Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  If Daphne Moore was unkind to Eric Dutton, he had only himself to blame. He deliberately cultivated a pose of boorishness and enjoyed his reputation for ill manners, while at the same time ingratiating himself with the nobs of this small colonial world. He was the sort of man one could imagine tapping a Minister on the shoulder and, with a knowing smile, whispering into his ear a piece of scandalous gossip. But the image he projected of himself was only half true. He was a brave man, for one thing; so badly had both legs been smashed in the war that he was obliged to wear heavy iron calipers and to use a stick; nevertheless he climbed Mt Kenya and got to within five hundred yards of the top. At that time, in 1926, only Sir Halford Mackinder and his Swiss guide had reached the summit, in 1899, so even for a fit man this would have been a considerable achievement.

  Beneath his off-putting manner and homely appearance lay a vein of creativeness which found expression, when opportunity could be manoeuvred into offering, in designing buildings, gardens and parks. When Sir Edward Grigg, Governor from 1925 to 1930, invited Britain’s great imperial architect, Sir Herbert Baker, to design a new Government House in Nairobi, a smaller version in Mombasa and other public buildings elsewhere, Eric Dutton sat at Baker’s feet and acquired a good working knowledge of the trade, as well as the friendship of the brilliant but erratic Hollander, Jan Hoogterp, whom Baker put in charge of his East African building programme. After Dutton moved on to Northern Rhodesia, he summoned Hoogterp to create in that country’s barren bush a complete new capital to replace the inadequate little township of Livingstone at the southern tip of the Protectorate. Dutton, with great relish, organised the planting of a nursery of thousands of indigenous trees and ornamental shrubs with which to adorn it. ‘There was something spellbinding’, he wrote, ‘about seeing row after row of trees, each labelled with the street or avenue where they would take up permanent residence, and knowing that they would go on growing and giving their shade and their magnificence for years to come.’2 After crippling set-backs and prodigious exertions, the future tree-lined capital of Zambia, Lusaka, was officially opened on 31 May 1935.

  Sir Edward Grigg had been appointed to his governorship on the understanding that Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar were soon to be united in some form of federation, that Nairobi was to be its capital and that he, Sir Edward, was to become its first Governor-General. The old bijou residence in stockbroker’s black-and-white that had hitherto served to house the King’s representatives was clearly no place for a Governor-General, and a grandification was planned. Grigg, a big man with big ideas – he was one of the Round Table school founded by Milner’s Young Men – would have no truck with merely adding on an extra wing or two, so behind Baker’s stately white columns and imposing portico arose a splendid edifice which swallowed the old one like a whale ingesting a krill. By Kenya’s frontier standards the cost was outrageous, some £80,000, and its taxpayers – the white and brown ones – squealed indignantly and talked of folies de grandeur. Their anger rose to boiling point when a large ballroom was added at top speed to be ready for a visit by the then Prince of Wales.

  There is a thesis to be written on the legacy of royal visits to colonial possessions. Such visits were intended to strengthen loyalty to the Crown and the cohesion of the Empire. Their on-the-spot effects were more down to earth. In many a far-flung outpost of Empire a gleam came into the eye of many a district officer as he reached for a file in which was embalmed a cherished project clobbered by a Treasury veto. Now at last the chance had come to achieve that longed-for road, to improve that unhygienic market, that inadequate district headquarters, dispensary, school, shed for drying hides in, seed farm or ghee-making project. How was Royalty to get from A to B along a road without bridges? Should a Princess be exposed to the squalor of a makeshift native hospital without an operating theatre? How were chiefs and elders to present their Loyal Address in seemly fashion in a dilapidated court-house whose roof had fallen in? A reluctant Treasury scraped the bottom of its barrel, road-gangs wielded picks with a will, lorries bumped through the bush loaded with corrugated iron, cement and tins of paint, district commissioners purred with delight. I know of at least one rutted track, passable only in dry weather, that had been converted into an all-weather road to enable a Princess to lunch with a remote farmer whose dwelling (in which a loo had to be installed) commanded a spectacular view. As a result, local farmers were at long last able to get their produce to the railway station during the rains. In time, along came international agencies with tarmac and machinery, and the track became a scenic highway, possibly a strategic link as well.

  The Griggs made a notable impact on the raw Colony. ‘They raised the tone’ I was told. King George V took a lively interest in the conduct of his East African subjects, and was pained by rumours of the white farmers’ slovenly habit of dining in dressing-gowns and pyjamas. Sir Edward was instructed never to allow such behaviour in his presence. In Nairobi the situation did not arise, but when the Griggs visited up-country farmers they found the royal ukaze an embarrassment. Some of His Excellency’s hosts, requested to change into suits, thought his attitude stuck-up and pompous. Queen Mary had issued her own Royal Command to Lady Grigg: no divorcée was to be received at Government House. Ned Grigg wrote in his memoirs3 that this injunction was strictly obeyed, but when I asked his widow about it she laughed and said ‘Nonsense!’ Perhaps some divorcées slipped in while he was away. Those were the days of ‘guilty parties’ taken in adultery by a hotel chambermaid bringing in the early morning tea; the wronged spouse was perhaps exempted from the royal ban. But Happy Valley-ites were not invited to Government House, despite their high rating in Debrett’s.

  Lady Grigg, Joanie to her friends, was as strong a persoanlity as her husband. Young, handsome, full of energy, and equally determined to set the mark of progress on the country, she saw that the wellbeing of women and their babies had been sadly neglected. Not a single maternity hospital for Africans had been established, nor had a single African nurse been even partially trained. Medical missionaries had done what they could, but for the most part African women had their babies as they had always done, in dark, unventilated, smoky huts shared with sheep and goats, attended by old women who had never heard of disinfectants, sterile instruments or even soap and water. If things went wrong, the witch-doctor was called in to appease with incantations and spells the offended spirits who had caused the trouble. The fact that nearly every girl had been circumcised, which left scar tissue that impeded childbirth, made matters worse. It was no wonder that infant mortality was high, and deaths in childbirth common.

  So, in trying to change all this, Joan Grigg faced a daunting task, at first almost single-handed. Neither the women themselves, ultra-conservative in outlook, nor the tribal elders, wanted change. On the contrary, they resented interference. In order to receive even the most basic kind of training in midwifery, a girl would have to leave home, live amongst strangers and learn new ways utterly at variance with those of her own people. Most likely she had been pledged from childhood to a husband, and perhaps the first instalment of the bride-price paid. Her father could scarcely be expected to welcome the overthrow of ancient custom and the disruption of his plans.

  It was not only Africans who shied away from innovation. Many Europeans doubted the wisdom of ‘forcing the pace’, the official phrase for taking action of almost any kind. African resentment against interference was like an unexploded bomb that might go off at a touch. It very nearly had gone off when the Church of Scotland Mission had tried to abolish female circumcision amongst the Kikuyu. In 1929 a sixty-three-year-old woman missionary (a Miss Stumpf) had been forcibly circumcised and left to bleed to death. Unrest had been such that the Government had backed away from any active attempt to discourage the custom. Time and education, they said, must be the remedy.

  So, no money was available with which to build even the simplest of maternity hospitals, to train nurses or to open clinics for women and their babies. Starting f
rom scratch, Joan Grigg set out to raise the money. She appealed, cajoled and bullied, set up committees and relentlessly chivvied commercial firms and business men, trusts and people like the Aga Khan, whose generosity was proverbial. The culmination of the appeal was a mammoth Child Welfare fête at Government House. Not everyone enjoyed being chivvied. The future writer Karen Blixen, then living on her coffee farm at the foot of the Ngong hills, wrote crossly to her mother of ‘Lady Grigg’s confounded fête’ which she thought ‘crazy and barbaric’. People were being ‘pumped and badgered’ to give objects for sale. Faced with a request to supply roasted almonds for the tea pavilion, she doubted whether her cook remembered how to do them. (Not difficult, surely?) In a fertile flight of fancy she compared Joan Grigg’s fête to the actions of the mayor of a French provincial town who, at a cost to his citizens of 100,000 livres, had presented Madame de Montespan with a barge with silken sails in which to proceed down a river.4

  The fête itself she found ‘utterly exhausting’, the only bright moments being visits to the cocktail bar where, she wrote, drinks were concocted from ‘about twenty different left-overs’; no wonder these gave her ‘instant strength’. However, the fête made over £3,000, and in time the Baroness became reconciled to the Griggs. They could be ‘tremendously pleasant’, she wrote, in contrast to most of the British, whom she found bourgeois, dreary, ill-bred and philistine. But with the Griggs she could discuss Shakespeare and the Old Testament. Despite a horror of everything to do with childbirth she allowed herself to be conducted round Joan Grigg’s newly established maternity home, where she pitied a young woman being wheeled into the labour ward – ‘how nice it would be if one could sit on an egg’.

  Maternity services had fared better in Uganda, where the hospital started by the great missionary doctor Albert Cook had been training girls as nurses for some time. He loaned two of them to staff the cottage hospital at Mombasa that Joan had raised funds for and had built, which opened its doors in 1926. To start with, no one came. Then a single African woman braved the unknown and was safely delivered. This was the start of a trickle that became a flood. A second hospital was built in the Pumwani district of Nairobi; now enormously enlarged, it is still in business nearly sixty years later. Nor did Joan Grigg confine herself to the welfare of Africans. An Indian maternity hospital followed, Indian girls were coaxed into training, and a hostel for European nurses was built.5

  Joan Grigg’s was a remarkable achievement, and her name is commemorated in the Lady Grigg maternity home in Mombasa. But malice directs the gods, the fates, or whatever it may be that orders, if anything does, our human destiny, and many of our virtuous aims lead towards disaster. To save the lives of babies and mitigate the suffering of mothers must be seen as a great and Christian Good. Death by starvation of tens of thousands, eventually millions, of people, and especially of children, can be seen only as a great Evil. Yet the first creates the second. Kenya’s birthrate is now the highest in the world; the average family size is eight and a half children. This flood of babies is drowning the resources of the country, over-population has become the greatest threat to the nation’s stability. Would it have been kinder in the long run to have let nature continue that cruel and ancient culling method to which every species must submit, lest it overwhelm the others? Goodness knows.

  A very different regime at Government House followed that of the Griggs. Gone were the grand parties, the French chef, a certain panache and imaginative, if costly, gestures – the visiting Prince of Wales was supplied every morning with fresh trout flown from a farm in the Aberdare mountains in time for breakfast. Sir Joseph Byrne, a former Royal Inniskillen Fusilier, had risen by way of the post of deputy Adjutant-General in Ireland to command the Royal Irish Constabulary, and to be rewarded by the Governorship first of the Seychelles, then of Sierra Leone, and finally of Kenya. His cautious approach to decision-making led to a frequent response of ‘yes, but –’ and hence his local nickname Butty Byrne. With her usual asperity Daphne Moore wrote: ‘I have listened to the damn man telling me the same dull stories about himself every time I meet him.’ But he had his human side too. On New Year’s Eve, 1932, Glady Delamere gave a party at Muthaiga Club which included the Byrnes. ‘The Haldemans were there. Lady Idina [formerly Hay, formerly Gordon, formerly Wallace] got herself introduced to H.E. and the whole club held their sides to see Kenya’s most notorious vamp clasped in the arms of the King’s representative who was apparently making the most of it.’6

  Butty Byrne went on leave soon after my arrival in Nairobi, and it was to Daphne’s husband, Chief Secretary Henry Monck-Mason Moore, that I applied for permission to use the secretariat library and to see as many of the files as possible that related to Delamere’s career. Research into colonial history was very amateurish in those days. Proper archives, public record offices, embargoes, fifty (later thirty) years’ rule and all the rest were lacking. You just asked questions and borrowed papers and, at least in the provincial and district centres, no one seemed to mind whether you returned them or not. There was little sense of history then, no idea that these records might interest generations to come. When – this was some years later – I visited Meru, north of Mount Kenya, and asked to see the district record books, I was told that the last DC, in a fit of tidyness, had burnt the lot. Luckily some records have survived and so have personal diaries, and much has since been saved, classified and made available to students in the Rhodes House library in Oxford and elsewhere.

  But things were different in Nairobi’s secretariat. Delamere’s role as a goad prodding the Government’s backside naturally had not endeared him to the senior officials, and their attitude was evasive, not to say obstructive. Then, unexpectedly, there came a softening and a change. I was given a desk in the secretariat’s library and shown most of the files I had hoped to see. I had no idea what had brought about this change and only later discovered that I owed it, in the main, to the current deputy head of the Treasury, George Sandford. He nursed a good deal more impatience with bureaucratic constipation than most of his colleagues, was interested in Kenya’s history, and, most unusually, had edited the East African Standard for several years before returning to the Colonial Service. He had known and admired Delamere and thought that the full story should be told. I remember him as a slightly built, sandy-haired man, bright-eyed and with a twinkle, who gave out a bird-like sense of eagerness and interest in all that went on. Eventually he climbed the ladder to a minor governorship (Bahamas) and a knighthood.

  Delamere had first reached East Africa in 1897, and ever since his life had been so closely intertwined with the country’s development that I was clearly committed to a history of white settlement as well as a biography. Of white settlement only, not of all aspects of the country’s story set in its historical perspective. That was a task for professional historians and beyond my powers. I called the book White Man’s Country because that phrase was a summary of Delamere’s political aims, and one he often used. It was not intended as an historical assessment.

  Curiously enough, when people argued as to whether Kenya was, or was not, a white man’s country, they were not then making a political judgment. They were making a medical judgement. Some held that people of European stock would not be able to establish a healthy, self-perpetuating population on the equator, and at an altitude of over 5,000 feet, because the actinic rays of the sun, combined with the rarefied atmosphere, would sap the vitality of the European stock and lead to its degeneration. Several doctors took this view, but Delamere and others disagreed. Ironically, those who believed that Kenya would prove to be a ‘white man’s country’ on this basis were probably right. Insofar as we can tell – and there are third and fourth generations of white Kenyans – the stock seems able to maintain its vigour, though perhaps four generations, and on so small a scale, is not enough on which to base a judgement. I do not think it occurred to anyone that politics, not health, would decide the issue.

  Loresho provided me with an ideal
base. It was a comfortable, creeper-covered stone bungalow with the usual deep veranda, built around a central quadrangle with a fig tree, sacred to the Kikuyu, in the middle. Glady had her own separate cottage, and a nanny with her three children lived in another. The altitude was higher than Nairobi’s, the air crisper and cooler and, after the rains, filled with the orange-blossomy scent of creamy-white flowers that burst out all over the coffee bushes surrounding the house. Indoors, a scent of madonna lilies hung upon the air. Glady had been thirty years younger than Delamere, whom she had married as his second wife in 1928 when he had less than four years to live.

  Glady was a very hospitable person with a wide and varied collection of friends, and you never knew whom you might find breakfasting on the veranda, having arrived overnight from some distant farm or outpost. She had the art of mixing together different kinds of people and keeping conversation on the boil. In argument she could be aggressive, but then she would disarm her guests with a deep throaty chuckle and a sudden unexpected turn of phrase. Sometimes, after dinner, everyone would go on to dance at Torr’s hotel to the rhythmic, sentimental tunes of the thirties – Smoke Gets in Your Eyes; Dance, Dance Little Lady; Poor Little Rich Girl; Bye, Bye Blackbird; These Foolish Things – all rather doom-laden songs, love was never a carefree experience. For lunch there was a small restaurant, Chez Gaby, newly opened in Government Road by a genuine Frenchman where the food was excellent and cheap, especially sea-food brought up overnight from Mombasa packed in ice.

  Like Joan Grigg, with whom she had been friends from childhood, Glady was much concerned with good works, as well as with social life and local politics. She was canvassing for a seat on Nairobi’s Municipal Council, elections to that body having recently been introduced. These elections were for whites only, the Indian members being nominated by the Governor: no blacks, but then there were no black rate-payers. The Council, closely modelled on the British pattern, elected its own mayor and deputy. The numbers on the voters’ roll remind one of English parliamentary elections before the Reform Bill: Glady was duly elected in 1934 by 236 votes to 80. She became an able, energetic councillor, and four years later was elected mayor, and then twice re-elected to that position.