Later, they tried to lure one lion into a cage, and this actually worked. Then a worker tried to shoot the trapped lion, missed, and instead shot out one of the cage's bars, allowing the lion to escape.
via Wiki Commons
Finally, they got their act together and managed to kill both lions. News reached London, where the Prime Minister reported what had happened like this: "The whole of the works were put to a stop because a pair of man-eating lions appeared in the locality and conceived a most unfortunate taste for our workmen. At last the laborers entirely declined to carry on unless they were guarded by iron entrenchments. Of course it is difficult to work a railway under these conditions, and until we found an enthusiastic sportsman to get rid of these lions our enterprise was seriously hindered." This tone gets across the entertaining dry humor with which the British describe serious matters, as well as the cheery way Brits accept the death of anyone who is not British.