4 – Ibid.
5 – From diaries kept by Genessie, Lady Claud Hamilton, which she has kindly allowed me to read.
6 – Several tribes have changed their names, because those by which they were formerly known were really nicknames given them either by the Maasai or by Swahili porters of the early safaris. Thus Lumbwa is a corruption of m’bwa, meaning dog, their correct name being Kipsigis. The people formerly known as Suk have become Pokot, Suk being a word for snot.
7 – My thanks are due to Sir Colin Campbell of Finlay Muir’s of Glasgow for lending me his company’s history of the tea industry in Kenya.
8 – The Nandi bear is discussed in On the Track of Unknown Animals by Bernard Heuvelmans (Rupert Hart-Davies, 1959).
9 – Robert Frost’s forthcoming biography of Sir Philip Mitchell.
10 – The history of the East African Literature Bureau has been told by Mr Charles Richards, OBE, D. Litt, in No Carpet on the Floor, MS in the Rhodes House Library in Oxford.
CHAPTER 7
1 – Grateful thanks to Arthur and Tobina Cole for allowing me to quote from their collection of Galbraith and Lady Eleanor Cole’s letters and papers. Also for the loan of photographs.
2 – There is a large literature about the Powys family. I have relied mainly on The Powys Brothers by Richard Perceval Graves.
3 – Pioneers’ Scrapbook, op. cit.
4 – The Powys Brothers, op. cit.
5 – Black Laughter by Llewelyn Powys (Jonathan Cape, 1925).
6 – The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, ed. by Louis Wilkinson (John Lane, 1943).
7 – Cole collection, op. cit.
8 – Random Recollections of a Pioneer Kenya Settler by Lady Eleanor Cole (privately printed).
9 – Cole collection, op. cit.
10 – The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, op. cit.
11 – Cole collection, op. cit.
12 – I am indebted to Miss Kathleen (Tuppence) Hill-Williams for information about the Moral Rearmament movement in Kenya.
13 – Random Recollections, op. cit.
14 – The Boer War by Thomas Pakenham (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979).
15 – White Mischief, op. cit.
16 – African Saga by Mirella Ricciardi (Collins, 1981).
17 – Private communication from Mrs Anne Carnelley.
18 – Several of Gilbert Colvile’s former managers have given me their impressions of his character and life-style, including Messrs W. J. Martin, Gerald Romer, David Hazelden, Frank Beletti and Paddy Grattan. Mr Hugh Barclay has been indefatigable in ferreting out information about this enigmatic man, and Mrs Lorna Dempster went to much trouble to put me in touch with people who knew him.
19 – Thanks to Mr David Christie-Miller for these recollections.
20 – White Mischief, op. cit.
21 – Mr W. J. Martin, as above.
CHAPTER 8
1 – Mrs Dorothy Vaughan, daughter of the first Mrs Cobb, has generously lent me letters, photographs and the manuscript of her own recollections of her childhood and of her father’s career.
2 – Mrs Hilda Furse and her sister Kathleen (Tuppence) Hill-Williams, have helped me greatly over this chapter.
3 – Letter from Mrs Anne Carnelley.
4 – From Delamere to his wife Glady dated 22 April 1930, quoted in White Man’s Country, Vol 11, op. cit.
CHAPTER 9
1 – Mrs Billie Nightingale, Captain and Mary Fey’s granddaughter, most kindly helped me with this chapter. There is also a short account of the Feys’ arrival on the Kinangop in Pioneers’ Scrapbook, op. cit.
2 – Wide Horizon by Venn Fey (Vantage Press, U.S.A., 1982).
3 – A Lifetime’s Recollections of Kenya Tribal Beekeeping, by Jim Nightingale interviewed by Dr Eva Crane (International Bee Research Association, London, 1983).
4 – From Mrs Barbie Nightingale, Stanley Polhill’s daughter.
5 – ‘Ages Ago’, by Walter de la Mare.
6 – Pioneers’ Scrapbook, op. cit.
7 – Ibid.
8 – Raymond Hook’s sister Mrs Sylvia Atkinson and his daughter Mrs Hazel Holmes of Nanyuki most kindly helped me with recollections and information about Hook’s career.
9 – See The Spotted Lion by Kenneth Gandar Dower, and two books about Raymond Hook by John Pollard, Adventure Begins in Kenya (Robert Hale, 1957) and African Zoo Man (Robert Hale, 1963).
10 – Castle to Caravan: An Autobiography by Lady Victoria Fletcher (‘Taffy’) (Summit Press, Canberra, Australia, 1963).
11 – Letters from Africa, 1913–1931, op cit.
CHAPTER 10
1 – Pioneers’ Scrapbook, op. cit.
2 – From a letter in the possession of Mrs Rose Dyer, who has generously lent me her papers about her mother, Elizabeth Powys.
3 – Letter to Alyse Gregory in the Powys archive in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
4 – From Clarence Buxton’s papers in the Rhodes House Library, op. cit.
5 – I am grateful to Mrs Delia Craig and Mrs Rose Dyer for impressions of Will Powys’ life and character, and also to his sister Mrs Lucy Penny, and his niece Mrs Isobel Marks, for their help.
6 – Public Record Office, Attorney-General’s deposit (Kenya), files 142 and 4/142.
7 – The East African Standard, 3 November 1934 and succeeding days.
CHAPTER 11
1 – Grateful thanks to Mr Robert Tatton-Brown for letting me read his diaries, which describe this encounter.
2 – Sir Richard Turnbull, GCMG, probably the greatest living authority on the Somali people of northern Kenya, has been more than generous with his time and advice relating to the old NFD, and I am very grateful.
3 – ‘It is worth remembering,’ Sir Richard Turnbull has written, ‘that but for a handful of District Commissioners and a score of policemen, this Somali wave would have washed over Kenya sixty years ago.’ It did, indeed, reach the foothills of Mt Kenya, where a force of Somali invaders was repelled by the Meru tribe in 1892. Its leader, in defeat, ordered his bodyguard to shoot him as he knelt on his prayer-mat. There can be no doubt that the Somalis would have returned to the charge had not the British administration, flimsy as it was, intervened.
4 – Ethnologists say that Dorobo – Il Torobo – is ‘a slightly derisive’ name given to these forest people by the Maasai, and that they themselves use the term Okiek. Some thirty groups have been identified, living in relative isolation from one another in the forested mountains. Probably their number totals no more than 8,000 or 9,000. Each group speaks the language of the tribe with which it is most closely associated, and many of the groups are in process of assimilation into the major tribes. See Portraits of Africa, by Mohamed Amin and Peter Moll (Harvill, 1983).
CHAPTER 12
1 – From the diary of Sir Robert Armitage, KCMG, deposited in the Rhodes House Library, Oxford.
2 – To My Wife, Fifty Camels by Alyce Reece (Harvill, 1963).
3 – From Mr Robert Tatton-Brown’s diary.
4 – A barramil is a copper vessel, weighing 37½ lbs when empty, holding ten gallons of water. Two barramils make up one camel load.
5 – Related by Mr Robin Wainwright, CMG, whose help and advice, together with that of his wife Bridget, I gratefully acknowledge.
6 – Tich Miles’ surviving letters and papers are in the possession of his nephew Canon Robert Miles, who most generously put them at my disposal. The quotations that follow are from this collection.
7 – A somewhat highly coloured account of this action is given by E. A. T. Dutton in Lillibullero, or The Golden Road (privately printed in Zanzibar), which also describes in detail Tich Miles’ life at Mega.
8 – With a Women’s Unit in Serbia, Salonika and Sebastopol by Dr I. Emslie Williams (Norgate, 1928).
9 – Dolly Miles wrote an account of her war-time experiences in 1930, from which these extracts have been taken. In Canon Miles’ collection.
10 –
From Sir Richard Turnbull’s papers, most of which are in the Rhodes House Library archives.
11 – Ibid.
12 – From the unpublished memoirs of Sir Charles Markham, Bart. My thanks for letting me read them.
CHAPTER 13
1 – With a Prehistoric People by W. S. & K. Routledge (Edward Arnold, 1910).
2 – The Morris Carter Commission was set up by a Joint Select Committee of the House of Commons to survey the land situation, and in particular to assess and report upon the claims of the Kikuyu to land they asserted had been lost by them to white settlement. The chairman was a judge, Sir Morris Carter, the other members F. O’B. Wilson and Rupert Hemsted. The Commission investigated every claim and finally recommended adding land to the reserve, amounting to rather less than three per cent of the total, to compensate for what had been lost. The report was published in 1934, and in due course its recommendations were carried out.
3 – Kenya Diary, 1902–06, by Richard Meinertzhagen (first published in 1957 by Oliver & Boyd; republished 1983 by Eland Books, London).
4 – Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta (Secker & Warburg, 1969).
5 – The respect in which Malinowski was held in academic circles was not always matched by that of practical administrators in the field. In the journal Africa, Philip Mitchell urged that Colonial Service cadets should study ‘the modern Africa’ rather than ‘the eccentricities of remote Papuans, the scars they make on their bottoms and their unsavoury sexual habits scarcely any anthropologist can keep off.’
6 – From a tape-recording made in Kitale, Kenya, in 1984, when Mr Whitehouse was interviewed by Dr David Throup and Miss Pamela Scott.
7 – From a disc recording of several of Kenyatta’s major speeches made just before and after independence, issued after his death under the title ‘In Memoriam’. This speech was made in May 1963.
CHAPTER 14
1 – The Portuguese Period in East Africa by Justus Strandes. Transactions of the Kenya History Society, published by the East African Literature Bureau (Nairobi, 1961).
2 – The Land of Zinj by C. H. Stigand (Constable, 1913).
3 – The History of Malindi by Esmond Bradley Martin (East African Literature Bureau, Nairobi, 1973).
4 – Cargoes of the East by Esmond Bradley and Chryssee Perry Martin (Elm Tree Books, London, 1978).
5 – History of East Africa, Vol. 1, ed. by Roland Oliver & Gervase Mathew. Chapter v, by G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville.
6 – Cargoes of the East, op. cit. Chapter on Lamu.
7 – Pioneers’ Scrapbook, op. cit.
8 – A summary of Alexandre Tinné’s story is given in The Challenge of Africa (Aldus Books, London, 1971) and also in Africa Explored by Christopher Hibberd.
CHAPTER 15
1 – Jim Mollison was the first to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west, but he started from Ireland. The next was John Grierson in 1934, who made a prolonged and interrupted flight from Rochester to Hudson’s Bay, coming down at Reykjavik and having to return by sea for spare parts. I am indebted to Mr A. Doyle, chief librarian to the Civil Aviation Authority, for this information.
2 – From Lady Francis Scott’s diary quoted in Pamela Scott’s unpublished autobiography, by kind permission of Miss Scott.
3 – So Rough a Wind by Michael Blundell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964). I am deeply grateful to Sir Michael for his practical help in many ways, and for the privilege of enjoying his stimulating flow of talk on Kenya’s past and present and other matters.
As well as those whose help has already been acknowledged, I should like to thank many others who have answered questions, spoken into a tape-recorder and assisted me in other ways; among them Sir John Hewett, whose memories go back to 1912; Mr Mervyn Cowie, father of Kenya’s National Parks; Archdeacon Peter Bostock, the missionary pioneer; Mr Hugh Barclay, whose memory is prodigious; Mr Cen Hill, whose name is synonomous with enlightened farming; Mrs Morna Walker-Munro, a friend from the early 1920s; Mrs Cecily Hinde of Timau; Mrs Bey Fletcher, OBE, of Nanyuki; Robin and Biddy Davis, also of Nanyuki; Mrs Molly Hodge; Jimmy and Rose Caldwell; Mr Jim Cooper; Mrs Sylvia Dawson, formerly of Sotik; and others no less helpful, but too numerous to name.
I am grateful to the following friends (in alphabetical order) for lending me the following photographs: to Lady Altrincham for nos 1a and b, 8a, and 14a; to Arthur and Tobina Cole for nos 4a, b and c, 5a and b; to Mrs Lorna Dempster for 1a and 5b; to Mrs Hilda Furze for 6a; to Mrs Hazel Holmes for 3b; to Mrs Cockie Hoogterp for 3d; and to Mrs Dorothy Vaughan for 7a, b and c. The rest are the author’s.
Glossary
1. Statue of the 3rd Baron Delamere by Kathleen Hilton-Young, now at Soysambu, Delamere’s ranch.
2. Denys Finch-Hatton and Glady Lady Delamere, Northern Frontier District, 1928.
3. Group at Wanjohi, 1924. Left to right: Hon. Josslyn Hay (later Earl of Erroll), Major Roberts, Jos Grant, Lady Idina Hay, Cockie Birkbeck (later Baroness Blixen), Princess Philippe de Bourbon, Nellie Grant.
4. Locust swarm, 1933.
5. On safari in 1930: Cockie von Blixen, HRH Edward Prince of Wales, and Captain Alan Lascelles.
6. Galbraith Cole at Kekopey, Gilgil, 1916.
7. Lady Eleanor Balfour and Galbraith Cole before their marriage in 1917, with dead impala.
8. Llewelyn Powys at Kekopey.
9. Will Powys, the Coles’ manager, at Kekopey, 1920.
10. The original Treetops at Nyeri: the modern one has 78 bedrooms.
11. Denys Finch Hatton, Jack Pixley, Tich Miles, with Lady Colvile behind, at Ngara Road House, 1914.
12. Foot Safari on the upper slopes of Mt Kenya, 1936.
13. H. B. Sharpe with elephants at Wamba, 1936.
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