Authors: James Fox
His wife, Eileen, daughter of the Earl of Minto, kept a diary which illuminates, often with an ingenuous touch, the experience of the first days in the great landscape. She recorded, for example, a hunt near Nakuru: “Wonderful going, glorious grass and no holes. Ten couple of hounds, all very young but very fast, the Belvoir strain.” (Belvoir is the family estate of the Dukes of Rutland.) She described a visit to their neighbours, soon after their arrival, fording rivers and climbing over boulders with great difficulty, until they found their small tent, beside which their friends were eating lunch from a Fortnum and Mason chop box. After a shooting safari, she wrote home:
I shall never be able to describe or forget the beauty of our last morning in the camp. The sun rises about six. I woke soon afterwards and lay and watched the changing loveliness from my bed. It was perfectly still, very thick dew glistening on the grass and a golden haze in the distance, like a fine September morning at home, our fire still alight and every now and then a puff of delicious smoke was wafted into our tent. The birds singing everywhere. The colourings of the butterflies and birds are amazing—brilliant greens and blues and crimsons. The smell of the blossom on the thorn trees is divine and there is a perpetual smell of mimosa in the air.
Lord Francis had set up a polo club and acquired a string of Somali ponies while he was still surveying his land from a tent and while Lady Francis’s china—one set for the nursery and one for themselves—was piled in crates in the corner. They came amply supplied with household goods. In 1979 I was invited by their daughter, Pam, to the vast stone house they had built at Rongai in 1922. She gave me a linen towel marked with a coronet and the date “1916.” I remarked that Lady Francis’s linen had lasted extraordinarily well. “Most of it is still unpacked,” said Miss Scott.
Many of the new arrivals, looked down on harshly by the pre-war generation, had money to spare and no great interest in making a profit, earning themselves the disparaging description of “veranda farmers.” Among them was Jack Soames, an old Etonian who was thirty-two when he arrived in 1920. He bought many thousands of acres at Burgeret, near Nanyuki, at the foothills of the Aberdares, settled in for a wasted decade and quickly adopted the habit of offering visitors a pink gin whatever the time of day. His former Somali servant, now in his seventies but still preferring anonymity despite the passage of time, described in Swahili the life at Burgeret:
He had many servants and a great deal of money. There was for example, one servant whose only job it was to make whiskies and soda, one to look after the dogs, one to start the generator, one for hunting buck, and so on. They earned between thirty and forty shillings a month. The Bwana could never stay alone in this enormous house and would always go to look for his friends, often driving for many miles. Because of that I went with him all over the place. Usually there were many guests. Each house guest was allotted his own servant and servants that the guests brought with them were not allowed near the house. Every day the guests came slowly down to breakfast and started drinking at one o’clock. Then they played tennis at about four o’clock and started drinking again and in the evening they danced until the early hours of the morning. Most evenings the Bwana played the piano and the violin …
Into this “community of English squires established on the Equator,” as Evelyn Waugh described them, came other travellers from the glittering New Age. Largely through the hunting safaris that Denys Finch Hatton was among the first to organise, an expedition to Kenya became a romantic adventure for the rich. The added frisson of danger brought out the great adventuresses, too, like Vera, Lady Broughton, who was said to have eaten human flesh while investigating cannibal tribes in Borneo, and who had certainly shot many elephants.
A few socialite settlers—whose exclusive interest was the pursuit of pleasure, although there were a few veranda farmers among them—gathered in a prime area that was given the name of Happy Valley in the early 1920s. Anywhere between the Aberdares and the town of Gilgil on the plain might have qualified for Happy Valley. But its real centre was beside the Wanjohi River, which ran down from Kipipiri—the mountain that stood at its head—and which was joined to the Aberdare escarpment by a saddle-shaped cedar forest.
It was supremely beautiful landscape—the valley itself a wide grassy plain, the escarpment wooded and leafy with patches of rugged gorse. From the Wanjohi Valley you could look over the next mountain, the Kinangop, which was shaped like a long, narrow headland, into the Rift Valley beyond.
The great social events were the race weeks at Christmas and mid-summer, when the farmers came to Nairobi and turned the place upside down, staging rickshaw races, shooting out the street lights, brawling drunkenly in the bars—conspicuously led by Delamere himself, who would shoot at the bottles on the shelves—and pursuing whatever sexual liaisons had been simmering away in the previous months.
The settlers congregated in the few strongholds of luxury which existed in the late 1920s. The oldest established was the Norfolk Hotel, run by a formidable lady known as “Auntie.” (“She practically runs the country,” you would be told.) There was also Torr’s Hotel, nicknamed “Tart’s Hotel,” built by Grogan in 1928, where
thés dansants
were held each afternoon in the circular Palm Court lounge.
Most exclusive of all was the Muthaiga Country Club. A young French visitor, Count Frédéric de Janzé, described the Muthaiga Club in
Vertical Land,
a book of “pen portraits and travel sketches”:
*
Why do we all belong to Muthaiga Club?
Why do we go out five miles for a cocktail?
Why do we have to fight for a room during Race Week?
Why do we have to put up with our things being stolen and our laundries mixed?
Why do we drink champagne at 35 shillings a bottle?
Why are we told to go to bed at one, like naughty boys?
Why do we stand boring food and draughty halls?
Why do we live in rooms without mosquito netting?
Why do we put up with our “boys” being ruined?
Why do we stand the Committee’s smile?
Why does our money keep Muthaiga going?
That twice a year, swamping the “regular member” in our numbers, all together, once more delighted, hearts beating, throats drinking; from Moyale, from London, from Rhadjputna, from Queenstown, from New York and Tyrone. We can bang the bar, break the glasses and on the morrow in numberless “prairie oysters” repent—
The Muthaiga, with its golf course, squash courts, croquet lawns and ballroom, was an exclusively up-country farmers’ club run along St. James’s Street lines. Though women were allowed in of necessity, Jews were not: once the Club’s piano was set alight with paraffin in protest against the suggestion, quickly withdrawn, that they might henceforth be admitted. The officials and tradesmen of Nairobi kept to themselves, as a separate class, in the Nairobi Club—and it was a strictly observed division, giving rise to much sneering and disapproval from the officials at the effete goings on in the other place.
The Club was built in true Kenya style, by Indian artisans, from large blocks of stone, covered with pinkish pebbledash with the usual steel windows and with small Doric columns to give it a glimmer of grandeur. The walls were cream and green like a well-upholstered nursing home, the floors were polished parquet. With its deep armchairs and loose chintz covers it gave out the atmosphere of Thames Valley gentility and Betjemania—of Ranelagh or Hurlingham.
Bachelors slept in the spartan “military wing” with cell-like bedrooms. The double rooms, with twin beds, were large and austere, in the colonial manner, the bathrooms luxurious.
All payments were transacted on chits of various colours—cash never changed hands. You could get a drink at any time of the day, but between six and eight in the evening the bar was reserved for men only, or “toughs,” as Waugh described the members he encountered there. The Club was empty for days, then suddenly it would be impossible to get a table, unless you were in the favour of a powerful Somali called Ali—who ran the dining room and who was considered “a genius” at table-shuffling. Every year Lord Delamere gave a dinner for the Governors of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, otherwise the evenings were mainly given over to bridge, backgammon and the many private parties, including the annual Eton Ball.
During race weeks the Club really came alive. The drinking started soon after midday with pink gins before lunch, followed by gin fizzes in the shade at teatime, cocktails (Bronxes, White Ladies, Trinities) for sundowners, whisky and champagne until the lights went out.
At the nightly balls, the guests might have been dressing for royalty, and women were required to wear a different dress each night. Later on, as impromptu Rugby games took over, the ballroom furniture would be wrecked in displays of unashamed public schooliganism. A popular attraction was a gentleman called Tich Miles, who would climb into the roof and hang from the beams like an ape. Another was Derek Fisher, a Happy Valley resident, who would order the servants to arrange the chairs in lines to resemble a train. He would push the chairs through the sitting rooms, hooting and puffing to the howling encouragement of his friends. That would turn into musical chairs and the chairs in turn would be hauled through the windows.
The dances usually ended around 6 a.m., four or five nights in a row at the height of the season. Squash and golf would take over immediately. No one liked going to
bed. By lunchtime the following day, all had been patiently swept up, the fines presented for payment on the club chits, and serious offenders called in to the Secretary’s office.
In all the descriptions of those heady nights, it is remarkable how little time was taken up with sleep as opposed to the sexual escapades for which the Club was famous. The altitude should have been tiring. Instead it seems to have worked as a stimulant, and as an irritant too. Wars and brawls broke out incessantly during race weeks, and terrible grievances took root in that libidinous, drunken atmosphere.
Edward, Prince of Wales, visited Kenya in 1928, and was immediately at home in the atmosphere of Muthaiga. Sir Derek Erskine, who was later Kenyatta’s lone supporter among the Europeans before independence, remembered one of the nights when he was present:
Edward P. as we called him in those days, was a very likable person but already he showed signs of dissolute behaviour, though I must say he always kept himself extraordinarily fit. He insisted after a very vigorous day on dancing all night. Now we hadn’t got a resident band at the Muthaiga Club. Syd Zeigler would come up with his band on Saturday nights. On other days we had to put on gramophone records, and one night Edward P. was dancing with my wife and he suddenly lost his temper with the records which he said were the wrong kind, and I very much regret to say that aided and assisted by my wife, they picked up all the gramophone records and threw them through all the windows of the old ballroom, which is probably the reason, some people say, why it fell down twenty years later. Well, I had to pay the bill for all those records, and I remember it well. Edward P. would then go to bed, at say four o’clock in the morning, and at half past six he would be down on the racecourse. I remember, quite clearly, Sonny Bompas who lived down on the racecourse and was training horses there, said to me, “Do you mind cantering slowly round the course, because Edward P. wants to run round holding on to your stirrup leather?”
So the madness went on. This was 1928, one year before the great crash, which drastically thinned out the settler population. It was also the year in which Josslyn Hay’s father died, and Josslyn became the Earl of Erroll and High Constable of Scotland. He had already been living in Kenya for four years, in the heart of Happy Valley.
*
Duckworth. 1928.
2
HAPPY VALLEY
Fu I loved the high cloud and the hill,
Alas, he died of alcohol.
E
ZRA
P
OUND
1923: In the middle of June, close to midsummer, I met Josslyn Hay. It was inevitable that he should be conscious of such wonderful good looks as he possessed, and with these he had an arrogant manner and great sartorial elegance. His straight pale gold hair was brushed up into wings on either side of his head. He was the kind of young man that my father most disapproved of, and his manner seemed to become even more cocky when he was in my father’s presence. He never called him “Sir,” as most of my young men did, and he always beat him at tennis. Josslyn had a scornful way of looking at people—an oblique, blue glance from under half-closed lids—and this impudent look was even turned on my father.
There was a terrible row when my father discovered that I sat out with him on the back stairs at dances. The morning after this scene Josslyn sent me an enormous bunch of red roses. I kept them hidden away in my bedroom basin until they died—the first present of flowers I had ever received.
My father’s disapproval of Josslyn only added to his fascination, and I was beginning to imagine myself in love with him when he suddenly eloped with a married woman to Kenya.
*
That year Josslyn Hay was twenty-two. At seventeen he had been sacked from Eton, or rather he had been “asked to leave.” He would tell a funny story, by way of explanation, something to do with being sold a motorcycle by a Jewish boy, that always went down well, with his gift for mimicry.
He was certainly the most attractive boy in the school and when, many years later, a British peer was asked on a quiz show who,
had
he been homosexual, he would most like to have had an affair with, he mystified his audience by replying, “Josslyn Hay.”
An Eton contemporary, Sacheverell Sitwell, confirmed this memory of Hay as an object of schoolboy adoration. He wrote to Connolly, “I suppose the time I am thinking of is the summer half of 1916. I saw him, more than once, followed down Keate’s Lane by a whole mob of boys. And heard a lot of talk about him.