Frederick Grant Banks was born in London in 1875. In the mid 1880s his family moved to New Zealand, where he attended Christ's College, Canterbury, and the Lincoln Agricultural College. After his father's death, Banks left for Africa, landing in Mombassa in March 1896. He was successively a trader, a government official (in agricultural and forestry work), a planter, an elephant hunter, a game ranger and again a planter, in Kenya and, for most of his career, Uganda. In 1951 he retired to London where he died three years later.