Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  Special efforts were made to persuade Africans to join; a number did, and when the Mau Mau revolt broke out in 1952 they refused, with great courage and at the risk of their lives, to take the oaths that were enforced with much obscenity to kill, maim and destroy white people and their livestock and property. In the three years that followed, Mau Mau adherents killed many more of their fellow tribesmen than of their designated foes. MRA supporters used the technique of group confession to bring to repentance men and women held in detention camps for Mau Mau offences, and to ‘cleanse’ them from the undoubted impurities of their revolting oaths.12

  It was the Church of Goodwill which Nell built beside the main Nairobi-to-Nakuru road at the foot of the escarpment, on a corner of Kekopey, that was the cause dearest of all to her heart. It was built as a memorial to Galbraith, and as a thank-offering for the safe return of her two sons from the wars. Also, she wrote, she wanted to ‘make a physical, visible demonstration of what I stood for – that is, Christianity’.13 It stands today, a charming little church built of stone and timber from the estate, modelled on an old Mission church in Zanzibar. It was built, with many difficulties, at first by Indian and then by African artisans, and paid for entirely by Nell. The first service was held on 6 November 1949.

  In age, Nell became rather a formidable figure – I suppose an arduous life, heavy responsibilities and a position of command had left their mark. But she was always kind and generous, quite without false pride or pettiness, and had memorable blue eyes with a look in them of candour, innocence perhaps, and now and then a glint of humour. She was an accomplished public speaker with a clear brain and an enthusiasm that kept her young in spirit, and was one of the first Europeans to become after independence, legally that is, a Kenya citizen. Kekopey she handed over to her younger son Arthur and his wife Tobina, daughter of her old friend Rose Cartwright, and her other property to David, who became the Earl of Enniskillen. She ended her days, indomitable and sanguine to the finish and rising ninety, in the home for the elderly established in Nairobi by the East Africa Women’s League.

  The third member of the trio of livestock barons I have mentioned – all were old Etonians – was Gilbert Colvile. Of the three, he was the least gregarious and the most single-minded in his devotion to his sheep and cattle. His father, Sir Henry Colvile of the Grenadier Guards, had been a distinguished soldier with a great array of medals. He had taken part in the relief of Khartoum in 1885 when General Gordon perished, and won a medal for his successful conduct of a campaign in Bunyoro while he was assistant Commissioner of Uganda from 1893 to 1895. Unfortunately his military career ended ingloriously in the Boer War when he was relieved of his command by General Roberts after an operation that had gone wrong. He met his end neither in battle nor in bed, but by being knocked over while on his bicycle near Bagshot in Surrey.14

  His country seat was Lullington near Burton-on-Trent, and he took to wife a French lady, daughter of Pierre Richaud de Préville, who had a château in the Pyrenees. Gilbert was their only child. Probably he would never have settled in East Africa had he not blown off several toes while shooting rabbits, which disqualified him from taking up the commission in his father’s regiment that he had gained on leaving Sandhurst. Soon after his father’s death in 1907 he and his mother came to East Africa on the usual shooting trip. Gilbert so much liked what he saw that he gave up all idea of the army and decided to become a pioneer instead. After Lullington was sold he was joined by his mother, but she did not share his dwelling. Like Delamere and Galbraith Cole, Colvile became a Maasai addict. He learned their language, respected their independent spirit, admired their physique and tapped their expertise in cattle management. He also shared their indifference to comfort, and lived in a shack overrun by ill-disciplined dogs and furnished with the skins of wild animals imperfectly cured, and therefore smelly. As he acquired more land he ran up more dwellings; the living room of one of these was panelled with the skins of lions.

  Lady Colvile built a more substantial house at Gilgil, near the railway station – too near; passenger trains stopped there at two o’clock in the morning to refresh their engines, and passengers often woke her up to ask for cups of tea. This prompted her to build a hotel where she installed a manager, and thereafter slept undisturbed. She died in 1930 on her way back to France and was remembered as a convivial, hospitable lady, cheerful and fond of good food, not at all misanthropic like her son. But apparently the Somali, or at any rate one Somali, disapproved; he thought it infra dig to keep a hotel, considered her to be seedy, and told the writer James Fox that she used to carry milk on her head. This seems extremely unlikely, but then the Somali was prejudiced, and disparaged Gilbert too because he used to travel with a Maasai herdsman clutching a spear in the front seat of his car.15 Colvile lived like a Maasai, the Somali said, which put him quite beyond the pale.

  I remember Gilbert Colvile as a smallish, wiry, rather wizened man, reserved but not unfriendly, who willingly answered my questions about Delamere, his neighbour and friend. In later life he looked rather like a tortoise. His Maasai name was Nyasore, meaning the lean man. ‘When he was hunting he would go all day with only an egg and a cup of tea in his stomach,’ one of his servants told Mirella Ricciardi, daughter of the Roccos who lived at Naivasha. ‘Nyasore was a Maasai like us. There has never been another white man like him.’16 He was a great hunter, especially of lions, and kept a pack of mongrel dogs who bayed the quarry until Colvile came up and shot it; I have been told that he destroyed over 250 lions in this way. He could be as hard on his dogs as on his men. One of his managers recalls seeing him draw his pistol and shoot a dog that misbehaved itself during a lion hunt. To protect himself from thorns he wore a jacket and trousers made from the skins of antelopes he had shot and cured himself.

  His initial ranch was Ndabibi, lying to the north and north-west of Lake Naivasha and eventually covering 40,000 acres. His neighbours, the Carnelleys, were ardent conservationists, which Colvile most emphatically was not. He accused Stephen Carnelley of harbouring lions that devoured his, Colvile’s, cattle, and then returned to sanctuary on Carnelley’s land. As a result the two were not on speaking terms. Colvile was a dangerous enemy. Stephen Carnelley owned two small islands in the lake and kept them as a sanctuary for birds and hippos. Colvile set fire to them, destroying the bird life and forcing the hippos to seek new homes.17 An odd quirk in Colvile’s character was a passion for fires. Most people dreaded them, but Colvile liked nothing better than to set a match to a stretch of dry grass or a bush-clogged gulley on one of his ranches and watch the blaze roaring away. But first he always checked the state of the firebreaks and the direction of the wind, and estimated the chances of rain.

  His mind and heart were centred on his cattle. To start with he followed the current fashion by importing pedigree bulls, but soon realised that their big-boned progeny needed a high-protein diet, and failed to thrive on sparse and fibrous veld grass; also they were more susceptible to disease. So he got rid of his imported beasts and replaced them by Borans, hardy Zebu cattle from the north. In this way he built up one of the country’s best and largest herds of beef cattle. So he made money, a lot of money; on his death he was said to be worth over £2½ millions. ‘To meet him you would think he had no money at all. He was very hard on his managers,’ one of them told me, ‘and very mean as well.’ Despite this, most of them stuck to him, one for over thirty-four years, another for nearly twenty. Those who stood up to him did best. ‘When I was appointed,’ one of them said, ‘I went round his estates and presented him with a long list of things I thought should be done. He said no to all of them, so I told him there was no point in having me as general manager if he was going to turn down all my suggestions. He said: “Don’t be stupid, Romer, I always say no to start with, now begin again and give me reasons.” He then agreed to everything, and I got on well with him after that.’18 Like many rich people he would swallow a camel and strain at a gnat. He would buy an expensive tractor witho
ut a second thought but quibble at the cost of half a dozen pangas. Nor did he provide umbrellas for his Maasai herdsmen.

  Everything he made he put into buying more land and breeding more cattle, until he possessed five separate properties totalling about 265,000 acres. (The largest, Lariak on the Laikipia plains, covered 160,000 acres.) His beef herd numbered about 20,000 head. In order to expand the sale and improve the quality of local beef, he started a cold storage company, and was one of the founders of the Kenya Meat Commission, and its first chairman. This entailed visits to Nairobi, and his shabby appearance – a rather dirty bush shirt and trousers, no tie and no socks – caused raised eyebrows among some of his tidier colleagues. Michael Blundell found him rude. Once, at a meeting, Michael addressed the chairman as Gilbert. ‘My name is Colvile’ was the frosty reply.

  Politics held no appeal. ‘We used to have quite lively meetings at Naivasha,’ recalled a former DC, ‘but Gilbert never came. He was out in the bush with the Maasai.’ There was a streak in his nature of choosing to be ‘agin the Government’, even when co-operation was in his own interests. During the Mau Mau troubles, the DC I have quoted said: ‘His place was absolutely crawling with very subversive fellows. The moment we pinned something on them, he hired an expensive lawyer in Nairobi who got them acquitted – Kapila I think, a very clever Indian who ran rings round the local magistrate.’19 Colville avoided women, and took no part in Muthaiga’s revels. Austere in habit, he did not smoke and touched no alcohol. Maasai snuff, raw and strong, seemed to be his only indulgence.

  Then, at the age of fifty-five, came an extraordinary volte face. In 1941, Sir Delves Broughton was tried in Nairobi for the murder of Josslyn Hay, the twenty-second Earl of Erroll. The white community of Kenya was not prone to making moral judgements, but in this case the protagonists had gone too far. After Broughton was acquitted, both he and his much younger wife Diana, whose affair with Erroll had provoked the murder, were ostracised. Even at Muthaiga Club they found themselves unwelcome. After an interval Sir Delves Broughton, a broken man, returned to England, where later he committed suicide. Diana was left homeless, unhappy and with few friends. Colvile felt sorry for her and wrote to tell her so. She was a beautiful woman, elegantly dressed, fond of jewels, sophisticated, chic – a far cry from Maasai manyattas, lion hunts and cattle yards.

  In a gesture which seemed quite out of character, he bought for her a mansion on the shores of Lake Naivasha whose Moorish look, with white crenellated walls and a minaret, had earned it the title of the Djinn Palace. Oserian was its real name. It had been built by Major Cyril Ramsay-Hill for his wife Molly, who had subsequently married Joss Erroll. Despite her wealth, which Erroll quickly squandered, her life with the handsome but unscrupulous Earl was unhappy. She sought consolation in drink and drugs and died miserably, leaving Erroll what was left of her fortune. James Fox wrote in his book that there is a portrait of Molly, Countess of Erroll, in the hall at Oserian, reclining on a canapé, which must be an interesting sight.20

  To everyone’s amazement, Gilbert Colvile and Diana Broughton married. Her acquaintances were as surprised as his; they had not cast her in the role of the wife of a rancher, least of all a rancher like Colvile. He was said to be the richest man in Kenya – probably several Indians were considerably richer – and known to be a recluse. The marriage appeared to be a happy one and lasted for twelve years. Gilbert taught Diana to ride about the plains, sustained by Maasai snuff, and muster cattle, while Diana weaned Gilbert from some of his Maasai ways and, when she could, from some of his more parsimonious habits. When one of the managers was in conference with the boss, she would have his car driven round to the pump and its tank filled with petrol. There was tragedy: a son was born, and lived only for a few days.

  Diana was twenty-five years younger than Colvile and as sociable by nature as he was solitary. Soon after Tom Delamere, after a successful business career in London which enabled him to settle what remained of his father’s debts, came to Soysambu to live, he and Diana met and fell in love, and amicable divorces for both Diana and Tom Delamere’s wife were arranged. Colvile stayed on at Oserian, keeping a close eye on his cattle at Ndabibi and on his other estates. He remained on good terms with Diana and Tom, who sometimes came to stay at Oserian, and all three would be seen together at Nairobi races; but his life was, in the main, a lonely one. He had few friends. He and Diana had adopted a daughter, but she was away at school or else with her mother. His austere habits scarcely changed, and an excellent cook was sadly under-used. He reverted to one former custom: almost every evening his Dorobo headman, oddly named Swahili, would squat down on the living-room carpet and converse for an hour or so with his employer in Maasai. His constant companion was a pug called Peggy, a present from Diana. Peggy was buried beside him at Ndabibi after he had died in a Nairobi hospital, following a stroke, in August 1966, aged seventy-eight. His infant son lies there also, with Tom Delamere as well. He left Diana all his property, together with his mother’s jewels. ‘He was a hard man,’ wrote a manager who had served him for many years, ‘and did not suffer fools gladly, but believe me he was a clever man too.’21 A younger manager, who knew him only in his later years, added: ‘He was aloof and shy and enigmatic and peculiar but he was kind to me.’

  CHAPTER 8

  A Man of Big Ideas

  Away to the north-west of the great Valley, on the crest of the escarpment which forms its western wall, lived another rancher and farmer, one with bold, original and sometimes hare-brained ideas. Like Galbraith Cole, Powys Cobb had fought in the Boer War and subsequently travelled north to spy out the land, and had fallen for the rolling open downs interspersed with belts of cedar forest, the chilly dawns and windswept uplands of the country round Molo. This was too high for small-scale cultivation or for Maasai cattle, and so was untouched by the mark of man.

  He had picked out an area of 30,000 acres, named it Keringet after a river, and persuaded a friend to join him. John Hill-Williams with his wife and two small daughters went ahead in 1908, and Powys Cobb followed shortly afterwards at the head of a cavalcade consisting of his wife and two young children, a nanny and her husband, four bulls each of a different breed, six thoroughbred mares and a stallion, two bloodhounds – Prospero and Prosperine – two kittens and an assortment of ducks, geese, turkeys and hens, together with trunk-loads of clothes, furniture, saddlery, tools and general possessions. At Mombasa they paused while railway wagons were fitted with screens to protect the livestock from tsetse flies en route. From Molo station they proceeded by ox-wagon and on foot to the site of their new home where, Mrs Cobb had been led to believe, a substantial house awaited them. She had even brought soft furnishings from Heal’s with which to equip it. It was typical of her husband that the house existed only in his imagination.1

  While in some ways a practical man, Powys Cobb was also a dreamer, and the germ of this adventure lay in a dream. A lover of the sea, he had formed an ambition to buy an ocean-going vessel and equip it as a floating school for boys from poverty-stricken homes; then to sail to distant ports in search of adventure, and to inspire his pupils with a vision of the scope and grandeur of the world. While not a poor man, he was not nearly rich enough to finance so ambitious a project, and in the undeveloped highlands of East Africa he thought he saw the answer. There he would make a fortune, and return to England to devote it to the realisation of his dream.

  I did not know all this when I first met him, as I was not yet eight years old. This was in 1914, when I had been despatched on a visit to the Hill-Williams, whose daughters were round about my age. The partnership with Powys Cobb had not lasted long, and by then the Hill-Williams had their own chunk of Africa called Marindas lying up against the forest boundary at an altitude of over 9,000 feet. Mountain streams rushing down from the forest were icy cold, and on their banks grew wild delphiniums, purple bog violets and, at certain times of year, drifts of dwarf gladioli. Maidenhair ferns stooped over the water, and the white flowers of an especia
lly strong-scented jasmine starred the tangled undergrowth. Gertrude Hill-Williams had surrounded their cosy little thatched house made of rough-cut cedar planks from the forest with a garden full of English flowers – roses, extra-tall delphiniums, phlox, peonies, larkspur, tiger-lilies were there as well as daffodils and narcissi, and other bulbs of the English spring.

  I loved Marindas, and especially picnics in the forest, sometimes beside ‘rhino falls’, so-called because above it was a dead tree used by rhinos as a scratching-post. To reach the little waterfall we followed a narrow path that twisted about among rocks and passed a cave said to be the home of a leopard. Hilda and Tuppence, the Hill-Williams children, told me that they sometimes kicked aside bones that the animal had gnawed. We were escorted by a young Nandi carrying a spear and by the nanny, Emily Bull, who feared nothing and rode about, side-saddle, on a mule. They were a wonderful breed, those nannies, plucked from the orderly routine of well-off English households to find themselves surrounded by semi-naked tribesmen speaking strange tongues who dwelt among goats in (by nanny standards) horribly insanitary huts. The nannies were not much better off themselves in flimsy shacks with leaking roofs, lizards running up the walls and a possibility of snakes above the ceiling (when there was one) and scorpions crawling into boots. They had, as a rule, only their employers and their charges for company, and had to put up with male, black, alien nursery-maids. All this for very little pay, ten or twelve pounds a year. They took it in their stride, and some married farmers and became ladies of substance with nurseries of their own.