Just as they were searching for a chance to start a new life, an article describing Kikuyu country as a land flowing with milk and honey appeared in a British newspaper and this convinced them that they should emigrate to the British East African highlands. They set about ordering large quantities of “candles, matches, soap and tinned goods”, and a “great deal of clothing” for Mrs Boedeker who was almost painfully aware of her clothes and appearance.… Her boxes contained a large variety of hats, not of the protective sort, but wide-brimmed and small, trimmed with osprey and veiling to match a selection of gowns in the high fashion of the day. None was suited to travelling in the bush but she was one of those women who kept up standards despite everything. Into her cabin trunks in 1896 went piles of exquisite laces, velvets, silks and muslins; the high-necked dresses with leg-of mutton sleeves were without doubt quite unbearable for marching along in the dust and the heat.
Dr Boedeker had been more perceptive as to their needs than his frivolous bride. His luggage included a mould-board plough, so called because of the curved plate which turned the furrow and the first, as far as is known, to arrive in British East Africa. They sailed on the SS Góorka, a slow boat which called at every port for food and water. Sheep and cattle were bought in Mediterranean markets, taken aboard and slaughtered when required. At Aden, the Boedekers transhipped to the SS Goa when, after the excitement of seeing flying fish for the first time, “a frightful passage’ ensued. They were relieved to come ashore at Mombasa.
To reach the highlands, the Boedekers joined forces with a blacksmith from Dumfriesshire and his wife Mary, and another couple called Wallace. They set forth across the Taru desert.
Years later when Mary McQueen’s children begged her to describe this safari she usually recalled the joy of reaching Kibwezi where a small river ran cold from the mountains, the relief of dangling her stockingless feet in the water and of how she carried their father part of the way after he had sprained his ankle. Fortunately she was strong and, being six feet in height, taller than her husband. She explained how she cooked their meals on a piece of flat iron perched on three stones. Tinned meats and pigeons varied their diet from freshly-killed goat, which Mrs Boedeker described as “tough enough in all conscience”. Mary McQueen never talked much about the problems of the walk. Yet, as if crossing almost fifty miles of the vicious bush thorn was not enough, the party was harassed by petty thieving in the Taru as well. Food and blankets were stolen and, to her husband’s outrage, his cut-throat razor disappeared with them. He was a quick-tempered man and swore in his fit of anger, that he would never shave again. Nor did he for his remaining forty years and in Nairobi where men were more often bearded men than not in the early days, McQueen was easily distinguishable from the rest by his waist-length black beard.
Dysentery next afflicted the small cavalcade. The Europeans recovered but many of their porters died from it. The loss meant that the two Muscat donkeys which had been purchased for the women to ride now had to be used to carry loads instead. Other porters defected after they had been paid in advance.
For Mary Wallace and Mary McQueen in particular, the historic journey across those blistering miles of heat in 1896 was an exercise of great fortitude because they were both expecting babies. Mrs Wallace was seven months pregnant when she arrived at Machakos.
Not surprisingly, the baby Mary McQueen had carried from Mombasa, for a time together with her injured husband, was born dead. But subsequently four daughters and two sons were born at Mbagathi, twelve miles from Nairobi, on the forest land they made into a farm.
They called it Rhino Farm – later Rhino Park – because there were so many. Morning and evening the tank-like creatures came to drink from the Mbagathi River or wallow in the mud near the slope from which the McQueens drew their water supplies. McQueen built the house. He made all the hinges, nails, shutters and doors himself and encircled it with a thorn boma to keep the leopards and bothersome rhinos away. Water was taken up in old paraffin tins slung over their donkeys’ withers. Three stones and an improvised Dutch oven made from the baked clay of Kikuyu formed Mary McQueen’s kitchen. The same flat griddle she had brought from Scotland was used for frying for as long as she lived. Food was cheap. McQueen shot birds and game for the pot. Before long a Somali butcher opened from whom they bought local mutton. Occasionally they killed a steer and pickled it in brine and the salt beef kept them going for months. Bananas could be exchanged for the foul-smelling iodoform, which, ever since John Boyes had introduced the ointment to the Kikuyu, was much valued by them in the prevention of septicaemia from wounds. A large bunch of bananas could be traded with them for as much iodoform as could be placed on a pice piece the size of a silver sixpence. The McQueens lived at Rhino Farm until the blacksmith died in 1944. Mary McQueen educated her children by reading to them from her family Bible or Pilgrim’s Progress before losing her eyesight prematurely.…
John, Jean, Madge, Minnie and Jim McQueen kept tame gazelles and saw nothing unusual in rhino drinking from their stream. Other children reared cheetahs, monkeys, lion cubs, mongooses or hyraxes which were accepted no less than white mice as pets. The McQueen children conversed with one another in Kikuyu and played tribal games learned from their helpers. The most favourite and bizarre of these was to steal beads which they would commandeer from the dying women as playthings before the hyenas did their undertaking. Neither they nor their parents thought anything of it; it never crossed their minds that they could be causing offence.
Possibly as often as every six months the McQueens walked to Nairobi on a shopping expedition. Newcomers were surprised by the strange cavalcade headed by the blacksmith whose wife dwarfed him, and each child walking one pace behind the last. They never wore shoes and had travelled so many native tracks barefoot through the bush that, as with the Africans themselves, it had become second nature to walk single-file in order to avoid the wait-a-bit thorns, even when in town. Unlike other Europeans then, the McQueens never wore spine-pads or pith helmets though shoes were introduced when they went to “proper”’ school at the age of ten.
The Kenya Pioneers Errol Trzebinski.
Hugh Cholmondely, third Baron Delamere, reached the future Kenya in 1897 after a two-year trek from Berbera in Somalia. Six years later he returned for good to take up a grant of land from the Protectorate Government and to become the country’s boldest and most influential pioneer and rancher, and the political leader of the white settlers.
Delamere reached his new estate on a stretcher. This was in January 1904, just a year after his accident. He could only walk a little. The train stopped at a level crossing between Njoro and Elburgon stations. He was carried to a couple of rough grass huts which Dr Atkinson’s brother had built for him on a little rise below the forest’s edge. He named the farm Equator ranch: the line of the equator ran through one corner of it.
His huts stood on the lower slopes of the Mau escarpment, the Rift Valley’s south-western mountain wall, looking over a wide sweep of game-dotted plain beneath to a range of blue tumbled hills beyond. To the east ran the mighty cleft of the Rift Valley and on its far side rose the peaks of the Aberdare mountains, their crest a dark blue line against a changing background of banked or fleecy cloud. At the back of the huts lay the deep forests of the Mau. Most of the trees were junipers, known as cedars. Their trunks were straight and tall, and a sort of lichen hung like drooping grey-green whiskers from their crown of dark foliage. They were magnificent trees, dwarfing the paler olives which shared the mountains with them. The forest rose and fell in ridges. From the summit of one ridge you could look down on to the tree-tops from above and see two shades of colour, sea-deep of cedars and spring green of olives, splashed with the racing shadows of clouds, merging into a restless pattern like a leafy ocean.…
Delamere’s huts were planted down in the open with no more disturbance to the natural panorama than the shaving of a little patch of grass. The windows (they were holes in the sides of the hut) looked out on to
a long grass-covered slope merging into the flat plains below. You could see from these apertures slow-moving and compact herds of zebras, gazelles and hartebeests, mingling with awkward, striding ostriches and, occasionally, a placid rhino ruminating beneath a thorn-tree.…
Everywhere colours were vivid and deep and always changing, distant escarpments sharply defined, the sky rich with moving clouds, the atmosphere clear with the rarity of mountain air and charged with a sense of space and freedom blown on cool, crisp breezes from the hills.
There was no luxury about Equator ranch. The grass huts were surrounded by a corrugated iron boma into which cattle were driven every night. In the rains the ground was churned into a bog and the buggy often stuck up to its axles in mud. There were no proper doors or windows to the grass huts, so that at night the cows were liable to poke their heads through the apertures and breathe heavily into the sleeper’s face. After a year or so a little wooden hut was built for Lady Delamere.
The inside of the huts presented a strange contrast. The floors were made of earth. They were uncovered and largely unlevelled as well, full of hills and valleys. Some good furniture had been imported from England and fine mahogany sideboards and valuable oak tallboys stood at drunken angles on the uneven floor round the walls of the huts. Good china and silver plate seemed incongruous in these crude surroundings.
Lady Delamere started a garden, but her days were so filled with looking after pigs, poultry and, later, ostriches that she had little time to give to it.…
Delamere dressed to suit his surroundings. Ever since he had suffered from sunstroke in Somaliland he had dreaded the sun and even in the highlands, where a felt hat generally gives ample protection, he was never without an enormous sun helmet (the biggest ever seen in East Africa) which practically obscured his face and dwarfed his slight figure. Since his third accident he had adopted a special precaution against the impact of the sun’s rays on the back of his neck. This was to wear his ginger hair unusually long. He allowed it to hang down almost to his shoulders. He generally dressed in an old pair of khaki breeches and a woolly cardigan.…
When sheep and cattle failed at Njoro Delamere turned to agriculture. He evolved a theory that ploughing should be done in the cold of the early morning before sunrise. He used to get up at four o’clock and breakfast, muffled up against the sharp night air, off Thomson’s gazelle chops by the light of a hurricane lamp and to the accompaniment of his favourite tune played, several times over, on the gramophone – “All Aboard for Margate”.
White Man’s Country Elspeth Huxley.
In 1902 Abraham Block, a penniless Lithuanian Jewish refugee from Russian pogroms, reached the embryonic Nairobi from South Africa. The Stanley Hotel, called after the explorer, had recently been opened by Mayence Tate, née Bent, Nairobi’s first successful milliner and dress-maker.
The newness of the corrugated iron was all that separated its appearance from the other scores of buildings on stilts with wooden steps but apart from the fact that she had no mattresses she was ready to receive guests. Block heard of her dilemma and seized the opportunity to earn some money out of it. While he was riding about looking for work earlier that September he had noticed a great many bundles of dried grass which had been cut from either side of the railway. Believing that this would make suitable mattress filling he obtained permission from the Railway Superintendent to collect enough; he found ticking in the Indian Bazaar and, with the help of Mr R. M. da Souza, a Goanese merchant who provided Block with a tailor, worked out the dimensions. And then Block discovered that there were no mattress needles with which to assemble them. Ingenuity worthy of any pioneer overcame the problem; he sharpened and punctured two old bicycle spokes and stitched them with these instead. Mayence Bent approved the sample and ordered twenty-three more. He delivered them three weeks later and was paid 10 rupees each (the equivalent of about 14/6 in 1903).
With his mattress profits Block decided to buy a farm on the “pay-as-you-earn” system. Dotting the Kiambu landscape were a number of new homesteads belonging to Europeans; mostly rondavels, round thatched huts built in the Kikuyu tradition; the walls were made of red mud and cow dung and cost little to construct. The roof was thatched and the floors were of beaten earth. Some were already surrounded with patches of experimental crops, others barely developed at all.
Two German farmers, Dr Ufferman and Mr Lauterbach, alerted Block to the fact that a man called Corran had put the disposal of his 640-acre farm “Njuna” seventeen miles from Nairobi in their hands and left the country. They offered it to Block for 1,500 rupees and were willing to accept payment at his convenience. “Njuna” was in the Upper Kiambu district; the ground was cleared but not broken. Though it was not like Block to buy without seeing anything first, perhaps he feared that, by riding out to inspect the land first, he might lose the favourable deal to someone quicker off the mark. He paid Ufferman a deposit of one hundred rupees and sought legal advice to clinch the verbal arrangements.…
When Block got to Njuna he discovered that it had more to its name than he thought. There was a hut in which was a crude home-made bed and some cooking pots and there were even a few chickens scratching about outside and some pigeons but a local mongoose took these before he had the chance of a meal from them himself. The frames of the door and windows were covered by sacking and there were also a number of paraffin boxes, the inevitable alternative for furniture.…
The need for a plough posed a new financial crisis. His ponies were precious to him but they were also his only saleable asset. Reluctant as he was to give up his only form of transport, he concluded that something to ride was less vital for survival than machinery to break the soil. Imported ponies were scarce and commanded a high price at the time and so there was no difficulty in finding a buyer.…
Block had to walk a total of eighty-five miles just to get his plough and six oxen to Njuna. He had been lucky to find a plough to buy because until 1904 none were imported on a regular basis and the demand had been so erratic that the shortage was acute. Wealthier settlers were able to import them but farmers like Binks and McQueen had resorted to making their own.…
Block’s Rudsak plough was borne home on the backs of Kikuyu women traditionally by means of a strap which went up round the forehead; it was adjustable so that each load sat snugly in the small of the back. To take the weight off the brow, the women stooped forward constantly so that by middle-age most of them bore a deep depression round the forehead and were pigeon-toed from having already spent half their lives in toil.
Hearing of a building plot for sale in the centre of Nairobi, Block pawned his watch and chain, made a down-payment with the proceeds and then sold half the plot to meet the rest of the purchase price. Twenty-three years later he exchanged the plot plus £500 for the Norfolk Hotel, thus laying the foundations of an empire which, carried on by his sons, was to embrace several of Kenya’s leading hotels and game park lodges, and set a standard of catering respected throughout the world.
In 1947, ten years after Fred Tate died, Block’s eldest son purchased the New Stanley from Mayence Tate on his father’s behalf. People remember Block standing on the steps of the New Stanley, after he became its owner, a familiar figure wearing a suit and a worn Trilby, his hands clasped behind his back. Alternatively he could he found sitting in his favourite chair at the Norfolk in the foyer, puffing away at an expensive cigar (he bought only the best once he could afford them; they were his one concession to luxury). As the receptionist dealt with guests’ accounts on the day of their departure, Block would lift his hand towards her, so that she could pass him the bill for scrutiny. It was then handed back. Unless it was at fault not a word passed between them.…
Block’s sons acquired more land on the hotel’s frontage and by the time they had finished developing it in 1974, though it had long been the centre of Nairobi, the New Stanley with its world famous “Thorntree” meeting point, was valued at almost half a million pounds.
The Keny
a Pioneers Errol Trzebmski.
In 1902 Joseph Chamberlain, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, visited East Africa and, impressed by the land’s apparent fertility, its emptiness of people and the healthiness of the climate, offered a free grant of 5,000 square miles to the Zionists who, following an especially ghastly pogrom in Russia, were pressing for a home for the Jews in Palestine. Despite a hostile reaction by many Zionists and an even sharper one by the Protectorate’s few but vociferous European settlers, the Zionist leader Dr Theodor Herzl agreed to consider the offer. In 1904 three Jewish commissioners arrived to inspect the promised land on the Uasin Gishu plateau. A deputation of British settlers waited on Sir Charles Eliot to reiterate their opposition to the proposal.
They also asked if one or two settlers could accompany the Jewish commission on their tour of the country in search of a new Zion. The settlers’ knowledge of the country might, they suggested, be of some value to the visitors.
“I am sure, gentlemen,” Sir Charles Eliot replied courteously, “that you will be able to show members of the commission many things that they would not otherwise see.”
The three commissioners were escorted to the Uasin Gishu by an officer sent out with them by the Foreign Office and by a couple of settlers. From Londiani on the railway they had to walk. It was a stiff climb over the escarpment, and the commissioners were not used to walking. They learnt that blisters could be a painful affliction.
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 12