SITREP LIII
June 2019 DIARY OF EVENTS: 2019
AUSTRALIA
Gold Coast: Sunday Curry Lunch, Krish Indian Restaurant, Robina TBA Brisbane: Sunday Curry Lunch, Punjab Curry Club, Forest Lake TBA Sunshine Coast: Sunday Curry Lunch, Caloundra Boat Club TBA Contact: Alastair Napier Bax. Tel: 07-3372 7278
Perth: Bayswater Hotel – KRA and EA Schools curry lunch TBA Contacts: KRA – Aylwin Halligan-Jolly
ENGLAND The KenReg Rafikis 2019 Curry Lunch at The Victory Services Club, 17 July 63-79 Seymour St, London, W2 2HF. Contact: John Harman
KENYA Nairobi Clubhouse: Remembrance Sunday and Curry Lunch 10 Nov Contact: Dennis Leete
NEW ZEALAND Auckland: Soljans Winery & Restaurant, Kumeu, Auckland TBA Contact: Mike Innes-Walker
SOUTH AFRICA Cape Town: Somerbosch Wine & Bistro - Stellenbosch July Contact: Geoff Trollope. Tel: 021-855 2734
Johannesburg: Sunday Curry lunch, German Club, Paulshof (Joburg) Oct Contact: Keith Elliot. Tel: 011-802 6054
KwaZulu-Natal: Sunday Carveries: Fern Hill Hotel, nr Midmar Dam 16 Jun, 15 Sep, 17 Nov Contact: Jenny/Bruce Rooken-Smith. Tel: 033-330 4012
*****
Kenya Regiment Website
SITREP Editor: Bruce Rooken-Smith, Box 48 Merrivale, 3291, RSA. [Ed: My thanks to Anthony Allen for proof reading, albeit against the clock – any errors are mine!]
Front cover: Crossing Victoria Falls bridge from Southern Rhodesia into Northern Rhodesia
Back cover: Katherine Gorge, Northern Territory, Australia
The views expressed in SITREP LIII are solely those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor, nor those of the Association – E&OE
I was born in Africa and its seasons shaped my soul, I knew my place beneath the sun, the warm earth made me whole, Those arching skies and brilliant stars fixed my position there, That brooding space my boundary, the far horizons clear. I belonged to Africa and knew no other home, I had no wish to leave her and no desire to roam. The heat, the storms, the droughts were all familiar scenes to me, The hills, the plains, the valleys and the green acacia tree. It’s tempting to resist my fate, to look back and complain At the stealing of my birth right and who or what to blame, For the loss of those I loved and knew, and the places I have known. My memories will always take me back to friends that now have flown Regrets and blame are for the past and I must walk the track That takes me on this journey, where there is no turning back, I must embrace the changes that old England holds for me And see the old with eyes anew where I was meant to be. There is a beauty here in England and it’s steeped in history, It’s the land of both my parents and my ancient ancestry. So I must look beyond the dross and open up new doors, And blend my life that’s yet to come with what has gone before. I do not have to be there to hear the Masai song, It lives forever in my mind where memories belong. When I sail through the sunset, the truth will set me free Take me out of Africa—but leave Africa in me. RL 18
Printed by Pmb Drawing, Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
THE KENYA REGIMENT & CONSERVATION
[Ian Parker KR4602]
[Ed: Having included a very brief article about Daphne Sheldrick’s life in SITREP LII, I approached Ian for an equally brief synopsis of East Africa’s, Kenya’s in particular, Wildlife Conservation, and the Kenya Regiment connections.]
Military links between game keeping and hunting are ancient. The tactics of locating and outwitting human enemies have many similarities to hunting. Bushcraft. stalking, tracking, concealment, using and understanding camouflage, navigating across country, capacity to rough it, live off the land and endure discomfort and senses of independence, are attributes armies value. And so it was across East Africa’s colonial years. Frederick Courtney Selous, DSO, was not only an ardent conservationist, a great naturalist and hunter, but also an aggressive and competent soldier.
Six out of the eleven substantive or acting Chief Game Wardens of Kenya prior to the country’s independence were military men (tho’ not from the KR). Of all 75 Game Wardens listed as serving in Kenya’s Game Department in Parker & Bleazard’s ‘Impossible Dream’, 41 (55%) had military experience. The same pattern appeared in Uganda’s and Tanganyika’s Game Departments and National Parks.
Being a territorial unit that drew its members from all walks of life, from its inception in 1936, there were few aspects of colonial Kenya that Kenya Regiment (KR) men did not contribute to. It recruited from the farming communities, the railways, every field of commerce, the civil service, commercial aviation and many more besides. Yet perhaps no field was quite so influenced by KR men as conservation.
In 1950, the tiny Game Department and National Parks combined, had fewer than 30 wardens. Of these, their KR men, listed alphabetically, are George Adamson [KR1719], Jack Bonham [KR577], Don Bousfield [KR848], Mervyn Cowie [KR399], Gordon Harvey [KR374], Tony Henley [KR3696], Marc Lawrence [KR666], Charles Marshall [KR302], Frank Poppleton [KR1813] in Uganda, Evelyn Temple-Boreham [KR199], David Sheldrick [KR415] and Myles Turner [KR884] all saw service in the Second World War and left their marks in conservation.
Re-establishing the Regiment in 1950 and the Mau Mau rebellion in 1952 produced the next wave of KR names on the conservation record. Alphabetically some are David Allen [KR3974], Athol Allison [KR6917], Jack Barrah [KR3627], Stan Bleazard [KR4242], John Brown [KR3902], Rodney Elliott [KR5758], Alexander Forbes-Watson [KR4547], Charles Harris [4665], Peter Jenkins [KR4311], Denis Kearney [KR4087], Marc Lawrence [KR666], Tom Martindale [KR3934], Dave McCabe [KR4280], Julian McKeand [KR4302], Monty Moore [KR4891], Ian Parker [KR4602], Gilfrid Powys [KR6263], Peter Saw [KR6144], Tony Seth-Smith [KR4980], Bill Woodley [KR3997].
These lists relate to the National Parks and Game Department only. If one includes professional hunters, they would be far longer, as the East African Professional Hunters Association (EAPHA) played an important role in pressing for national parks (their archive is now housed in the libraries of the University of Florida) and many were honorary game wardens. Until after independence the Trustees of the Royal National Parks of Kenya always had an EAPHA representative on their Board. Such lists would be further enhanced if the KR men who had been appointed Honorary Game Wardens were to be taken into account. Unfortunately no such record now exists.
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It was no accident that conservation policy across the colonial period was not in the hands of biologists, but better enforced by people with military and police experience. Their primary role was not so much managing animals and plants, as controlling people, preventing trespass and poaching. After independence, these qualifications gave way to scientific degrees which, whatever fine science was produced, was a catastrophe for enforcement. Quoting Myles Turner [KR884] of the Serengeti:-
“Out of the many hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on research in East Africa during the fashionable decade of the 1960’s, little if anything has been achieved to my knowledge. Far better, if the money had been spent on anti-poaching and education. One thing is sure, it was a great confidence trick, and virtually nothing has ever come out of it to help the hard-pressed animals of East Africa.”
Small wonder the boffins squealed in anguish, and Myles was a tad over the top, but what he said has a strong core of truth. As Bill Woodley opined dryly:-“The only parks without problems are those without scientists”! Again Bill exaggerated, but he was the continent’s most out-standing anti- poaching warden with cynicism well founded.
The greatest KR contribution to Kenya’s conservation took place in and around the Tsavo National Park. Proclaimed in 1948, it immediately proved too large for one Warden and two junior Assistant Wardens to manage. In 1949 it was divided in two: all east of the Nairobi/Mombasa railway becoming Tsavo (East), all west of the line becoming Tsavo (West).
David Sheldrick, who in WW2 had been the youngest Major in the KAR (seconded from the KR), and had tried professional hunting, became Warden of Tsavo (East). His junior Assistant Warden was Billy Woodley. They were joined for a short period in the early 1950s by John Lawrence who had also seen active service with the KAR in the East African campaigns and in Burma.
Sheldrick, a military martinet, tried to make the system of field patrolling from fixed bases, patterned on Kruger in South Africa, work. The bases were too few and the manpower, limited to what in army parlance would be a section or less per base, too little to be effective. The patrolled zones were limited to areas within reach of each base, they could be kept under observation by poachers who often outnumbered by them.
David did not take long to close the fixed bases, base his men at Park Headquarters, and deploy them in bigger units to different parts of the park without warning. It produced encouraging results immediately. However, this development was interrupted by the Mau Mau rebellion which saw his anti-poaching lieutenant, Billy Woodley called up for military service in the Kenya Regiment.
Captain Woodley M.C. rose from private in 1952 to Captain in 1954, but was not released until 1955, when he returned to Tsavo East with his new bride, Daphne (née Jenkins). She was sister to Assistant Warden Peter Jenkins who had joined Parks in 1948 along with Bill. When Tsavo was split he had been posted to Tsavo West. Like Bill, he had been called up and, by the time he was released he, too, had been commissioned. Bill Woodley’s service against Mau Mau and command of men matured him immensely and, among his many experiences, he had learned the military value of intelligence. This was central to what was about to happen.
Returning to the Tsavo free to tackle poaching head-on, he convinced David that the centrally concentrated manpower and patrolling system already functioning would be immeasurably enhanced if supported by an intelligence network. Who poached, when and where, would best be learned, not in the field, but in the communities where the poachers and their families lived. Spies (we called them informers) were disbursed among the Kamba and Wata, west and east of the park.
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In societies where poaching was not considered a crime but to the contrary, admirable, information was relatively easy to come by. However, to act upon it, the law enforcers had to be able to operate outside the confines of the national parks and go among the people living around it.
While Woodley master-minded the intelligence gathering, David used his formidable organisational skills recording the evidence, and his political acumen to raise support for an anti-poaching operation that took in, not just the Tsavo Parks, but the whole of Kenya’s Coast Province. The Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, was an enthusiastic conservationist and through his support, the Game Department was commanded to field two platoon-sized field forces which in addition to the Parks unit comprised the equivalent of a military Company. The Police Air Wing was ordered to provide an aircraft for anti-poaching duties, and a trained police prosecutor to take cases to court.
All these units were under David Sheldrick’s command. Game wardens D. Brown, Dave McCabe, Ian Parker, H. Massey and Denis Kearney were seconded to Sheldrick’s unit who had Woodley as his 2i/c.
The modus operandi was that when a comprehensive picture had been built up of a village’s hunting activities, it would be approached and surrounded at dead of night by a platoon (or more). The inmates of each hut were methodically ordered to open up in the name of the Government. All men were taken and held under guard, until all males in their late teens or older had been rounded up. Interrogations began immediately, several teams working simultaneously out of one another’s hearing. Identities were established, and their intelligence record consulted. As hunting formed an important part of the communities’ economies – both for food and money - it was not difficult to confront individuals with information on their activities, using the age-old inquisitors’ gambit of implying that much more was known about them than was in fact the case. The rather nasty trick of inferring that the prisoner’s friends had provided this information, often led to him telling on them to get his own back.
The results were impressive. In eighteen months several hundred men were jailed for poaching. It was superior to field patrolling as a means of getting poachers to court. Surprisingly, it has not been copied elsewhere, and military patrolling has remained the chosen but less efficient anti-poaching technique used the length and breadth of Africa. There was nothing new in the principle employed: criminals are off-guard when at home among their families. Police forces around the globe use this weakness by relying on informers, spies, sneaks – call them what you will – to build up intelligence networks.
The Kenya Regiment had taken this well-used system to good effect against Mau Mau and Woodley applied it to the anti-poaching campaign. This is not to infer that there is no role for field patrolling. It certainly has a role, but like cops patrolling the streets, it is secondary to good old, time-consuming and boring sleuthing.
This operation in 1956/1957, was so successful that for the next sixteen years there was virtually no poaching in the Tsavo Parks – East or West. It stands out, both for this achievement and the fact that it has not been emulated. Yet it had a dark side. Those who were arrested for poaching – hunting in their cultures – were by our standards, decent people. We even envied their freedom and what by our own Wardenly standards, was a marvellous way of life. We did not see them as criminals in the sense that crime is normally held in western eyes.
We were also aware that while the tactics and strategies employed were successful, they were too similar to those employed by the Gestapo and NKVD for comfort. Terrifying women and children in the middle of the night was very uncivilised. Parallel to this, until the evidence accumulated, we had no idea of the great role that hunting played in local lives. This realisation was central to
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creating the ‘Waliangulu Scheme’ that later became called the Galana Game Management Scheme. It was an endeavour to marry a hunting culture to the needs of modern Kenya – as we saw them.
This was the environment in which Daphne Woodley was thrown in 1955. Although she came as a house wife with no position, she served as David Sheldrick’s secretary, sitting at the centre of the anti-poaching operation. Later, switching partners and becoming David’s wife, brought her even closer to the machinations of all that went on in the ‘conservation’ realm. When David died in 1976, it was the spring board from which she entered the field on her own account, albeit very much with the Animal Rights philosophy, and for which she was internationally acclaimed. Yet, returning to the starting point of this article, one could argue that had she not married a Kenya Regiment man, Bill Woodley, her career might have gone in an altogether different direction. Such is life! Ian Parker
2018
*****
OBITUARIES
Since SITREP LII was distributed (June 2018), we have been advised of the deaths of the following members. In ( ) the name of the member/source whence the information came:
Bamford, Laurence Frederick [KR4670]. 03/04/2019. England (John Harman KR7227) Barbour, George [KR6692]. 03/10/2018. Kenya (Iain Morrison KR6111) Becker, Martin Paul (Muff) [KR6074]. 09/05/2019. Hillcrest, KZ-N (wife Gill (née Harris)) Blowers, Bernard [KR4609] 29/10/2018. Pretoria (wife Merle) Blunt, John Nicholas de Guisnes [KR6661]. 10/09/2018. Cumbria. (John Tucker – DoY CCF) Browse. Richard [s418]. 13/03/2019. Kloof Golf Course, KwaZulu-Natal (Ian Morrison) Burns, Ralph [KR4694]. 17.02.2019. Surrey (Jim Cruickshank KPR) Hemphill, Patrick Dawson [KR3876]. 31/08/2018. Pemba, Kenya. (Iain Morrison) Jacob, Michael Bruce [KR3514]. 30/04/2019. Wales (Iain Morrison) Jacob, Val (née Arnold) w/o late Barry [KR3581]. 31/10/2018. KZ-N, RSA (Terry Tory KR6339) Kearney, Henry William Dennis MBE [KR4087]. 25/09/2018. Howick, RSA (Shirley Holyoak) Leonard, Allan Victor (Jim) [KR6998]. 07/08/2018. Harare (Bob Rose KR6166) Lock, Ron [KP Mounted Unit] 23/05/2018. Port Edward, KwaZulu-Natal. (The Witness) McCabe, Brunie (née Hartmann) w/o late Dave GM [KR4280]. 11/05/2018. Harare. (son Nick) Norris, Mike [DoY CCF]. 16/01/2019 Montagu, W Cape, RSA (wife Maryanne) Owen, Peter John Aird [KR6858]. 31/07/2018. Kenya (Iain Morrison) Pegrume, Derek [Kenya photographer]. ??/05/2018. Devon (JoanWedekind) Pembridge, Richard Chandos Geoffrey [KR6381]. 28/12/2018. Rotorua, NZ (brother John KR7429) Plenderleith, Robin Lennox (Dingo) [KR4551/5806]. 23/03/2019. Spain (brother Gary KR4642) Stanley, David Charles [KR4810]. 12/07/2018. Nairobi (John Harman)
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
[Laurence Binyon] *****
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HENRY CONWAY PLOUGH [KR4911/5833]
[01/11/1932--31/03/2018]
[daughter Abigail Smit]
After attending Prince of Wales School in Nairobi, Conway was half-way through a chartered accountant’s course in Scotland when his father passed away. He immediately returned to Kenya and eventually only qualified as a Chartered Secretary, working for Coopers & Lybrand for as long as I can remember.
Dad played both rugby and hockey at the Mombasa Sports Club, and spent a great deal of his spare time scraping barnacles off hulls and propellors of sea-going vessels which frequented Kilindini Harbour.
In 1966, whilst diving in front of Fort Jesus in Mombasa, Dad discovered the ‘Santo Antonio Da Tanna’. He used to regularly retrieve artifacts from the sea bed, a few of which he donated to the Fort Jesus Museum, where, to my knowledge, they are still on display.
In 1968, he located and named a reef, Carlsberg Reef, having found 600 cases of Carlsberg Beer. He actually opened one of the bottles to taste it when they resurfaced.
Over the years, Dad taught many people to dive, and with a couple of other was the first to use aqualungs in Kenya.
Together with life-long friend, Guido, Dad laid a pipeline in the Seychelles, which they used to undertake many diving tasks.
Dad dived on the ‘Kota Menang’, a ship which ran around on the reef opposite Nyali Beach. Another dive was on the SS Globestar which ran aground near the entrance of the harbour. I remember one year, Dad had a few of us in the rubber dingy, and as the ‘Kota Menang’ had split in half, he steered through the middle of it; a bit terrifying but he knew what he was doing, for he had a great knowledge, and respect for the sea.
One year, on his birthday, he located a reef, thereafter referred to as Birthday Reef and where we laid a stainless steel cross in 1984 in memory of his brother. This is where I want to try and scatter his ashes but have no idea what the co-ordinates are. I know the direction in which it was so it will have to be when I feel I have the right spot that we will stop. The day we laid the cross, we had thousands of fish, sharks, manta rays and anything else you could think of. It was a beautiful day.
In 1981, Dad climbed Mount Kenya and dived in Lake Two Tarn, about 14,720 feet above sea level. I remember he brought me a rock from the bottom of the lake; I took it to school to do a ‘show and tell’ and someone, having no idea how significant that rock was, stole it from of my bag
Married in 1964 to Mum, Valerie Sheffield and divorced in 1992, Dad always remained in Mombasa whereas Mum moved to Nairobi for a short while and then emigrated to Australia and remarried. They had two kids, Angus born in 1964 and me (Abigail) born in 1968. Angus died on 29 March 1984.
We used to go camping to Lake Chala every year around October and of course this involved diving as well. Everywhere we went, Dad would always have to go for a dive. Even on Christmas morning, no celebrating until Dad had been for his annual Christmas morning dive.
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Dad was always helping out by being the rescue boat for the Mombasa Yacht Club (MYC) when the boats went sailing. This was after he had his Sunday morning dive. He used to sail with Dixie Dean on Estrella. They would go on trips up or down the coast for days. He loved the sea. He spent a lot of time at the MYC, where we practically grew up there.
He used to jump off the cliff at Katherine Bibby (now known as Mombasa Hospital) at high tide. They would have to watch the waves to make sure they timed their jumps as the wave came in and were taken out to sea as the wave went out. I only ever made this dive once! You would then move along and surface in front of the Chini Club (Mombasa Club).
There was one other cliff – Alder’s Jump, nicknamed after a friend. This was at the sea front but the cliff was approximately a 30-50 foot drop! A risky dive and not undertaken very often!
Dad was a member of the Kenya and British Sub-Aqua Clubs, and Scottish Diver. He used to take part in the Hash House Harriers and help them with trails when they came to Mombasa from Nairobi.
In 1990, Dad and a friend (can’t remember his name) were attacked by a bull shark when they were checking the moorings at the MYC. Dad was bitten on his thigh whereas his friend lost his foot. It was a pretty scary time as sharks obviously followed ships into the harbour.
On a final note, Dad loved his diving, curries and Tusker. He used to pretty much have his curry for breakfast, lunch and dinner, topped with a spoonful of cod liver oil sprinkled over his curry! Yum!
There is so much more to Dad’s life about which I know little, including his time in the Kenya Regiment, though I know he played in a rugby team for them. I have a few photos which I can send you; they are quite old.
Unfortunately, Dad passed away in Nairobi and not on his beloved Mombasa coast. He would never, ever leave Kenya. It was well and truly in his blood. He passed away from a kidney disease which led to other organs failing; too much for his body to fight. An an amazing man, with many stories to tell.....Kind hearted and always ready to lend a hand should it be needed.
**
CONWAY PLOUGH - A PERSONAL REMINISCENCE
[Kevin Patience]
I first met Conway in February 1972 at the Bahari Fishing Club, a small makuti building, set on the edge of Tudor Creek, Mombasa, not far upstream from the old floating Nyali Bridge.. It was from here my father went deep sea fishing, and was a favourite watering hole for many of the Mombasa residents. I was on leave from the Royal Air Force and keen to put in a few dives in my month at the coast. Dad knew of Conway and introduced us.
Here was the person I had read about, who a few years earlier, with his diving buddy Peter Phillips, had found below the battlements of Fort Jesus, the remains of the ‘Santo Antonio Da Tanna’. The wreck was the Portuguese galleon sunk in 1697 and its wooden frames had been spotted and investigated by the pair, leading to the recovery of some interesting finds, including a bronze cannon.
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Conway and I, together with another diver Alan Alder, first dived on the remains of what was believed to be a large steel tugboat in the entrance to the old harbour. Afterwards we retired to the bar and after a lengthy discussion on what we had seen, I concluded this was a sailing ship. With the help of Edward Rodwell, editor of Coast Causerie and well known coast historian, and others, we identified the wreck as the ‘Sussex’, a three-masted sailing ship that ran aground in 1909.
A week later, Conway suggested a dive on Birthday Reef, so named after he discovered it on his birthday. This was one of those memorable dives with great visibility and wonderful fish life, and ensnared in the coral reef was an enormous old anchor. We dived a few more times before I returned to the UK. The following year I returned and Conway and I, and others, dived around Mombasa and I found the builders plate from the ‘Sussex’, now hanging on the wall of the Mombasa Club; Conway had been busy!
One of my fond memories of our dives together was in 1974, having returned to Kenya to work. Conway called to say an expedition was in hand to dive in Lake Chala [BELOW] in the Tsavo National Park, on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. It was going to be a long weekend and a number of cars and divers including Conway’s wife Val set off on the 160 mile trip. Lake Chala is a very deep volcano lake; on arrival we were faced with a terrifying climb down to the water’s edge with all our equipment. It was rumoured to be full of crocodiles but none were seen. We sank down the steep sides of the rocky cliff and the water became blacker. As we passed 100 feet the torches came on and we looked down into a black abyss below; it was at this the point we decided it was time to surface. The hot sun dried us out and we faced the arduous climb to the crater’s edge. It had been an interesting experience, but one none of us was keen to repeat.
We continued to dive together until 1977, when I left Kenya to work in the Arabian Gulf. In 1982, I was back in Mombasa, and we dived together for some two years before I returned once more to the Gulf.
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Looking back at my dives on the Kenya coast, I realise that Conway had been a wonderful partner and when it was time to surface he used to put his hands together forming a T, we all knew he meant it was ‘Tusker’ Time. Farewell Rafiki ya Kuzama…
[LEFT] Kevin Patience, Conway’s son Angus, Conway, Chris Seex and John Grossert - diving in the old harbour on the wreck of the Sussex..c 1972...
***** TIME, GENTLEMEN
An elegy on the British pub - Public Houses - by our obituaries editor - Dec 16th 2010
[Ed: Ted Downer [KR4253], who forwarded this article some years back, comments: “We all have VERY happy memories of evenings in our favourite pubs - Impala Club, Kenya Regiment Mess, London student days, etc - enjoy!” As most members of the KRA live in the UK, I’m sure some of the pubs are/were familiar?] THE Hand & Racquet [LEFT] sat in Whitcomb Street, just behind the National Gallery in London. A good position, you might think, with tourists passing; a good name, too, recalling a now- vanished tennis court from Charles II’s day. It was painted a fashionable dark navy some years ago, and acquired hanging baskets of petunias. Those have gone now, as have the windows, eclipsed by plates of steel. The painted sign is fading. The brass windowsills, which once promised “Superior Salads” and “Homely Fare”, are turning a patinated green. Nothing fresh, animal, vegetable or mineral, has featured here in half a decade.
The fate of the Hand & Racquet can be multiplied across Britain. Since 2005 more than 6,000 pubs have closed [Ed: Now slowed down to ±two-a-day?]. Drive through the cities, and the once-proud Victorian keystones on every corner are likely to be shuttered and dead. Roam the suburbs, and the 8
neat brick housing estates are haunted by mock-Tudor ghosts. Search the countryside, and increasingly only the strange, too-large front windows in a cottage, or an ornate iron sign-holder projecting from a wall, will tell you that a pub once stood here. More than half the villages in Britain now have no pub at all.
The Hand & Racquet, like the others, died by a dozen cuts. The 2007 smoking ban drove regulars onto chilly backless benches in hastily improvised beer gardens, or into the street, or simply home - 1,409 pubs closed in 2007; 1,973, post-ban, in 2008). Around 24,000 pubs, roughly 40% of the total, are tied to giant “pubcos”, hooked to one particular brewer, and must buy their beer from them at premium prices. Pubs, selling pints for £3.50 (A$4.50) [Ed: A pint in SA can cost as little as R16; less than £1!] must compete with six-packs of beer in the supermarket, or cheap plonk at £3.50 a bottle; they must also pay a swingeing government duty on beer, now ten times as high as Germany’s.
And Britons are not drinking as they used to. Communal imbibing with neighbours and passers-by is fading, in favour of the glass of wine by the television, alone. And they are drinking less. In 2009, according to the British Beer and Pub Association, alcohol consumption fell by 6%, the fourth drop in five years, and the steepest year-on-year decline since 1948. Britons now drink less than the EU average, taking refuge in caffeine instead. Recession crimps beer-money, too. So, slowly, pubs go bust, realising more value as awkward private houses, with hanging globe lamps and capacious cellars and a hard-to-shift aroma of smoke, sweat and ale. Or, like the Hand & Racquet, they quietly moulder where they stand.
The Hand & Racquet’s managers may have contemplated many measures to save it. They could have knocked out the Victorian etched windows in favour of clear plate glass, letting the light stream through to the cavernous interior, or opened up the frontage, café-style, with buzzing outside tables in fresh air. They could have gone for the stripped-out-bar franchise, all pale wood and box trees in stone tubs. Rather than mere “superior salads” they could have embraced foodism, become a gastropub, let their menus swell to the size of a telephone book or served, like the Bull & Last in London’s Kentish Town, gourmet renderings of pub food in a room full of fashionably tatty furniture.
Or they could have gone overboard on the drinks side, hired a sommelier to handle their wine list and tossed out the gassy keg bitter in favour of real ales from the more than 2,500 now being brewed in Britain; beers with added raspberries, liquorice, or oysters; with “honeyed notes” and “a complex floral bouquet”, like fine wines; beers called “Swinging Gibbet”, “Scoundrel” or “Old Slug” from breweries called “Hopshackle” or “Leatherbritches”.
The more roguish the name, the more cachet; the smaller and closer the brewery, the stronger the draw for jaded 21st-century palates. Such pubs can survive, like the Southampton Arms in north London, once Any Old Victorian pub with red carpets and a karaoke machine, now a big-windowed “ale and cider house” featuring wooden floors and a weekly ukulele night. Change or die, seems to be the message.
History in a name. The old names won’t go. They cling to pubs, as tenacious as the past itself. The church can go, long since the preserve of a flower-arranging few; the local shop can go, since the distant hypermarket’s cheapness is worth the petrol; but the vanishing of a pub means, by common consent, the loss of the beating heart of a community, in town or countryside. A pub can become a sort of encapsulation of place, containing some small turning’s grainy photographs, its dog-eared posters for last year’s fete, its snoozing cats, its prettiest girls behind the bar and its strangest characters in front of it.
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The Square & Compass [RIGHT], at Worth Matravers in Dorset, on the Jurassic Coast has accumulated so many fossils brought in by punters that it has its own little museum. Most longstanding pubs have a fossil equivalent, and not merely on the human side; cases of moths, dusty farm implements or, at the Widow’s Son in Bromley-by-Bow [BELOW], a hanging bundle of blackened hot-cross buns to which, every Good Friday for 150 years, another has been added.
History before the 20th century is scarcely taught in Britain now, but pubs are meant to preserve it. They hold ghosts, myths, the memory of kings; Green Men live on in them, White Horses carry Saxon echoes, Royal Oaks keep the drama of civil war and restoration. The world before the hunting ban still thrives in the Hare and Hounds and the Tally-Ho; old trades survive in the Compasses, the Woolpack and the Wheatsheaf. The craze for renaming tied pubs en masse the Slug and Lettuce or the Leek and Winkle has now abated, because the old names won’t go. They cling on in the soil and the air, as tenacious as the past itself.
Pub games cling on there, too, and are having a revival of sorts. In 2006, darts boards were still in use at more than half the pubs in Britain. A “Save Our Skittles” campaign, launched in 2008, seeks to preserve the 2,500 alleys offering an ancient, wooden version of ten-pin bowling. Marbles, quoits, bat ‘n’ trap and shove ha’penny survive in pubs, and only there. That sense of gathering, competing and disputing, of disorder lightly contained in obscure sets of habits and rules, belongs in pubs, and drains away from a community once they have gone.
Their loss is also the disappearance of a kitchen, or a sitting room, or some comfortable dim place where there is warmth and a welcome, and no questions asked, all over Britain. The naffer brand of pubs have for years made Tudorbethan kitchens their model, all horse-brasses and spindle-back chairs; the more fashionable or very much older favour flagstones, open fires, dried flowers and pewter. It is all a variant on the origins of pubs in the kitchens of wayside farmhouses, where a man exchanged his own hearth for another.
He was not, however, alone there. In the pub he met his fellow men and, with them, formed a society of musers and drinkers. He mingled with people he might not otherwise meet, had words with them, was obliged to take stock of their opinions. In a highly stratified society of worker, merchant and lord, the pub was open to everyone.
Only the Victorians tried to complicate matters with separate parlours and saloons based on class. Their walls and screens survive, but reflect different attitudes. Most pubs retain a peculiarly English blend of socialising and privacy. Regulars prize maze-like or womb-like pubs, tiny rooms and dark corners; for hearths and fires, no matter what the season; for a sense of history in the layers of paper, clutter and paint; for an indefinable grubbiness and informality.
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In “trendy” pubs people go to be seen, either for their clothes or the sleek cars they have left in the car park; but pubs, like homes, are not about fashion statements or public preening. By the same token, the building itself often has no importance. What matters is the atmosphere, that indefinable thing that no one can put a finger on, until some alteration kills it. “Ninety-nine per cent of change in pubs is for the worse,” says one twenty-something, cheerily enough. “Attempts to modernise a pub always fail.”
Vertical and horizontal
Big brewers and their pubcos, however, disagree. For them, the old lag nursing his pint all night is a disaster. What they want is “high-volume vertical drinking”, where the mostly young stand around high tables, down their poison and move to the next drinking hole, chatting but never settling. The idea isn’t new. The Victorian gin palace was for “perpendicular drinking”: a glass quickly downed at the bar, standing up, before the stumbling exit. The fantastic lighting and glasswork of the gin palace, like the glitter-balls and mirrors of some modern city bars, are nobody’s idea of home. They pull the roaringly gregarious, not the mere quiet fancier of a drink with a mate or two. They are settings for drinking industrial-style and, since the introduction in 2003 of 24-hour drinking laws, sometimes on an industrial scale.
The drink of choice in these places is increasingly wine, alcopops or some parasolled cocktail. But the proper drink of pubs is beer. Britons spend £17 billion on their favourite tipple each year; it accounts for 60% of alcohol sales in pubs, hotels and restaurants. In ancient times it was almost all the nourishment Britons needed, “liquid bread”, a meal in itself. Pub-savers now push it as a health food, packed full of vitamins, fibre and anti-oxidants, with fewer units of alcohol than wine, and with no more calories in three pints than in a packet of peanuts. Such propaganda approaches Hogarth’s, whose engraving of “Beer Street” showed commerce thriving and plump couples embracing in a paradise of smoke and ale. Beer is also fashionably local. Even big brewers advertise the spring water that bubbles up under their buildings, and it is this that gives a beer its taste of the terroir, like a good cheese. In Lewes, East Sussex, Harvey’s seems to run through the town like an underground stream; almost every pub is, in effect, the brewery tap, and when the town flooded in 2000 “Ouse Booze”, chemically altered by the flood water, was suddenly on sale everywhere. The tiny Lewes Arms [LEFT], squashed at the foot of the castle, became nationally famous when Harvey’s beer was withdrawn on orders from Greene King, a pubco based in Suffolk. Customers boycotted the pub until the beer reappeared.
Dangerous places
The Lewes Arms saga points to a deeper truth: pubs are loved for their subversion. Pubs made a setting ideal for secrecy, murky as a pint of mild, but also open to the unexpected, the bang of the door, the stranger entering, the sudden galvanising piece of news.
The provision of drink to all-comers was a task both sacred and profane, and pubs reflected that dangerous ambiguity. The medieval alehouse, in which England’s peasants drank themselves
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insensible, was often built in the lee of an abbey or a church from which the customers, including clergy, came direct. The Victorian gin palace was a church itself, equipped with coruscating lights and screens to dazzle the poor sodden souls who took refuge there. The “improved public houses” of the 1950s tried to look like dull suburban hotels. But no matter how pubs scrubbed themselves up or put in “family rooms”, disrepute still dogged them. No wonder that the Queen Vic in “East Enders”, one of Britain’s most popular TV soaps, was the scene of three extra-marital impregnations, two criminal raids, two murders and, in September, a calamitous fire, probably arson, which burned it to the ground.
Drama suits pubs. They are places for pushing limits, and not just in the sense of jars and fists. A pub is where Prince Hal first tested his mettle for Crécy and Agincourt, and where the knee-high David Copperfield, on the run, confidently ordered a glass of “the Genuine Stunning”. Pubs are where the first workers’ associations met to demand higher wages, and where (at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand) proper electoral reform was first floated. “The Communist Manifesto” was jotted down, locals claim, at the Flask in Highgate, where Karl Marx was a regular. Pepys went to pubs to sing, as much as to drink. In pubs normal wariness is suspended in favour of live and let live, of free speech and free space. The words “Free House” carry on the theme, somehow, in ways a corporatised pub and a constrained landlord cannot. Americans have their guns; but the Briton has always had pubs, liberty glowing in thousands of small corners, as his weapon to beat back tyranny. John Bull lives there. When pubs are swallowed up, or die, something very much more than a beer- shop perishes with them.
Saving England
Americans have their guns, but the Briton has always had pubs. John Bull lives there. This being so, many of the great and good are now striving to save the pubs of Britain. Bill Bryson, the American president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, campaigns for them as he does for hedges, post offices and red telephone boxes. Prince Charles, alongside promoting organic biscuits and the Book of Common Prayer, is desperately concerned that pubs should survive. The last Labour government briefly appointed a minister for pubs. Somewhere in the back of all their minds is that worrying remark by Hilaire Belloc, a Frenchman: “When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.”
Pub-saving efforts often focus on ways to restore the social web around them, seeking to reverse the headlong flight of Britons into solitary, online worlds. A report in 2001 by the Countryside Agency, “The Pub is the Hub”, recounted encouraging stories from near and far: of the Beauchamp Arms in Gloucestershire which now hosts a playgroup; of the Miners Arms in Derbyshire which offers computer training classes in a room upstairs; of the White Hart Inn in Suffolk, which takes in dry-cleaning and prescriptions. In some 30 rural places, consortiums of villagers have got together to buy their failed pub, spruce it up and open it again. Even in well-watered north London two pubs, the Pineapple, and the Duke of Hamilton [RIGHT] have been saved in recent years by neighbours’ petitions and spirited press campaigns.
Relaxed opening hours have their advantages; the pub can become a community hall, as it once was. In a newly saved pub in Brighton the landlord wants writers to come in and use his Wi-Fi all day, young mums to sit and drink his Fair Trade coffee at elevenses, neighbours to leave their keys and get parcels delivered, and everyone to sign up for swims round the pier for charity. He hopes
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quiz nights, popular everywhere, will bring people together upstairs on sofas, rather than sitting on sofas at home.
The landlord (or landlady) dominates many of these community visions. This is as it used to be. Chaucer’s Harry Bailly of the Tabard Inn, the “myrie man” who organises the tale-telling, was a member of Parliament; well into the 19th century, landlords were often magistrates; to this day their character is meant to be attested by several neighbours. Hence the idea, slightly related to the rediscovered sterling qualities of beer, that the modern pub should promote itself as a haven of safe and regulated drinking, away from the dangers of uncontrolled home and un-policed street, where the landlord is vicar, squire and copper together, the shepherd of his flock.
All these notions, severally and together, may help pubs to survive. But which Britain is being saved here? The model often seems to be the golden age of coaching, immortalised by Dickens, when pubs seethed to the bustle of horses, ostlers, serving maids and calls for peppered lamb chops; or, alternatively, some rural idyll of cricketers, oaks and village green. But pubs, despite a pickled tendency, are also mirrors of their times. Those that best reflect modern Britain, with its rapidly morphing cultures and increasingly unrooted sense of itself, are probably those that boast metal advertising boards, quiz machines, pad thai and stock antique photographs of people unknown to anyone; the Wetherspoon’s that calls itself the Willow Tree Walk, when the sooty tree outside it is a birch, or the Railway Tavern that decks itself with the giant, rusty skeleton of a fish.. In a sense, the English pub has been reborn as the Wu Wok Chinese takeaway or the Tandoori House.
No single magic formula will save pubs. At present, the strongest current in their favour is the passion they still provoke. Britons are not similarly passionate about restaurants, cafés or shops. But by favourite pubs they measure their own lives, and Britain’s condition. They see reflected there, as in a glass, the present blights of social isolation, forgetfulness of history, cultural confusion; but they also see the forces of change somehow made to pause. Time slows; company gathers; speech is freed; beer flows, like the very lifeblood of the land. Pubs are needed, even when every social and economic indicator is running hard against them.
****
CORRESPONDENCE
Tom Lawrence
What I am now trying to establish is what happened to him after Independence. He was an Agricultural Officer before and after the war, and a fundi on coffee.
I suspect that he went back to the UK (possibly Hertfordshire), but wondered whether you might have an old address list, that would have a UK contact for him, and as a piece de resistance, a date of death, or even an obituary would be fantastic.
It strikes me that the camaraderie of the Kenya Regiment men who served during WWII, was not as tight as those who served during the Emergency, so this may well be a long ask!
[Ed: Unfortunately, we have no personal details about Jack in our KRA database, so, please, if you know/knew Jack, please contact Tom.]
*****
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KENYA REGIMENT ACT REPEALED
-----Original Message----- 21 April 2019 23:51. From: Bruce Rooken-Smith to Ian Parker
Ian responded: So the Kenya Regiment (T.F.) no longer exists on the country's statute books [see KGS LEFT]. Given its efficacy during the Mau Mau rebellion and the ill-will this might have engendered, it is something of an enigma that it took 53 years after Independence for this to happen. Certainly in the decade after 12th December 1963 when emotions still ran strong, its existence is unlikely to have gone unnoticed or that it stayed on the books by default. I believe that it was quite deliberately retained by Kenyatta.
My thinking is thus: from his sojourn in Britain before and during the war and his marriage to an English girl [Ed: Edna Grace Clarke], he knew the Brits better than any of his contemporaries. As his actions as President clearly showed, he had no innate antipathy against white settlers as individuals. His visits to Pam Scott on Deloraine for afternoon tea illustrated this, as did his infrequent meetings with Bill Ryan [KR2910], who spoke Kikuyu fluently and in which language they would tease one another. If anyone had studied British systems of governance, it was he.
Wily and far-sighted in an era when African leaders across the continent were espousing socialism, he may have paid lip-service to the ideal, but kept Kenya on a conservative capitalist course. When Humphrey Slade [KR636] arranged a meeting between Kenyatta, DA [KR1] (Col Dunstan Adams) and Paddy Deacon [KR5831], he listened politely to their case for perpetuating the Regiment. In the end, however, the regiment was stood down. That is, it continued to exist in the Laws of Kenya and could recalled and brought out of retirement. It was at that point, surely, that it should have been struck off the books if he felt it served no further purpose?
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It seems more likely than not, that Kenyatta had a reason for not doing so. That there was no objection to members of the Kenya Army becoming members of the Kenya Regiment Association - which quite a few of its senior officers did - showed that that organisation was not held in political opprobrium. And so I speculate along the following lines.
Political coups led by Army officers are the bane of elected African leaders and a constant worry if the continent's records are anything to go by. Starting in the north Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Southern Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Guinea, Liberia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, Congo (Zaire), Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are an incomplete list of those where coups have taken place.
Notably, Kenyatta did not allow an overall command of the country's armed forces. Instead the country's Army, Navy, Air Force, Police, GSU, Administration Police and Prisons, and the Game Department which morphed into KWS, all bore arms and were substantially independent of one another. Anyone wishing to carry out a coup would have to get a significant degree of co-ordination between these units to succeed. And when, after Kenyatta died, there was an attempted coup led by the Air Force, it failed because it was opposed by elements of the Army and the GSU.
It is against this background that keeping the Kenya Regiment as a territorial force made some sense. That its members all underwent officer training elevated it above all the other units. That its members were distributed throughout Kenyan society, from clerks to CEOs of large concerns, and widely in the civil service itself, not only made potentially a very powerful force (as the Emergency demonstrated), but one that would be very difficult to subvert given its part-time commitment. If a situation arose in which the regular forces showed cohesion in opposing, that is where a territorial force could have been a major obstacle to them. As I stated earlier, these are personal speculations, but they do give a reason for keeping then KR Act on the books. Why has it now been repealed? Again I can only speculate. Those responsible simply don't have the vision demonstrated by Kenyatta.
*****
Keith Elliot [KR4289]
What actually happened was this. Jim, a Sergeant attached to the Devonshire Regiment, was on a patrol up in the forest, probably in the bamboo belt, and, as we all did, had taken up the position of number two in the patrol, just behind the tracker, as the group is better controlled in this way. A rhino was sighted ahead approaching on the narrow track; now orders were, when such an ‘armoured vehicle’, approaches, give way, move to right or left, and let the creature go through; makes sense to me. However; one or possibly more of the Devons decided to be a hero and let off at the rhino with his sten gun/Patchett sub-machine gun (SMG). Around half a dozen bullets hit Jim from the rear, raking him from throat to lower knee area.
The rhino got off scot free, and Jimmy was taken to Nairobi’s No. 1. General Hospital. Fortunately, although Jimmy lost a lot of blood, he recovered almost one hundred per cent, as no vital parts were hit- doesn’t say much for the SMG, does it?Many years later, visiting Jim and his wife Thelma in England, I asked them why they had chosen to settle in Exeter, Devon. Thelma responded “Jim had so much Devonshire blood pumped into him, he felt like one of them!
*****
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Dennis Leete
*****
OAKY VALLEY ESSAYS – ABOUT BRAZIL?
[Submitted by the late Tony Shepherd KR5058 – author unknown]
“That’s an extraordinary price for a cup of coffee”, I said to my sister as we sat in her car waiting for Chris to emerge from the super-market nearby.
“What do you mean?” asked Gillie and I had pointed to a board in the window of the beauty shop outside which we were parked. At the end of the depilatory services offered with their prices, was ‘A Full Brazilian’, which naturally enough I had taken to be a cup of coffee while ladies had their whiskers plucked. Gillie burst out laughing.
“A Brazilian is not a cup of coffee!” She then explained that it was a term used by Australian beauticians for an ‘extensive’ bikini wax. In disbelief I learned it involved many coats of liquid wax, then, when it had hardened, wrenching it off, hairs and all in one swift move. In all of my eighty years I had never heard of anything quite so bizarre. The very concept made my eyes water. Had I been told that it was used by the Gestapo as encouragement to speak it would have made more sense. Yet there it was in a beautician’s window advertised as a service for $80 (I wondered if they had a sound-proof room).
Still not quite believing what I had been told, I later asked a German friend what he knew about Brazilians – as a question out of the blue - expecting him to assume I meant natives of Brazil. Yet he responded “Oh, you mean girls waxing their hair?” and I accepted then that this was clearly a regular Australian practice.
Mark you, since arriving in Oz I have developed a Rip van Winkle complex; living in Africa had shielded me from the advances of time and fashion. For example, I had never realised how my concept of freedom was so dreadfully outdated. Obviously there were things I might want to do (e.g. sterilise tax collectors) that society, in the interests of the greater good, would not have allowed, but in broad terms personal freedom meant I could do more or less what I wanted; like not 16
voting in an election if that was my wish. If it was my choice to live in a straw hovel that leaked, did not comply with building standards, or was not cyclone proof; if I went fishing without a radio, rode in the back of a ute, used a chainsaw without a licence, rode a bicycle, quad-bike or horse without a helmet or climbed mountains, I accept inherent risks were to my own account. If the community has to spend money on medical expenses or costs of rescuing me from a predicament of my own making, I believe that I should reimburse it. As a cost of freedom I am prepared to pay. Freedom means that I can make decisions affecting my person and do not want others to make them for me. My health and my safety should be my affair.
Rules and regulations are all very well – to a point. Since boyhood I have been a member of the British Ornithologists’ Union whose Journal Ibis is one of the oldest scientific publications in existence. Its purpose was to advance the science of ornithology, which it has done in an exemplary manner for over 150 years. Yet, as the world sank beneath liberal ‘greenism’, bent on ensuring everyone lives as though in Heaven, someone introduced the idea that science and conservation were one and the same. The direction of Ibis reflected this in that papers submitted had to be consistent with conservation – whatever that might mean – and that research reported had to have been conducted in accordance with the laws of the country in which it was carried out. It all sounded good sense, was controlling and making for a neat tidy world.
Yet pause a while. What does conservation mean? Grammatically it is synonymous with preservation: keeping things as they were. Yet the wish is incomplete without ‘when.’ There is no stasis in the cosmos: everything is changing. It always has and always will (except perhaps in Heaven of which I have no evidence). Conservation is not a science it is a sentiment, a hope, a wish and means different things to different people. There could be sound ornithological science that is at odds with some views of conservation, or the law of some land. Those who slipped such ideas into Ibis policy restricted its scientific potential. In principle this was the same as the Pope telling Galileo that he could publish what he liked so long as it was in accordance with the Church’s teachings.
Taking the injunction that it only publishes research conducted within the laws of the country wherein it took place, Kenya law states all research be sanctioned by the President’s Office. For three decades I kept and analysed records of the black crake (Amaurornis flavirostra - meaning dark bird with a yellow beak) on my property in Langata. My wife and I watched them – often three times a day – which technically was research. I cannot publish those results in Ibis because by editorial fiat I did not have permission from the President’s Office. Neither Ibis’s editorial policy nor the laws governing research in Kenya were made envisaging such a situation and both resulted from ignorance on the part of the rule makers.
I mentioned this to two friends deeply involved in Australian academe. One retired of professorial rank, the other also of mature years, retired and keeping his brain active working for a PhD. The former is an authority on the green ring-tailed possum and has continued studying this animal voluntarily for years after retiring. Respected in academe and zoology, the foremost authority on his animal, he has lost this freedom. Suddenly confronted with new rules, he must get clearance first from the local indigenous authority, then from the national parks authority, not in Cairns the regional centre, but in Brisbane a thousand miles or more to the south. Further, he must not expect clearance, if it is given, for perhaps upwards of a month. However, if he goes to his study area as a tourist, he can look for his possums, day or night without any permission.
In the same vein, the PhD candidate who studies cranes, may only do so where sanctioned by his academic department, in the company of persons approved by that department and from an approved vehicle. Consequently he could not use the crane counts I made at Cullen Point because I was not an approved to count cranes at an approved place. However, if I wrote a letter to a
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newspaper telling of what I had seen, my observation would be classed as a published record which he might then use. This manic compulsion to control everything and everyone is compromising academic freedom as effectively as Stalinism ever did in the Soviet Union.
I never appreciated the many freedoms I enjoyed in Africa. Now in Australia, a country claiming how free life here is, my fellow citizens do not seem to realise how few freedoms they actually have. Set about by rules and regulations, even in academe, putatively the epicentre of freedoms, they live in amazing contradiction. However, those around me are getting used to my griping and given my amazement over Brazilians at $80, I was advised to look up merkin.
I was astonished. It is a 17th century term for a ladies wig. I mean using wigs and topees to cover cranial baldness is understandable, but the urge to replace that removed by a bikini wax? Who thought up this idea and how was it glued on - or unglued for that matter? You learn something new every day, but if I pass a beautician’s with an odd string of little tufts hanging in the window, I won’t be that surprised any more. After all, in this free land it is still something not yet governed by rules.
*****
NATIONAL SERVICE – KENYA REGIMENT
[Alec Wilkinson KR6125]
“In April 2001, I wrote this rather personal story for our four children, who were very young when we left Africa.”
The Regiment was formed in 1937 with two roles, to provide trained soldiers to aid the police and regular army in times of emergency, and to supply leaders to the King’s African Rifles (KAR) as it began a planned expansion.
Some background is needed. Kenya was regrettably but undoubtedly a very racist society at that time and in fact still continues to be so, though the boots have now shifted to other feet. The community of European descent – mainly Anglo-Saxon – were at the top of the heap. Then came the Asians, who were Gujeratis from western India and Sikhs from central India. Outnumbering the other two communities in the ratio of 100:1 were the 48 tribes of Africans. The Regiment took only Europeans until 1961, and were the only group which was ever subject to compulsory national service in Kenya. Apart from Kenya and Southern Rhodesia (and South Africa?), I don’t recall there ever being any compulsory national service in black Africa.
By the outbreak of war in 1939, 240 men from the Regiment had been posted to the KAR. Eventually about 3,500 men were trained and sent to every branch of the armed services, at which point Kenya ran out of suitable young men and the Regiment was suspended.
The Regiment was re-formed in 1950 as a territorial unit, with the permanent staff being seconded from the British Army Greenjackets Brigade, a light infantry brigade with a very honourable history going back 200 years to the days of General Wolfe in Canada, fighting against forest Indians. One section of the brigade was the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC) and they were still an important part of the Regiment in my time. They were used to a strong but less formal and rigid discipline than was usual in the British Army, and this prepared them well to deal with young Kenyans accustomed to showing initiative. I should emphasise that we were not part of the British Army.
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In 1952, compulsory military training was introduced, principally because the security situation was deteriorating as the Mau Mau rebellion began its reign of terror in the Kikuyu tribal areas and in the nearby settled areas such as Nairobi and Nakuru. Initially, the six months basic training was undertaken in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and was to be followed by four years territorial service, comprising exercise days, weekend camps and an annual two week camp. A permanent basic training camp (KRTC) was built at Lanet, near Nakuru in 1954.
As the Mau Mau trouble spread, it became obvious that more trained troops were urgently required. The training period was reduced to three months and full time service was to continue ‘for the duration of the Emergency’. The Regiment soon formed active service companies as well as continuing to supply officers to the KAR and to such emergency forces as the tribal police units operating in the Kikuyu reserves.
That was the situation when I began my basic training in January 1956. I had already completed ten months emergency service with Passbook Control, and most of the Mau Mau had by then, been driven back into the forests of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. So it was expected that I would be released after about eight months in the army, having done a total of eighteen months national service. I would be able to defer the balance of my territorial service until I had qualified as an accountant in England and returned to Kenya.
One little point of interest was that Kenya ignored any British national service done by young Europeans, and obliged them to do it again in Kenya. So the UK decided that any Kenya national service done by men under thirty then living in Britain would also be ignored. I could get deferment in the UK until I had qualified, but would then have to remove myself quickly! In the event British national service was ended years before I qualified, and in any case we left England within a couple of days of completing my five year training contract.
I had been in the army cadet corps at school and was the drum major of the school band, which meant I had endured such embarrassing moments as marching at the head of the not always tuneful bugle and side drum band at the opening of annual prize-giving afternoons, with hundreds of parents watching in addition to 700 pupils. Army discipline does not suit my preference for taking my own time.
Basic training was as bad as I had anticipated. Up every morning in the dark and on parade in perfect uniform, with barracks left totally clean and every item of clothing and equipment in its exact place. We were divided into four squads of 25 each, and there were two British Army sergeants per squad to beat us into shape. The psychology had not changed for a century; drive the existing personality out of each recruit and then drive in the instinctively obedient non-personality of a soldier who, for example, would climb out of a World War I trench to almost certain death without thinking about it. That may be overstating it a little, but it would have been foolish to suggest that to any of the sergeants.
Most of the sergeants were from the Brigade of Guards, so we all did the full slow Guards drill. Our sergeant was in fact from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLI) [Ed: Sgt Billington?], so he had a lot of difficulty doing it the Guards way without collapsing in mirth, but we did not realise this until much later. The non-commissioned officers’ (NCO) main instrument of persuasion was to shout as rudely as possible from about two inch range, using absolutely no swear words but a huge variety of quite poetic phrases acquired throughout their army service and copied with delight from one to another. The worst possible blunder would have been to laugh. The formal punishment procedure was to be put on a ‘charge’. You would be marched into the quite small office of the officer commanding of the whole training camp, with your sergeant or the company sergeant-major bellowing orders in your ear. I presume commandants of basic training
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centres have short stints to avoid premature deafness. The sergeant would then read out the charge, which would be for such heinous offences as long hair (we had it cut twice a week!) or idleness on parade (indefinable so indefensible), or of course it might even have been for something that mattered. The punishment could be anything from extra duties to some form of physical punishment, such as running, twenty times round the parade ground at six o’clock in the morning, every morning for the next week.
Within the first two or three weeks, the sergeants made sure that every recruit was put on a charge, either fairly or unfairly. It was a required experience. It was a chore they had to work through and they did it with impressive ill humour. By the 1950’s, it was a serious offence in the British Army to strike another soldier, so in the UK they never did so. They could only discipline by going through the charge routine. In Kenya, they must have been told things were different and they could use their commonsense. It saved a lot of time for all and was generally a much better arrangement. A quick prod with a pace stick was just as effective a punishment and could be very painful. The smack of a pace stick on dirty fingernails on a rifle butt at the slope was going beyond the pale and happened rarely. I was often the right marker of the squad because of my school drilling experience and in that position, if I did make a mistake it was there for all to witness. On one occasion, in the middle of a company drill exercise involving all one hundred recruits, I went out of step and then quickly recovered but knew something would happen. I was told afterwards that the company sergeant-major, who was a tall and splendid Welsh Guardsman with a classic twirled waxed moustache, dashed up behind me and smacked me over the head with his pace stick. My side of the story was a short moment of suspense followed by a very sharp pain in my head.
All the NCO’s were good at their job so must have been carefully selected for the one or two year secondments to Kenya. Our sergeant and most of the others were of an age when they had served through World War II and they knew their business well. There was a lot of competitiveness between them as their future careers obviously depended heavily on the reports from their time with the Regiment. Of course our squad with its KOYLI sergeant could never win a drill competition, but it was certainly not for the lack of trying.
Physical fitness was rapidly developed in the first few weeks and then maintained for the rest of the course. The officers always came with us on the early morning cross-country runs and amused themselves by out-running us, stopping to urge us to get a move on, and then running right through us again. Their politeness – or at least gentlemanliness – was a carefully contrived contrast to the bullying pose (and I mean ‘pose’) of the NCOs. They were from a variety of British infantry regiments but I don’t remember there being any Guards’ officers.
The other sergeant in our squad was from the Royal Irish (Inniskilling?) Fusiliers [Ed: Sgt P. Killgallon(?)] and he was exceptionally fit. One of the fitness development exercises was to climb up and down ropes set into frames twenty feet high, at first in gym clothes and eventually with rifle and pack. Whilst he was explaining the next trial to us, he would climb up and down the rope using only his forearms, talking and grinning nastily the while.
At that time there were still a lot of Afrikaner farmers in Kenya, their grandparents or great grandparents having come up from South Africa after their defeat in the Boer War at the turn of the last century. It was perhaps irritating for them to be in a basically British army but at least our enemy was black! One day a swarm of bees set itself in a cupboard in the barracks room I was in. A recruit named Joubert - whose name means his ancestors were French Huguenots who fled from France to South Africa in the eighteenth century - said it was no problem as they were harmless bees. He took a pillowcase, pinned one side of it to the shelf below the bees, held it open with one hand and with the other hand scooped all the bees into the pillowcase. Then he took the case outside and shook all the bees into the wind. He was very pleased with himself and so were we.
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Some weeks later the same thing happened again and the sergeant summoned Joubert to do his trick once more. He took one look and said: “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. See how the swarm turns grey as I put my hand near it? These are bad bees and the swarm turns grey because they are all putting out their stings as a warning.” The Yorkshire sergeant was not impressed. He said: “You did it last time. You do it this time or you are on a charge.” So he did it. He suffered multiple stings and spent three days in the sick bay being detoxified. The rest of us had learnt some weeks before that in the army you never volunteer until ordered to do so.
Towards the end of the three months we had to do an assault course in full kit with rifle and pack. It involved running several times back and forth through a stream up to waist deep, up steep banks to vertical parts where we had to help each other, across the same stream on ropes ten or fifteen feet above the water, and the whole thing was done at a trot in thick grenade smoke with our favourite sergeants throwing thunder-flashes as we struggled past. We were only supposed to do it once, but unfortunately some bright individuals thought it was funny to pick up the thunder-flashes and throw them quickly back at the sergeants. The result was predictable: the sergeants held on to the thunder- flashes a few seconds longer, so that they actually exploded as they landed right by us. They also stepped up the number of smoke grenades. The end result was also predictable: current army regulations accepted a casualty rate of 5% from such an exercise and our rate was something over 10%. My lungs hurt so much from smoke inhalation that I seriously wished I were dead. On one loose rope over the stream the smoke was so thick I could not see the far bank, so just let go when I thought I had made it; I hadn’t; I hit the bank of the stream and bounced into the water. I watched an exhausted friend collapse off a tensioned rope and fall ten feet backwards on to rocks in the middle of the stream; the only thing that saved him was the backpack which broke his fall.
This is the sort of situation where army logic can be delightful. Our casualty rate was not acceptable but nobody wanted a formal inquiry. Solution: do it again with a proper casualty rate and totally forget the first course. So we did it again about a week later when all except the four or five bad casualties had recovered. It was a breeze: less smoke, thunder-flashes a long way from us, and little pressure to move through it quicker than a fast walk.
By the end of the course we were really quite fit. I should mention that KRTC was at an altitude of just under 2,000 metres above sea level, so when we went on cross-country runs our lungs did a lot of work. We walked up hill and down dale with full pack and rifle for hours, with a five minute stop every hour and just a mouthful or two of water. Within sixty minutes and fully laden, we were required to walk five miles and fire ten rounds at a 200 yard target: the trick was to arrive with ten minutes to spare in order to fully recover your breath. We knew that we would be living later at nearly 4,000 metres, so we really did need good lungs.
One of the classic army drills for impressing the public is sentry drill. The soldier in command gives just one order and the squad then goes through maybe thirty movements involving turning, about turning, marching and arms drill, all to the beat of one side drum. A selected squad was taken to the Thomson Falls Afrikaner high school on their prize-giving day, to show the locals what fun it was to be in the army. In addition to the usual guard of honour marching to and fro, we were to demonstrate sentry drill. Unfortunately the drummer started his beat exactly half a beat before he should have. To this day I don’t know why the smart Welsh sergeant-major did not start us again, but he certainly didn’t. We stumbled through the whole drill with half of us a full step behind the other half – and it was on grass to make it even more of a shambles! I think maybe he was just happy to see us all reduced to size.
One afternoon we went into a very thick forest near the camp and had a lesson on setting an ambush. All such exercises were carried out in complete silence and on this occasion we were individually camouflaged, and so hidden that we were even invisible to the rest of the ambush. I
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was at the end of the line. It seemed to last a lot longer than I had expected and eventually I got fed up and crawled to my left to find out what the problem was. There was no-one there: they had all gone back to camp without checking numbers. I was very angry by the time I got back and for once the criticism went in the other direction!
The end of the course was the formal passing-out parade, with top brass and the press to admire our attempts to look like soldiers. Many parents came a hundred miles from Nairobi to watch us on the great day, which was to be followed by a week’s leave. It was a typical bright sunny day and for once we managed to do everything right. My father was in the Royal Artillery throughout World War II, and I remember how odd it struck me to be standing with him afterwards, as he chatted to the Welsh Guards sergeant-major, who for the first time was just an ordinary relaxed man having a drink.
At the end of the seven days freedom, life began in earnest.
I reported to Regimental HQ on the Ngong Road, about three miles from the middle of Nairobi. It had been built as the administrative headquarters, so there was no barrack accommodation and all available space other than the parade ground was close packed with tents for the eighty or so troops of ‘O’ – for ‘Operations’ – company. The soldiers who had contrived to get themselves posted to the much smaller ‘Admin’ company made their own living arrangements. Most of the time we were out on patrol a long way from Nairobi, so only saw Ngong Road for a few occasional days. This made the crowded tents seem quite a luxury, even when at one stage in my tent I was just one of three non-Afrikaners, the other two being a very Scots engine driver and a Pole. When Afrikaners are in the majority they are not always too friendly to the British. I certainly never told them my grandfather was an officer in the Boer War.
There was one feature at Ngong Road which was very unusual to army life: the food was nearly always excellent. The cook sergeant was an English national serviceman who had been called up again in Kenya and his normal occupation was chef in a quality restaurant. He always made a particular effort for our first meal back from a two or three week patrol and that mattered a lot.
We had thought that the basic training had been designed to harden us for active service but Rhodesian-born, Major Ray Nightingale [KR5713], the officer commanding ‘O’ company, did not see it that way. To sidetrack for a moment; he was subsequently a close friend of Clive Aggett, another career army officer. Many years later Clive was staying with us in Devon and telephoned Nightingale to arrange to visit him. Clive insisted I talk to him. He was by then a very old man and did not remember me, but he still had the wit to remark that he would have remembered me if I had been a bad soldier! After the Emergency and years with the KAR, his career took him to intelligence work with MI5 in such places as the Yemen and, when he died recently, the obituaries reproduced in a Kenya Regiment Association newsletter make it clear the picture of a very ferocious OC was just a front, but one which he presented with great consistency.
The first excursion was to a totally exposed slope on the very edge of the Rift Valley escarpment, where there was a steep fall away from us of perhaps five hundred metres.
We had been taught how to make a ‘bivvy’ out of our poncho (raincoat) by using a stick to close the head hole and two more to hold up each end. This had worked well on the flat when it was dry and we knew such a bivvy would be each individual’s tent when we were on patrol. We made our bivvies in a gentle afternoon breeze but were warned to make a good job of it. As the sun went down the breeze changed to a raging gale rushing up from the valley. The slower ones could sense too late that their ponchos were being whipped away in the wind, never to be seen again. The rest
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of us quickly abandoned the bivvy idea and wrapped our ponchos tightly about us. Luckily it did not rain but we were cold, sad and windswept in the morning.
The next excursion was to Mount Kenya. This is the second highest mountain in Africa at 5,199 metres above sea level. Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is 5,895m above sea level. Both of these mountains rise from plains only 1,500 metres above sea level, so viewed from a distance they are as impressive as any stand-alone mountain in the world. Fortunately we were only to climb to the top of the forest zone at 3,000 metres, but there is a distinct shortage of oxygen even at that height.
Our transport from Ngong Road to a patrol area was by cattle truck. The proper British troops were driven around in big Bedford trucks with seats to sit on and covers to keep out the rain. Cattle trucks don’t have seats or covers. British troops were paid for by the British Colonial Office, which then recharged the whole cost to the colonial Kenya government. Kenya troops were funded by the Kenya government, which was closer to the scene and could more efficiently see how money could be saved. We were the saviours! It might be a hundred miles from Nairobi to the patrol area. We often started climbing already tired, sore and wet.
We left Ngong Road on that first occasion before dawn and were out of the trucks by mid morning. We normally carried rations for three days, plus rifles, ponchos and a change of underclothes. Definitely no soap and no toothpaste. The unlucky ones, if they were big and strong, might carry a Bren gun instead of a rifle; if they were average or small, one man from each section of about ten men carried a wireless. They were still called wirelesses in those days and I think the word still conjures up the picture of a substantial and heavy box. Anyway, it does to me. And on this particular day, I was told to carry the wireless.
The usual routine was to climb for one hour and then rest for ten minutes, the rest period increasing slightly as the oxygen grew more scarce. ‘Climb’ is not really the right word to use. We were in fact struggling three feet up a muddy game trail churned to the consistency of an underdone chocolate pudding, and in the process sliding two feet back again, probably to abuse from the person behind, who you had almost or actually knocked off his feet. After several hours of this another pause was called – by sign language or whispers – and as I collapsed to the ground I realised I just did not have the strength to get to my feet again. I just lay there and wondered what to do.
This is of course a good example of army personnel management skills. After the normal rest time allowed – but not before – the platoon commander told us to make camp for the night exactly where we were. In other words, he had judged precisely how far he could take us on this exercise and in the process teach us our real energy limit: we were all in exactly the same state of exhaustion.
Making camp meant the bivvy routine, which we had so recently proved did not always work. However, this was a different lesson. The earth in the forest at this height was always wet, due to rainfall nearly every night and mist or weak sunshine through the day. Our sleeping bags lay directly on the ground but did have a supposedly waterproof underside. This was normally reasonably effective. The problem was that mountains are not flat; you arrange your bivvy [RIGHT] so that your head is at the higher point and your feet are at the lower. You go to sleep having somehow wrapped your rifle so that it is
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instantly accessible but securely dry. You try to arrange yourself with dryness the priority and then fall exhaustedly asleep, fervently wishing you could resign from this unpleasant job. In the middle of the night you wake up to the realisation that it is raining steadily and your bivvy seems to have disappeared. Gravity and slippery mud have won the day (or night). Your bivvy is about four metres behind you and half a metre above you. There is no choice but to attempt the impossible feat of struggling out of the sleeping bag and back into it in the bivvy without everything becoming totally sodden.
ABOVE: LOUNGING AROUND - L/R: 1 ?; 2 ?; 3 ALEC WILKINSON; 4 BRIAN SINCLAIR [KR4975]; 5 ?; 6 BRIAN GRANVILLE ROSS [KR6104]; 7 GERALD ANGEL [KR6066].
After a few nights one develops techniques for moving uphill whilst comfortably cocooned in a damp sleeping bag, for of course the rain has poured down on the exposed top as one slithered fast asleep from under the bivvy. I am quite sure there was no night I was in the forests of Mount Kenya or the Aberdares when it did not rain.
During each day of the exercise we tramped slowly around the forest and the marshes at a suitably slow pace. We saw a few waterbuck and bushbuck, all of which looked at us in some perplexity and moved away at a similarly unaccustomed slow rate. There was no sign of any Mau Mau but tracks of elephant and buffalo were everywhere. It was mainly an exercise in moving quietly and avoiding the worst of the mud holes. There was also a night exercise, which I presume was to teach us not to try it again: it was so dark up there in the clouds that each soldier held with one hand on to the one in front. Otherwise we would all have been instantly lost. As we stumbled silently through the mud, the local population of something very large was unaware of our coming until we were just feet away. The first thing we would know about it was a tremendous crashing in the bushes right next to us as the huge something charged away. It was good to be told that the wildlife always had the sense to run away from potential trouble, but this did not wholly tie in with normal rhinoceros behaviour. Fortunately it seems we only disturbed elephant, buffalo and peaceful rhino. Anyway, the lesson was well learnt.
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Even in daylight it is extraordinary how similar the peaks and valleys in these mountains are to each other. At first we had no idea at all in which direction we should go to find our camp again. After a few days we were not much the wiser. In each patrol of four to six people there had always to be at least one very experienced soldier to lead us home again. I shall explain later that in fact our lives usually depended on someone knowing exactly where we were.
It was a real joy to return to the Ngong Road camp despite the discomfort of the cattle trucks, which by now seemed quite a normal and reasonable way to go.
We were now supposedly ready for our first visit to the Aberdare Mountains, which rise from about 2,500 metres above sea level to a height of 4,500 metres and are covered progressively by rain forest, bamboo forest and marshy moorland as one climbs higher. These mountains were the last resort of Mau Mau terrorists, many of whom had by then been living in the forest for years and had truly reverted to the level of savages. Their sense of smell had become so acute that they could detect such foreign smells as soap or toothpaste from miles away. Their hearing and ability to move silently were practically as sharp as an animal’s. They were dressed in rags or animal skins so were always well camouflaged. The methods and attitudes of the terrorists were fully understood from those captured, some of whom were offered the opportunity to change sides and sensibly accepted as a good alternative to being hanged. By this stage of the Emergency, the main successes were by pseudo gangs, consisting of turncoat terrorists and one or two Europeans who could speak good Kikuyu. Their tactic was to be so convincingly disguised that they could make close contact with real Mau Mau gangs and then deal with them. There were no examples of turncoats betraying their new masters, but I was very happy that I knew no more than about twenty words of Kikuyu.
For reasons I have already explained, no talking was allowed once we were in the forest. We set off along another muddy game trail and were soon climbing up a gentle slope among tall trees. The plan on the first day was to get at least half way to the patrol area and ideally this allowed us to reach a suitable campsite by about four o’clock. Much of the forest at lower levels was thin enough for us to get off the game trails which were physically the only way to get up the mountain. It was quite common higher up that the undergrowth was so thick that we were forced to pitch our bivvies on, or very close to the trail we were climbing. It was much more relaxing to know that we were not actually blocking the normal path of a buffalo, elephant or, worse still, a rhino. We pitched our bivvies very close to each other so that the sentry could keep effective guard over everyone. Sentry duty was one hour each per night if a section was camped together. We were of course allowed no lights, so staying awake was sometimes a real problem. It was understood that the penalty for sleeping on sentry duty was to be shot, but nobody was shot for that reason and I know there were a few sleeping sentries.
The ascent was always hard work due to having three or four days’ food on our backs in addition to all the normal equipment. It was a real luxury to arrive before evening at a ‘good’ campsite and have reasonable time to select a bivvy site flat enough to wake up in! At this stage we would probably be at platoon strength as the usual split into sections would take place within a short distance of the patrol area.
A few words about the weapon each soldier carried. It could be any of the following: a ·303 Lee Enfield rifle with short barrel and flash eliminator for ‘jungle warfare’; a Bren gun; a Belgian FN automatic 7.62mm rifle, very recently developed at that time and considered a luxury; a Stirling or Patchett scatter gun; or finally one man per section might have a crossbow in addition to his other weapon, intended for use at short range when absolute silence was essential, but very unpopular because their safety catch was not reliable. They were very similar to their predecessors of five hundred years ago. For that matter the ·303 Lee Enfield was virtually unchanged from the main British rifle of WW1 for the valid reason that it was a very reliable weapon. Our basic training had
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been with the normal Lee Enfield, but we had also had extensive Bren training – the only weapon I was obliged to fire right-shouldered – and had had adequate training on the other weapons.
Apart from the weapon, poncho and food, we each carried a spare pair of socks, shirt and underpants and a share of cooking utensils for the section. We were supposed to wash and change our socks every day to minimise foot rot (athlete’s foot), but we carried no soap of any sort, so washing could only consist of rinsing a garment in the nearest stream and hoping it was not still totally sodden when you next had to wear it. Most of us had foot rot most of the time despite lavish use of an odourless foot powder.
The second evening would find us down to section strength of ten men and camped in our patrol area.
The principal purpose of many of the Aberdare patrols at that stage of the Emergency was to divide large areas of the Kinangop or Kipipiri slopes on the south side of the mountains into square blocks of one kilometre each. Each section would patrol one block. Within the block the order was to shoot anybody on sight and ask questions afterwards. The remaining terrorists were so fast and bush-wise that there was no other possible way to deal with them. In practice, if you did see someone before they saw you, the routine was to lie very low until you could identify them with certainty. Having seen they were also security forces, you could then let them pass unchallenged and report the incident as soon as you were again in contact with the platoon commander. It was best not to risk an unnecessary shooting by the other soldiers and there was often some doubt as to who had strayed out of his allocated area. The age of mobile phones was still decades away and the platoon radios were far too cumbersome to take on patrol.
In the first years of the Emergency the Mau Mau gangs might number as many as fifty and accordingly the security forces tended to have up to ten soldiers in a patrol. As the size of the gangs declined, so did our patrol size. In 1956 it had become normal to have patrols of three or four. A larger patrol would inevitably have made too much noise to have any chance at all of approaching any Mau Mau. It was even being suggested that patrols of two or one should be the rule, but this would obviously have had its problems if a gang of any size had been encountered. Four was a good compromise: it meant a constant watch could be kept in all directions and the squelching in the mud could be kept under some control. We moved very slowly at all times for reasons of both noise and altitude. I should explain one example of the bush-cunning of the Mau Mau. In the early days the KAR normally had patrols of section strength, which meant about ten men including a Bren gunner. The last man in the patrol was trained always to face the rear when the patrol halted, to watch for any attack from that direction. However, he could not keep such a good watch backwards as the patrol advanced.
A common Mau Mau achievement was to approach and kill the rear guard without the rest of the patrol being aware of it. One moment he was there, the next he was not.
The majority of troops in the forest were British army and they remained convinced that it was better to have safety in numbers: there were still patrols at platoon strength crashing around the hills, though with hindsight this seems almost incredible. They also had a different attitude to conservation of undisturbed bush. With us it was almost a court martial offence to leave any material sign that we had been in an area. We each dug our own hole whenever the toilet need arose, and we normally took all empty food or other tins and containers away with us. Burying them was not good enough: many animals could detect buried tins and other rubbish by smell and dig them up. They could then cut or poison themselves and die a painful lingering death. Areas previously patrolled by the British army could be easily identified by general detritus and huge piles of rusty tins.
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Within each platoon there was a tracker dog and specially trained dog handler (Royal Army Veterinary Corps). The dogs were trained for the one purpose of pursuing a given smell on something such as a piece of clothing or a food fragment. It should have been an easy job for a dog handler at my time in the forest as we seldom came upon an interesting smell, but to keep the dog in training it had to do an extended track at least twice a week, and this involved one of us leaving a sock or handkerchief with the handler and then walking off for a mile or so (without leaving our square!). After about an hour the handler would show the dog the garment, tell it to track it and then head off after the straining dog. The risk in this procedure was of course that the sock owner or the handler could run into more than they bargained for, but I don’t recall this ever happening. The dogs were well trained to be very quiet at all times.
ABOVE – CONWAY PLOUGH’S No. 1PL ‘O’ COY BK ROW (1-9) – 1 CONWAY PLOUGH [KR4911]; 2?; 3?; 4?; 5 PONGO PARSONS [KR4974]; 6 BRIAN SINCLAIR; 7?; 8?; 9? MIDDLE ROW (1-8) 1?; 2 (RAVC)?; 3? 4 LAURIE PEARSE [KR6115]; 5 GEOFF WHITE [KR6142] ; 6?’ 7 ALEC WILKINSON; 8? FRONT ROW(1-7) 1 EUAN ANDERSON [KR6069]; 2 RON STANFIELD [KR6145]; 3?; 4 BRIAN?; 5?; 6 JOHN BYNG HALL [KR6121]; 7 TOMASYAN
There were a few men who were normally professional game hunters doing their national service, and some of them were experienced trackers. At different times I was sent on one day tracking courses and attempted to follow tracks through the bush or grass or over rocky outcrops. The main thing learned was that it is a highly sophisticated skill which takes years to develop but much less time to forget if not regularly exercised; in other words, best left to the experts. One point worth mentioning is that it is never effective to track alone: it is as important to look well ahead for above ground signs, such as dew dislodged from low bushes, as to see the tiny signs lying immediately before you on the ground.
It takes so much concentration, that the ground tracker is quite oblivious to what lies visually ahead. There has to be a second person immediately behind him, looking with just as much concentration, over his shoulder. Most of the really good trackers were African hunters.
I have mentioned the chore of climbing down and up the hills twice a week to collect food. When the Regiment was first in the forest for patrols which might last as long as three weeks, the food was the ‘compo’ ration, developed scientifically for British troops serving in such places as Korea or Malaya, as it was then called. After a few months it was found that Kenya men (mostly still almost growing boys) who were accustomed to a much fuller diet were beginning to suffer from malnutrition. So the change was made from the compo rations, which were light and compact, to ordinary sized tins of meat and vegetables etc. The cost in terms of the effort involved in lugging 27
these tins uphill twice a week was considerable. My memory is just of the mud in front of your eyes as you pushed steadily up a steep slope with what felt like a load of lead on your back.
At times airdrops of food from Police Reserve Air Wing (PRAW) light aircraft were tried. The wretched pilot had to work his way up through scattered cloud to a map reference which might or might not be correct. There a bright coloured cloth would be spread out in an open place to show him where to make his drop. It was good to hear the sound of an approaching plane, but worse to hear it flying around looking for the cloth but not finding it. The success rate was pretty poor and I’m sure the pilots were delighted when the idea was abandoned. The other great disadvantage was that every Mau Mau for miles around then knew exactly where we were and in what strength.
We were normally in rain forest rather than the higher bamboo or even higher moorlands. Moving around silently in bamboo is out of the question. There seems to be as much fallen bamboo lying across all the game trails as there is live bamboo standing up; very little point in patrolling in bamboo. The moorlands, particularly on Mount Kenya, are impossible for different reasons. The grass tends to grow in clumps with standing water in between and the only way to progress without sinking in the mud is to step from clump to clump. Of course you frequently miss the clump, or it gives way beneath you, and you sink into the mud anyway. We did spend a lot of time in areas of mixed forest and bamboo, and that was manageable provided one could avoid the bamboo. One great point about bamboo is that every section of every stem contains totally clean fresh water. The one thing we usually did not lack was water!
I have mentioned the unfortunate need to camp on, or very near to, game trails. We all know there are many different ways to be frightened, but I’ll describe one that has come to me just twice. We were camped in very thick forest right across a game trail. It was pitch dark at about two o’clock in the morning and I was on sentry duty. For obvious reasons we were allowed no lights whatever. I became aware of the almost silent footsteps of a very large animal slowly approaching. The footsteps became steadily closer and quieter. It was very probably a buffalo or rhino rather than an elephant, and my strong preference was for a buffalo, which is a much more sensible and logical character. However, at that moment a rhino seemed the more likely option. I suddenly realised that I was petrified; meaning that I could not move. Perhaps it is the same instinctive reaction as a new born antelope in the grass trying to avoid the attention of a predator, or a bird in a tree at night, or a rabbit before a snake. Whatever it is, there is apparently nothing one can do about it.
As I sat there listening, the footsteps paused for what seemed like minutes, and then the animal slowly retreated. Now I was aware that I could move again, though at that moment it was best to continue not to do so. There was no danger of sleeping on that sentry duty.
I believe I had experienced quite a common occurrence – I mean the approaching animal rather than being petrified, which I did not discuss with anyone – but the outcome was sometimes much more alarming. Rhinos would dash panic-stricken through a camp carrying a couple of bivvies on their nose, or would stop right in the middle of a camp whilst soldiers fled in all directions. I don’t think any members of the Regiment were killed by animals, but I am not sure.
There were some lighter sides. We took it in turns to do the cooking, which consisted normally of boiling a mixture of rice, tinned meat and tinned vegetables in a sufuria over a small fire. Provided we were as usual in a concealed position, we were permitted to light a fire at night – when no smoke would be visible - to make a hot meal before another night in the cold rain. The sufuria was usually supported over the fire by three trip flare stands. It was my turn to cook for the section of about twelve men and, when the food was almost ready, one of the stands collapsed and the whole mixture fell into the mud. I looked around in horror and realised that there was nobody in sight. I very quickly scooped the food/mud mixture back into the sufuria and gave it several extra stirs.
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When I had whispered the message that another sumptious Wilkinson repast was cooked, they ate the lot with no comment at all!
The Emergency was declared in 1952, so in 1956 some terrorists had been in the forest for four years or more. As I have already written, if captured they were sometimes given a choice: be hanged in the prison in Nairobi with full officialdom, or join us. Many took the easy comfortable option and I don’t know that they ever disappointed their new bosses. They were given proper clothes and food and cigarette money. Loyalty obviously has its price everywhere. I expect that at the end of the Emergency they were told to go quietly home. In return for this generosity they worked as trackers and general advisers on likely Mau Mau plans and movements. Their treatment by Mau Mau if taken by them would have been dreadful, but that was certainly the least of available evils. We sometimes had an ex Mau Mau attached to our section and one of his duties - of course the one I remember best - was to be up before dawn to bring us each a cup of tea!
I have mentioned the preponderance of Afrikaners in my first platoon in ‘O’ Company. There were not many Irish in East Africa and that may be the reason why the ‘Jaapies’ were the butt of a lot of jokes. There should not have been a language problem as nearly all of them had been to the European secondary schools in Nairobi, where English was of course the main language. Three recollections of particular Afrikaners come to mind. Idiocy: the first evening on a patrol on the top of the Rift Valley escarpment, the Afrikaans platoon commander called us all together and then said: “Would all those who are not present, please put up their hands!” Genuine concern: one day, also on the escarpment, I was left alone in camp to clean up and guard. The section corporal looked back from a hill and could not see me, so assumed I had been taken; the rest of the patrol claimed he ran the kilometre back to the camp in about one minute, to find me cleaning pots in a hollow by a stream. Care: a very experienced and even-tempered Afrikaner corporal had, I understood, previously been an officer but nobody discussed the reason for the demotion. He talked very little and never laughed. As a patrol leader he inspired complete confidence. I found out much later that he had done eighteen months in military prison for torturing a Kikuyu woman for information.
Queen Elizabeth had an official birthday when I had been in ‘O’ company for three months, and of course there was to be a military Birthday Parade. The powers that be decided there would be a Guard of Honour composed of a combination of British Army (in Kenya because of the Mau Mau Emergency), the King’s African Rifles (the black African regular army of Kenya and other British Commonwealth countries in Africa), and the Kenya Regiment (the tiny regiment of white conscripts like me). It has only now occurred to me, that the KAR should have been renamed the QAR about four years before, when the king died, but perhaps that would have cost too much in cap badges?
About thirty of us were selected for this grand occasion and we were taken to Government House for two or three rehearsals, all of which were hilarious. The first problem was that the parade was to be on grass. Most army drill is on tarmac surfaces where there is no difficulty in hearing whether you are in time. There was of course to be a military band blasting away but that does not totally solve the problem. A bigger problem arose due to differences both of physique and training. The British Army contingent was from a light infantry regiment, where the arms drill is a bit different and the marching pace is one hundred and twenty paces to the minute.
The Regiment was drilled by a majority of Brigade of Guards senior NCOs, so we were used to slow, heavy marching at ninety paces per minute, and much loud slapping of rifle butts etc during our arms drill. The askaris were something else again; mainly from tall nomadic tribes and selected for their height. Most were well over six foot and their parade headgear was a fez which rose another nine inches above their heads. They all carried themselves magnificently and strode along at just one hundred paces to the minute.
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The British Army sergeant-major in charge of the first rehearsal did not seem to anticipate any problems. He simply gave us the commands to fall in, right turn and “Quick march!” In the complete shambles which followed, it was very difficult not to laugh. He stopped us after a few paces and yelled at us to wake up. Of course we couldn’t: the marching pace you have beaten into your head in basic training overrides any attempt to do things differently. He stopped us again and was now clearly getting very angry. One of the officers watching the proceedings went to have a quiet word with him, and then they both went to speak to the band drum-major. There followed a clear instruction in the usual stentorian voice: “You will march IN TIME, at one hundred paces to the minute, as beaten by the band. This is how it will be!” And the sergeant-major solemnly attempted a demonstration of this style of march.
The Africans of course spoke generally no English at all so had no idea what was going on, but probably quite unthinkingly the compromise speed chosen was the speed they were trained in anyway. So we had the situation that both lots of white troops would have to try to adjust and the Africans could stride on in their usual excellent style with their usual haughty expressions upon their faces.
That was a lot more successful and we even managed to look like a well-matched Guard.
Then of course came the shambles of the arms drill, which in a Guard of Honour had to include much sloping, presenting and ordering of long barrel ·303 rifles. The clattering of out-of-time movements was appalling and no amount of shouting and practising seemed to make much difference. The whole planned parade movement was revised several times until there was the absolute minimum of arms drill, and we finally settled for the slow Brigade of Guards timing as the one which involved the least give away clatter.
On the actual day all the dignitaries of Kenya from the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, to the Leader of the Legislative Council, the Mayor of Nairobi and a crowd of thousands were present to watch us try to avoid making complete fools of ourselves. In fact it went quite well and I still have a very clear picture in my mind of the KAR striding past the wooden dais as the Governor took the salute.
At this point in the Emergency intake of new recruits was stopped and we were able to be moved to the now empty basic training barracks at Lanet, a short distance from Nakuru. So finally we had bricks and mortar to sleep in when not on patrol. This was luxury indeed and also meant we did not have to go so far in our cattle trucks to get to the Aberdares.
We were on another patrol on the Rift escarpment when a message came for me to report to the company commander in Nairobi: this was the fierce Major Nightingale already mentioned. Six privates had been selected to go on a two-week advanced jungle warfare course organised by the British Army. When we arrived we found that all the other soldiers were from British regiments or the KAR and all were officers or NCO’s of sergeant or higher rank. This was not really a problem for us but it put many of the others’ noses out of joint to varying degrees. They learned with difficulty that we were not there to clean their boots and seemed to have similar difficulty in understanding why we were there at all. Anyway, it was a good course and included the type of preparation we should have received in our basic training, instead of the open European theatre type of warfare on which that training concentrated. A bit of a waste of time for us as by then we had learned 90% of it by actual experience. It was an interesting introduction to the English class system and to corned beef, which was served to us - in the officers mess - three times on each of the fourteen days we were there. With hindsight I suspect Major Nightingale had taken an opportunity to send the six of us on the closest equivalent to an NCO training course which he could find; the Regiment was by then too small to arrange its own courses and most of the six were subsequently promoted. I was not; maybe because it transpired that I was due for release two months later, or
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maybe because the major was not quite so pleased with all of us as he told us on our return to Nakuru.
It was now clear that the Regiment was soon to revert to its peacetime status and the priority became to promote the normal territorial role of six months compulsory basic training followed by a further four years of weekend and annual two week camps. The time of year of agricultural shows was nearly upon us, and the chance was there to provide a sort of miniature tattoo aimed at young white Kenyans who would soon be of an age to do their national service. As this was to remain compulsory for many years, I am not quite clear why the powers-that-be thought it was a worthwhile exercise!
So it was back to bellowing drill sergeants - in this instance an extremely skilful Scots Guards sergeant - and dashing all over the place firing blank ammunition at each other. As usual I was in the Guard of Honour and so had to create and maintain the smart uniform which was never my strong point. We were allowed to pay one of the African camp followers to do the constant washing and starching required before each performance, but it was still a reversion to standard formal soldiering which we did not appreciate.
The drill sergeant had perhaps the most difficult time: we did not take happily to being shouted at again, and within a couple of days he had put nearly all of us on a charge for some perceived idleness or stupidity. This woke everyone up quite dramatically, and he achieved his aim before we realised he did not intend to push any of the threatened charges through to Major Nightingale. I still remember his particular brand of Glasgow sarcasm.
After about two weeks training we set off in smart covered Bedford trucks which had seats! They were hired from the KAR specifically for our tour. We did our stunts at agricultural shows in Nakuru, Eldoret, Kitale, Thomson’s Falls, Nairobi and Mombasa. It must have taken three or four weeks to drive the 2,500 kilometres involved and to be at each place for its weekend show.
There were a few ‘nonsenses’ before the big crowds who watched each performance. Mombasa on the Kenya coast is a very hot place to dress up in thick uniform and march from Fort Jesus at one end of the town to the Mombasa Sports Club at the other. We had a break before the Guard of Honour routine and the sergeant gave us a quiet talk as soon as he could see there were no officers within hearing range. The problem was that the officer in charge of the Guard of Honour was a man who sometimes muddled his left and right turn commands. We knew exactly what we were supposed to do because it was always the same sequence, but when he told us - as he had on a couple of occasions - to turn the wrong way, we were not quite sure what to do. The sergeant said it was simple; we knew what we should do, and that is exactly what we would do, irrespective of the command. We accepted this thankfully.
One minute before we were due to go on, Major Nightingale came to us and said he wanted to make one point absolutely clear. He knew that the officer sometimes gave us an incorrect command, but we should always - as good soldiers - do exactly what he said. And without further delay or opportunity to discuss, we were marching out towards a vast crowd to the excellent accompanying music of a British Army band. We were halted before the dignitaries in the main stand and should then have been told to turn right to face them. He told us to turn left. We each made our instant decision to obey the sergeant or the major. In many instances - probably 50% - we found ourselves facing the soldier next to us. The next decision was to hold our ground or to do a quick about turn - perhaps another 50% situation. It is very easy to visualise us as we frantically turned this way and that until finally the officer managed to shout: “As you were!”
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Shortly after the tour the compulsory service was reduced to eighteen months and, as I had already done my eighteen, I was soon released.
During my five years in England, I was entitled to a deferment of territorial service, but still had some years to complete when we arrived in Mombasa in 1961. I wrote to the Regiment to say I was back and need not have bothered as my letter crossed with one from them stating that they knew I was back and should report immediately to re-enlist. There followed about fifteen months of sweating up and down the Shimba Hills (33km south of Mombasa) for one weekend a month, and a two-week camp at Thomson’s Falls. This was actually quite good fun and included a few days back up in the Aberdares, where it was assumed my ‘O’ company experience meant I could lead a company through the forest from A to B. This involved a ‘by guess or by God’ routine which I only had confidence in, when at the last moment I could actually see the correct destination.
During the camp the CO gave us the news - by then inevitable - that an all white regiment was not acceptable in a Kenya about to become independent, and therefore the end of the camp would also be the end of the Regiment, and our compulsory territorial service. We found later that we were not even required to hand in our uniforms and equipment.
One final point. As my father was in the Royal Artillery throughout World War II, he was entitled to a number of service medals which he never claimed. When I was back in Kenya in the middle of my five years’ training in London, he proudly handed me my campaign medal, the Africa General Service Medal with ‘KENYA’ bar, for service in ‘O’ Company during the Emergency. I doubt if I would have thought to claim it; which would have been a pity. My grandfather, David Wilkinson, won the Queen’s South Africa Medal for service in the Rand Rifles in the Anglo/Boer Wars of 1899/1902. I keep the two medals together. One side of them is almost identical and the other differs only in that Queen Victoria appears on one and Queen Elizabeth on the other.
*****
EDITORIAL COMMENT
Readers may wonder about my choice of cover photos, downloaded from the Internet. The front cover came to mind when I thought of the many men from the Rhodesias who attended OCTU in Gilgil and/or Njoro in the early ‘40s. Whilst many returned to their Rhodesian battalions, many served with the KAR. The KR numbers 40000-40152 were allocated to 153 men from Northern Rhodesia (NR), most of whom were commissioned into one of the seven NRR battalions formed during WWII; and in the early ‘50s, our first five NS courses were trained in Southern Rhodesia. The photo on the back cover – Katherine Gorge – the first I’d ever seen, is in honour of those who moved to Australia, which after UK, boasts the second largest number of KRA members *****
*****
HARRY SELBY, RENOWNED HUNTER AND SAFARI GUIDE
[22/07/1925-20/01/2018]
[Robert D. McFadden]
Harry Selby, one of the last of Africa's renowned white hunters, who took rich and famous safari clients into the interiors of Kenya, Tanganyika and Botswana for a half-century to shoot game,
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photograph exotic wildlife and search for elusive adventure in the bush, died on Saturday 20th January 2018, at his home in Maun, Botswana.
His death was confirmed by his friend Joe Coogan, an American writer and hunter who had worked on safaris with Mr. Selby [LEFT]. Mr. Coogan said he was notified in a message from Botswana by Mr. Selby's daughter, Gail. No cause was given.
Mr. Selby grew up on a ranch astride the Equator in Kenya, watching enormous herds of zebra and impala, sniffing for lion and Cape buffalo, listening to an elephant scream and hyenas giggling at sundown. In the burning heat, he learned to track an animal over rocky ground, and to avoid the rhino laid up in the dusty shade of an acacia tree. He shot his first antelope at eight, his first elephant at fourteen.
Mr. Selby was a post-war protegé of the East Africa hunter Philip Hope Percival, who took Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway on safaris, and he became a professional hunter himself in the late 1940s. He took the American author, Robert Ruark [BELOW- RIGHT] on safari in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and with the 1953 publication of Ruark's best- selling book "Horn of the Hunter," Mr. Selby became one of Africa's most famous hunting guides.
Drawn to the romance of treks to kill lions, elephants and rhinos and to photograph native tribes and storybook landscapes, clients flocked from around the world to Selby safaris, which were booked for years with clients like Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the Maharajah of Jaipur, Prince Stanislas Radziwill of Poland and Western tycoons, industrialists and chief executives seeking thrills and self-fulfilment.
Those were anticipated wonders not always to be found in the real Africa. In the Hollywood-inspired popular images of the 1950S, the great white hunter was a fearless Clark Gable or Stewart Granger, tall and deeply tanned, who brought down a charging rhino with a single shot while his arrogant client cowered behind him, and who later romanced the client's neglected wife after saving her from a snarling lion.
The reality was Mr. Selby; short and stocky, mild and self-effacing, a man who seemed to listen with his eyes. He had curly hair, a boyishly shy smile, and a wife and two children. He catered to men used to giving orders, not taking them, but did it with tact, avoiding upbraiding a client needlessly and almost never finding it necessary to save anyone. Neither he nor any client was ever seriously injured on a safari, though there were some close calls.
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It was not all shooting and campfire tales. A Selby safari required an army of bearers, cooks, skinners, porters, drivers and others; game licenses and financial transactions; transportation arrangements, from trucks and horses to planes and boats; and a complex coordination of supplies and equipment; weapons and ammunition, food, water, tents, cots, radios, medicines, maps, clothing and a thousand other necessities.
Without cell-phones or evacuation helicopters, Mr. Selby had to be the doctor, mechanic, chauffeur, gin-rummy-and-drinking partner and universal guide, knowledgeable about mountain ranges, grassy plains, rivers, jungles, hunting laws, migratory patterns, and the Bushmen, Masai, Samburu, Dinka and Zulu tribes. He spoke three dialects of Swahili. And he improvised; if there was no firewood, he burned wildebeest dung.
He was no Gregory Peck, but had an easygoing personality that made for good company in the bush. He coped with emergencies, pulling a client clear of a stampede or a vehicle from a bog, treating snakebites or tracking a wounded lion in a thicket - his most dangerous game. He was left- handed, but his favourite gun was a right-handed ·416 Rigby, which can knock down an onrushing bull elephant or Cape buffalo in a thundering instant.
Safaris changed dramatically in his time. In Kenya and Tanganyika in the late 1940s and '50s, he took parties hundreds of miles into trackless bush country by truck, pitched camps with comfortable though primitive amenities, drank gin by kerosene lamp, and pursued game by his own instincts. Safaris lasted two or three months. The showers were often cold, but the food was good and the game plentiful.
In his later years in Botswana, safaris went out for just a few weeks and focused as much, if not more, on photography as on hunting, although Mr. Selby preferred hunters. Photography buffs stayed in hotel-like lodges and went on day trips to scenic sites. More adventurous hunters and photographers were flown to rendezvous points and driven in Land Rovers to fixed camps elaborately equipped with electric power, refrigerators, flush toilets, hot showers, kitchens and dining facilities with silverware and table linen.
"Africa itself has changed out of all recognition, both physically and politically, and the old-time self-contained safari would have no place to go in today's Africa," Mr. Selby wrote for Sports Afield in 2010, when satellite phones, computers and helicopters made life easy for the busy executive on safari.
"There are hunters today," he added, "who would prefer to have experienced the sense of freedom of an old-time safari, as I’m sure there were those who went on safari many years ago who would have preferred something along the lines of what is offered today. The two experiences are as different as night is from day; the only feature common to both is the name ... that magical word, ‘safari.’
John Henry Selby - Harry was his universal nickname - was born in Frankfort, South Arica, on 25th July 1925, the youngest of six children of Arthur and Myrtle Evelyn Randall Selby. When he was three his family moved to a 40,000 acre cattle farm near Mt Kenya.
Surrounded by a game-rich countryside, the boy learned to hunt from an old Kikuyu tribesman. "He taught me to use my eyes and ears as well as my nose, and to be patient in order to remain motionless for long periods of time waiting for an animal to come within range," Mr. Selby told The American Rifleman.
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Mr. Selby attended local schools, travelling by ox cart, and later the Prince of Wales, a boarding school in Nairobi. After World War II, he worked for Mr. Percival, who recognized his potential as a hunter-guide, and in 1949 he joined East Africa's foremost safari outfitter, Ker & Downey, based in Nairobi. In 1956, after Mr. Ruark's book had made him famous, he formed his own safari company, Selby & Holmberg.
In 1953, he married Maria Elizabeth Clulow, known as Miki. They had two children, Mark and Gail. Mark died in 2017. Mr. Selby is survived by his wife, daughter and a number of grandchildren.
In 1962, as Kenyan independence loomed and political upheavals dimmed prospects for safaris in East Africa, he accepted a partnership in his old company, which became Ker, Downey and Selby, and in 1963 moved as it’s trailblazer to Bechuanaland, a British protectorate that became independent Botswana in 1966. It was a hunter's and a photographer's paradise.
"What we found exceeded our wildest expectations; a land which the passage of time had passed by, where nature had remained unchanged in the 20th century," Mr. Selby said in a 2013 interview for this obituary. "The vast savannas were teeming with huge herds of elephant, buffalo, kudu, zebra, wildebeest and sable. Lions were everywhere, showing little fear of man."
For 30 years, Mr. Selby ran company operations in Botswana, and guided hunters and photographers into leased concessions covering thousands of square miles in the Okavango Delta in the north and the vast Kalahari Desert in the south, home of the click-talking Bushmen. He cut tracks and built airfields in the wilderness.
In 1970, he established Botswana's first lodge and camps for photographic safaris. He hired guides and a large support staff for what became a dominant safari business in Southern Africa. After Ker, Downey and Selby was bought by Safari South in 1978, he remained a director, and even after resigning in 1993 he continued to lead safaris privately until retiring in 2000.
In 2007, President Festus Mogae of Botswana [Ed: 1999-2004], awarded Mr. Selby the Presidential Certificate of Honour in recognition of his contributions to hunting and photographic tourism.
*****
COWBOYS DON’T FLY by John Steed [KR6762]
FROM CHAPTER - 2 - THE KENYA REGIMENT. At the age of sixteen, I found myself on the job market with nothing more than a Cambridge school certificate. The best I could do was a junior clerk's post in a small but thriving insurance brokerage closely associated with Lloyd's of London, where the first thing I did after settling into the clerical drudgery was to fall head over heels in love with the boss' daughter. Rosemary was a blue-eyed blonde, a year or so older than me, but as versed in matters of the heart as I was naïve. Our torrid encounters at drive-in movies and teenage bebop parties soon attracted the displeasure of both sets of parents, and it was not long before they collectively hatched a plan which would put an end to our passionate liaison.
Dad's post as Deputy Director of Manpower in Kenya, put him in sole charge of the conscription process, now in full swing following the advent of the Mau-Mau uprising that engulfed Kenya in a bloody war for several years. Although the fighting was drawing to a sullen conclusion, the call-up
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of young white men continued unabated. I was a year younger than the normal age, but one day at breakfast Dad dropped an ominous brown envelope next to my plate.
"There you are John. I thought I would save the government the cost of a postage stamp..." I tore open the envelope and stared in amazement. Before me were official papers, signed by my own father, ordering me to report within the next three months, to the Kenya Regiment Training Centre at Nakuru, some 90 miles north-west of Nairobi. My half-baked teenage dreams of eloping to Gretna Green in Scotland, enrolling in the RAF and becoming an ace fighter pilot were dashed in an instant. Protest or even discussion were out of the question, and so suffering the heart agony that only a callow teenage youth can feel, I found myself in the back of a draughty green-painted military lorry thundering along the road to an undesired, premature, rendezvous with the army.
Along with 100 or so similarly reluctant recruits I soon had a taste of what army life would be like for the next six months. We must have been a sorry sight for the handful of drill sergeants, drawn mainly from the Brigade of Guards. Our long hair and fashionable “Teddy Boy” sideburns were attacked by a trio of Indian barbers wielding vicious looking shears and clippers that left nothing but a square of ugly stubble on top. Once kitted out with boots and uniforms then weighed, measured and inspected by the camp doctor [Ed: Major John Ward, RAMC?], we were ready for anything, or so we thought. Nothing had prepared us for the harsh regime starting at 06h00 with PT and a road run before a gobbled breakfast followed by a morning filled with yelling sergeants on the parade square as our scruffy rabble struggled to learn the rudiments of marching in step, turning, wheeling and drilling in every conceivable way. Any recruit who made the slightest misstep would earn a barrage of vituperative abuse.
"You, Smith, are a horrible useless little man. What are you?" The required instant response from Smith would be..."I am a horrible useless little man, Sergeant!" Failure to provide this reply in less than a millisecond would earn the hapless recruit a summary punishment of running circuits of the parade square carrying two sand-filled fire-buckets until sometimes, literally dropping from fatigue. Most of the hardened drill sergeants showed open contempt for the motley bunch of what they clearly considered to be pampered colonial softies. But none of them was half as vicious as the fearsome and deeply loathed Company Sergeant Major (CSM) Cardy (Irish Guards) who harangued, lambasted and punished us in a constant stream of vicious insults. Like all bullies, the CSM had a few unlucky regular victims to whom he had taken a particular dislike, and woe-betide any of them who incurred his displeasure.
One of these unfortunates had been a school friend of mine, Eddie Morris [KR6758], whose Bohemian habits and non-conformist approach to life made him totally unsuitable for any kind of military discipline. Eddie was a talented artist, actor and musician - but none of these skills were of any use to him in the army. All his spare time was spent on jankers - loathed disciplinary fatigue duties – in a never-ending spiral of punishments meted out for his complete inability to look, behave, let alone think like a soldier. He was regularly late on parade, dishevelled to a degree that sent the CSM apoplectic with rage. In his broad Ulster accent, he would scream red-faced at Eddie. "Yaw, yaw, yaw...are a harrrible, filty, little piece of dirty shhite, yaw! What are yaw?" But instead of the required instant repetition of his shortcomings Eddie would respond with disarming innocence. "Sorry Sir, I didn't quite catch that. Could you repeat it please?"
This response was guaranteed to propel the CSM to new summits of incandescent fury and Eddie would be sentenced to ever increasing levels of jankers and sometimes the much feared “Company Orders” where he would appear before the Commanant KRTC [Major Tony (Rogue) Barkas?] on charges like “passive insubordination”. Inexorably, Eddie's mischievous nature got the better of him and his fertile mind hatched a plan to avenge his continuous mortification. Every morning the four platoons of recruits would assemble on the main parade square facing a prominent white dot painted
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in the dead centre of the ground. When all was ready for him, the wax-moustachioed CSM would march majestically, pace-stick tucked into his armpit, through the entrance arch in a gleaming array of burnished leather, polished brasses and starched khaki, his peaked guardsman's parade cap and regimental sash proclaiming him to be the epitome of superb soldier-hood. A deathly silence reigned as he approached his painted spot which he would reach at exactly the end of a march step, in a display of consummate drill precision. He would then snap to a halt with a clatter of his steel- tipped boots, turn towards us, and with a bellowed command of "Paraade, Atttennnnnshun!" proceedings would begin.
One fateful morning Eddie had been on early morning jankers and part of his duties had been to dispose of every canine turd in the camp precincts. Given that every officer and NCO appeared to own at least two dogs, these were not in short supply. He had succumbed to the irresistible temptation of placing the most noxious lump of dog shit he could find in the dead centre of the CSM's white painted dot. He had also taken the precaution of flattening and disguising the turd with white-wash. Thus, no one had noticed his heinous crime. I had a good vantage point in the front rank of my platoon and I can still picture CSM Cardy as his boot came crashing down on the foul excrement with a dull “splotch” instead of the usual clang of steel heel-cap. On comprehending the enormity of the crime that had been perpetrated, he exploded in a howl of volcanic rage. His face now puce with uncontrollable anger and his boots covered in a film of dog shit, he screamed and yelled threats of dire retribution on the whole company if a culprit was not immediately forthcoming.
He had not long to wait. Eddie stepped forward in as military a manner as he could muster, and confessed in a voice of innocent bewilderment that he must have “overlooked” that one when doing his turd collecting rounds. The last we saw of Eddie was him being marched at the double between two military policemen on his way to the cells. Needless to say, the court martial did not buy the “Sorry, I overlooked it” story and Eddie was sentenced to a month's DB in Gilgil(?) for his little prank. He never returned to the training course. After a few days the prison doctor declared he was deranged and totally unfit for military service. Eddie was dishonourably discharged when he had served his prison term. Opinion in the barrack room was sharply divided. Either Eddie was a half- wit or he had worked an ingenious stunt to avoid army duties. I strongly inclined to the latter view.
Once the basics of marching in step, saluting and presenting arms and so forth had been instilled in us, it was on to weapons training with antiquated but functional Lee and Enfield bolt action ·303 rifles and Bren and Patchett machine guns. The firing range was strictly controlled so that no stray rounds could hit a recruit and thus embarrass the authorities.
Lobbing grenades was a different kettle of fish. Here you are dealing with a very dangerous explosive device, and the army curriculum demanded that every recruit lobbed at least one live grenade during the course. This exercise was conducted from a pit – about five feet in depth and ten feet square – interconnected with a series of deeper narrow trenches in which we crouched in a queue, inching along to the central pit for a turn at this newly inculcated skill. The regular loud bangs and showers of debris were a reminder of the destructive power of these little bombs. No matter that hours of training and practice with dummy grenades had led up to this moment, there was a palpable sense of danger about the real thing. The system was for the weapons training sergeant to stand in the central pit, and, one by one, do a dry run through the lobbing procedure with each wide-eyed individual. This entailed pulling out the safety pin with the left hand while clasping the Mills bomb – to use the correct name – in the right. On the order to “throw”, it was a simple matter of using a full over-arm lobbing action to send the missile towards a target area immediately to the front. Recruit and instructor then crouched in the pit until the delayed action detonator did its work producing a loud and satisfying explosion along with clouds of smoke, earth and dust. In combat a Mills bomb explodes after about a five-second delay, but for training, a slightly longer
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fuse is used since there is no inconvenient enemy in the vicinity to pick it up and lob it straight back at you. Just as well.
I was duly nervous as my turn drew near but I noticed that the man ahead of me was literally trembling. This soldier's name was Kloppers, a gentle hulking Afrikaner farm lad from the deeply rural Eldoret district. Klops was not renowned for academic prowess and his command of English was less than perfect, but the gentle giant had an engaging aura of naïve innocence. From my vantage point as next in line in the trench, I could see his eyes glaze over as the instructor, fierce, wiry, sandy-haired Sgt (later CQMS) Dusty Miller (Seaforth Highlanders) went over the drill. "Do you understand what you must do, Kloppers?" "Ja, Sergeant." "Not 'ja' Sergeant. It's 'yes' Sergeant you great idiot. Ye're no' a bloody Hun in the SS." "Ja – yes Sergeant."
With a sigh, Sgt Miller gave up this hopeless battle and handed over the missile. When the order to throw was given, Klops had a single thought in his ponderous mind. Get rid of this nasty lump of metal as fast as possible.... His huge forearm described a perfect semi-circle and the bomb flew away. The only problem was that in his anxiety to get rid of the grenade, Klops had let go of it at the very top of the arc – so the deadly missile went straight up on a near vertical trajectory.
"Get out! Get out!" screamed Miller as he propelled himself and Kloppers towards me in the trench. I could not retreat for the mass of recruits in line behind me, so in an instant I was beneath the flailing limbs of a terrified Klops and his infuriated mentor. Seconds later the grenade landed in the middle of the throwing pit and went off with an ear-splitting explosion that I will never forget.
Nor will I forget the stream of apoplectic invective from the little Scottish sergeant as he disentangled himself from the sprawling melee covered in dust and bereft of his pompom beret. The unfortunate Klops spent the following week in a continuous state of jankers but, thanks to the quick-acting sergeant, he was at least alive to tell the tale.
The army kept me occupied every waking moment, but aeroplanes were never far from my mind and despite the brutal regime of square-bashing, spit and polish, tough PT and rifle drill, we had a few lighter moments. One such moment was in the form of a demonstration flight by the legendary PRAW pilot, “Punch” Bearcroft [KR3142] who was renowned throughout the services for his daring feats of airmanship. The nickname was derived from his facial resemblance to the cartoon character in the satirical English magazine of the same name. Having lost a hand in an accident, this amazing airman could make a light aircraft perform like a trained seal.
One morning after a long hot session of rifle practice on the firing range we were treated to a spectacular display. Punch suddenly appeared from the south, flying his tiny Piper Tri-Pacer at a height of not more than ten feet and launched into a heart-stopping series of low - level zigzagging manoeuvres, swooping turning and jinking with his wingtip mere inches from the ground at times. Then came a demonstration message drop. This entailed opening a window and dropping a small package on to a precise spot. How a one-handed pilot could manage all that while accurately flying at near zero altitude was a source of amazement. I later learnt that Punch overcame his disability by simply strapping his stub arm to the joystick with a length of car tyre inner tubing. We hooted, clapped and cheered our approval as Punch flew off to his next assignment.
From Chapter 8: Back in the air. I left the Dept. of Central Aviation (DCA) offices with a barely concealed grin. At last I had a proper flying qualification. It may have been a humble one, it may have been achieved in an unconventional way, but it was a start. Little did I realise that in a few
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days’ time my very first passengers and I would learn a salutary lesson about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.
That evening I shared the good news with my mess mates. Gerry Tonks, who was in the process of trying to win the affections of a young lady, immediately asked if I could take them both for a flip. "Of course I can," I said and added with a touch of bravado, "I suggest we do a flight into the Rift Valley and have a look at Ol Longonot." [BELOW – PHOTO ROBIN SWIFT]
Our trip was set for the following Sunday and Gerry duly brought along his lady friend who had never flown in any kind of aeroplane before and who admitted to being nervous about the coming experience. "Please don't worry," I assured her, "it really is a piece of cake and I know you’re going to enjoy it."
I strapped the girl and her would-be lover into the cramped rear bench seat and climbed into the front for my first flight as a qualified pilot. The extinct volcano Ol Longonot is a distinctive feature of the Great Rift Valley which lies to the north-west of Nairobi. It is a perfect conical shape and having a relatively small crater, a foot safari around the rim can quite easily be done in a day. We flew over the Nairobi suburbs and surrounding rich, lush coffee estates before crossing the eastern edge of the Rift that drops spectacularly to the Valley floor. Ahead of us the lip of the crater beckoned and I decided this would be a good place to show off my flying skills. Descending into the crater was easy enough, and the view of the crater floor with its brilliant green vegetation was an unforgettable sight. I turned the Cruiser from side to side and descended deeper into the ancient volcano so that both my passengers could have a good view of the panorama. In the rear view mirror I could see they were enthralled.
However, the Rift Valley heat was beginning to produce a little turbulence and I decided it was time to get out of the crater and head for home. That was when things started to get interesting. As the midday temperature climbs, so the air becomes thinner and aircraft engines and airframes are less efficient. Light aeroplanes are notoriously underpowered at high temperatures and altitudes, the Cruiser being no exception. Try as I might to get the little Piper to climb out of the crater it stubbornly refused, and every time I raised the nose to gain a few feet the stall warning horn squawked angrily at me. For a few moments I had the horrific thought that I might have to crash land my fragile craft into the dense undergrowth of the crater floor, but since I had plenty of fuel on board decided to stick it out to the bitter end.
The problem was that in addition to the heated air, the diameter of the volcano was too small to get a decent straight and level climbing run before turning to avoid slamming into the crater wall. Trying to both climb and turn simultaneously would have been suicidal, so backwards and forwards I nursed the Cruiser in a desperate attempt to claw back every foot of altitude I could coax out of her. Finally, my efforts paid off and I was able to gain 50 feet or so. At long last, with the wheels almost touching the rim, we scraped out of the volcano to head back to Wilson Airport. Sweating heavily, I turned to look at my passengers who were a shade of pale green. By now the air was extremely turbulent in the midday heat and we were being tossed around like a ping-pong ball. It
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was not long before the inevitable happened – my formerly starry-eyed companions were both puking violently into the sick bags thoughtfully provided by the club. With the resulting foul stench filling the hot noisy cabin, I was not far behind them and desperately tried to quell the queasy gyrations of my own gut.
Not a moment too soon Wilson Airport appeared on the horizon. It was with a great sense of relief that I felt the tyres of the main gear followed by the tail wheel bump on to the runway. My inexperienced landing was anything but perfect and the passengers could scarcely get out of the aeroplane fast enough. Gerry refused to talk to me for days. Much later he and I were both forgiven by his girlfriend – but at last we were able to laugh together about the whole episode. For my part, I realised that if I wanted to make old bones I had better learn a little bit more about how piston engined light aircraft work and treat flying in a less cavalier fashion
From Chapter 9: Carefree Days. Technically, Uganda was not a Colony but a Protectorate of the Crown; nonetheless all the colonial trappings were there. Life for a bachelor in Kampala centred on the Kampala Sports Club and there I congregated with other young bucks for nightly games of squash followed by the drinking of Nile Lager in industrial quantities. The company of the few available unattached girls was hotly contested and led to more than one bout of fisticuffs among the testosterone charged contenders for their favours. Most evenings ended up with a serious game of liar dice at the long mahogany bar or if things got particularly boisterous, a session of bar jousting. This indoor sport was played by two contestants mounted on barstools and armed with a padded broom. The "Knights of the Grand Tavern" as the jousters were known, faced off and at a given signal were propelled over the polished wooden floor at high speed towards one another by a ‘horse' in the form of a fellow pushing the barstool from behind. There was a degree of fine judgement required of these "steeds" who had to rise up at the point of impact and get their shoulders into the small of the back of their "Knight" in a quest to unseat their opponent. The clashes were spectacularly violent at times but I cannot recall any worse injuries than a couple of loose teeth and a dislocated shoulder. All the while, partisan bellowing for the contestants created a Wild West rodeo atmosphere and there was some spirited side betting on the outcome of the contests. Unsurprisingly, the committee eventually concluded that this kind of behaviour was not conducive to the right atmosphere in a family sports club and banned the sport before any real damage could be done.
Until I could find suitable single accommodation, I lodged as a paying guest with a Scottish advocate and his family. Charles McFadyen was in his early 40's and had lived in Uganda for a number of years. They had a beautiful house on Kololo hill a smart address overlooking Kampala and although he clearly did not need the money, "Charlie" as he was known, thoroughly enjoyed having some male company to offset his bevy of a wife and three young daughters. On the nights when I was not partying at the sports club or dining with clients, I was invariably invited to have dinner with the family after which Charlie and I would smoke a companionable cigar with a glass of single malt Scotch whisky. My host had gained a reputation as a brilliant defence counsel and was much sought after by those in trouble with the law who could afford his exorbitant fees. On one of these evenings Charlie turned to me and asked if I was doing anything special the following day. I replied that things were quiet at the office and asked what he had in mind.
"As it happens, I have a rather interesting case to deal with involving the son of the Omukama of Bunyoro who is up on a murder charge. I thought you might be interested in coming along to watch the fun." I was aware that the Omukama was one of the four traditional kings of Uganda the best- known of whom was of course King Freddie, the Kabaka of Buganda. Although Uganda is now a republic, the ancient kingdoms were recognised internationally as separate entities within the nation. In pre-colonial times, the rulers of the four realms held absolute sway over their people including life and death. Most of these powers had been stripped away but they were still revered by
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their subjects as semi-deities. Very early the next morning, we set off in Charlie's Jaguar on the dusty 110-mile trip to Hoima, the kingdom's capital in Western Uganda. On the way, Charlie described the detail of the charges against the Crown Prince who was accused of beating a love rival to death with fists and a beer bottle during a fight at a shebeen on the outskirts of town. In the "good old days" the young man would have been severely admonished by the King, exiled for a few months and then exonerated, but in the new Republic nobody was above the law, or so the law said. Charlie had done previous work for all the Kings defending various members of their turbulent families on criminal charges. The Royal Palace to which we had been invited for coffee before the court case was a fine stone building surrounded by a high thick palisade made of papyrus reeds and heavily guarded by askaris wielding knobkerries and spears.
The Jaguar was waved through the gate and we were treated as honoured guests - with me having been introduced as a "legal assistant". Charlie and I were immediately ushered into the throne room and seated on low stools by the King's male secretary, a stately gentleman dressed in traditional robes. Shortly afterwards the King, a tall, rotund, jolly looking gentleman entered accompanied by his equally rubicund Queen. Greetings complete we took our lowly positions in front of the thrones, no commoner being permitted to have his or her head in a higher spot than their majesties. I gazed in wonderment around the throne room which was about 50ft. square and saw that every inch of the floors, walls and ceilings was covered in lion and leopard skins.
I later learnt that every one of these species killed in the kingdom since time immemorial became the property of the Crown and any hunter who transgressed this law used to be summarily executed. This vast collection of pelts, and there were thousands more stored at the back of the palace, was the accumulation of homage to royalty accumulated since the 14th century. Considering his Majesty also held titles which included " The Orphan Protector, The Hater of Rebellion, The Lion of Bunyoro, The Hero of Bunyoro, The Hero of Kabalega, The Defender and Protector of Banyoro Culture, The Defender and Protector of Banyoro Oral Tradition, The Defender of Traditional African Religions, Omukama of The Kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara, The Sovereign Head and Grand Master of The Royal Order of Omujwaara Kondo and The Royal Order of Engabu, The Sovereign Head, Grand Master and Protector of The Most Honourable Order of Omukama Chwa II Kabalega, The Royal Patron of The Chivalrous and Religious Order of the Crown of Thorns, The Royal Patron of The Sovereign, Knightly and Noble Order of The Lion and Black Cross" and so forth, the reverence of his subjects was hardly surprising.
Pleasantries over we climbed back into the Jaguar and followed the Royal limousine to the centre of the scruffy little town of Hoima where the court building, a single-storey brick and corrugated iron structure was surrounded by a noisy crowd of onlookers. As the King and Queen alighted from their limo, the mob immediately prostrated themselves in submission to the Royal personages, face and palms down. The charade was repeated inside the courtroom where the audience remained prone until their Majesties had occupied their gilded chairs on a specially erected dais designed to keep their heads above all others.
Naturally our case was the first on the court roll and when the young Prince arrived in the dock handcuffed, barefoot and clad in jeans and T-shirt, a hushed murmur from the crowd was swiftly silenced by the magistrate, a wizened grey-haired gnome of a man who clearly brooked no nonsense. The prosecution outlined the case for the state and called three witnesses to testify to the brutality of the attack on the victim. The case appeared hopeless and I wondered if any Prince of a Ugandan kingdom had ever been sent to the gallows. But I had not reckoned with the skills of my friend Charlie. Impressively bewigged and gowned in the robes of a Queen's Counsel and freely perspiring in the late morning heat, Charlie systematically destroyed the prosecution case, inveigled the state witnesses into making conflicting statements and then triumphantly produced two suave and well spoken witnesses who swore blind that this had been nothing but an unprovoked attack. In
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fact, they claimed, the Prince had merely defended his life to the best of his ability and in any case the murder victim was a known vicious thug and deserved whatever he got. This elicited a howl of protest from the victim's family and again the magistrate rapped his gavel for silence.
Arguments complete, the magistrate sent the jury off to consider their verdict while Charlie and I found a cool spot under a mango tree for a quiet cigarette. We did not have to wait long. Less than half an hour later we were summoned back into the courtroom and as the jury filed into their box, Charlie gave a small smile of satisfaction. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, our Prince was a free man without any stain on his character.
Back at the palace, a sumptuous lunch had been laid on in anticipation of a triumphant victory and was served to us while seated on cushions at a low table on the lush palace lawns. This posed yet another challenge for the serving staff who had to cope with bowls of steaming meat and vegetables, bottles of beer and glasses of whisky whilst leopard-crawling around the table where the King, now visibly jollier, proposed a lengthy series of toasts. It was late afternoon by the time we bade farewell and set off for Kampala, Charlie having stashed a large bag of Uganda shillings in the boot of the Jaguar. No such niceties as submitting a fee note in these circumstances. I had witnessed the wheels of justice in motion, Uganda style.....
I was one of a group of bachelors who regularly racked up hospitality debts to married couples which was difficult to return other than in restaurants and bars. This prompted a group of us to pool our resources and hold an annual "big bash", invitations to which soon became a sought after commodity in Uganda’s expatriate society. The central idea was to give each party a whimsical theme. In 1962, we sent out invitations styling ourselves as "the Sludge Drinkers’ Syndicate" inviting guests to "celebrate the 1,750th anniversary of Hannibal's crossing of the Alps". The following year was also the year of independence for Kenya.
The Ugandan government had declared a public holiday in solidarity with their neighbours which presented us with an obvious opportunity. We got together in the sports club bar and plotted a bash to end all bashes, coinciding with the public holiday thus allowing guests plenty of time to recover from hangovers. A mutual friend, John Kelly, generously allowed us to use his large house with five acres on Tank Hill overlooking Kampala as a party venue; preparations got under way. Invitations were sent far and wide imploring guests to help us "celebrate the end of the white man's burden" and the Sludge Drinkers’ Syndicate morphed into "the League of ex-Empire Loyalists". We decided to limit the size of the party to around 200 and requested responses by "bearer with cleft stick". Guests were expected to wear suitable Victorian-style clothing and many turned up in civil service uniforms or explorers' kit embellished with pith helmets and fake medals made from beer bottle caps. One enterprising fellow had even instructed a "slave pole" and proudly strutted into the throng with his tethered "wife" trotting meekly behind. To set the tone, we had erected a flagpole from which fluttered the Union Flag, the idea being that when Kenya became independent precisely at midnight, the flag would be lowered to signify the end of the colonial era. There were portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill and various historical figures such as David Livingstone. As the guests arrived they were expected to swallow a glass of lethal punch brewed with about 80% vodka and tastefully served from a toilet pan, which, it should be said, had been borrowed from the local plumbers and had never been used for its intended purpose. On the stroke of midnight the Union Flag slithered slowly down the pole and a spontaneous chorus of God save the Queen erupted. After that the party began in earnest. A late supper was served, dance music cranked up and the bar was still going strong when the next day dawned.
Five days later I was in my office going through mail when my secretary, a genteel grey-haired English lady came in, her face ashen, and whispered breathlessly, "Mr Steed, the police are in reception demanding to see you! What shall I do?"
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"Show them in Marjorie, I'm sure it can't be anything serious."
I was very wrong. A diffident chief inspector backed by three armed constables, came in and handed me a warrant allowing them to "search for and seize subversive and seditious literature and tape recordings relating to an illegal organisation known as the League of ex-Empire Loyalists." I was dumbfounded. While the three constables rooted around the hundreds of files and bits of paper that any insurance office generates, the chief inspector asked me to give a statement about my connection with this shadowy group. I did my best to explain that the whole thing was clearly a ridiculous farce but he simply did not grasp the concept of people laughing at themselves. After an hour or so the quartet left my office with several boxes full of random files and my Dictaphone machine along with 40 or so hour-long tapes. I rang around and found that all my fellow hosts had enjoyed similar visits with predictably identical results. We decided to meet urgently for a beer at the City Bar, a watering hole that was often used for a colonial style lunchtime drink.
Ginger haired Colin, the oldest and most fiery of the bunch was all for insisting on an immediate interview with the Commissioner of Police to demand an apology for unwarranted harassment. Wiser heads prevailed. It was obvious that there was a political motive for this affair and it would be a good idea to keep our heads down and sit it out until the next move. We did not have long to wait.
On 20 December, the Prime Minister, Milton Obote, made a lengthy statement to the Uganda parliament about the Tank Hill party. The proceedings lasted several hours and once the debate was opened to the body of the house, MP's issued angry denunciations of the guests claiming that the Uganda flag had been trampled and urinated upon, insulting songs sung, rude impersonations of East African leaders performed and similar preposterous claims. One over excited gentleman told the house that the organisers were associated with "the Ku Klux Klan who had killed President Kennedy" and there were calls for a public flogging at the Independence Arch.
The docile Uganda press picked up on the story and without bothering to check the facts, faithfully parroted the government line. Next day, Obote held a press conference at which he said that investigations would continue into this serious matter but "I have already decided what action to take." In response we issued a press release to the effect that we were pleased to hear that investigations would continue and were "quite confident that enquiries among the 200 or so guests at the party would reveal the entirely innocuous nature of the party which was solely a gathering of friends." The press never got around to printing that one.
Matters turned really ugly on the following day, 22 December, when the house where the party had been held was burnt to the ground. With the press and media baying for blood and talk of a minimum five-year prison sentence being bandied about, we got together for a furtive meeting and discussed a contingency plan. Tony Lawrence and I were both members of the flying club at Entebbe on the shores of Lake Victoria, home of the country's main airport later made famous by the Israeli raid to free hostages during the reign of Idi Amin. Colin Sibley also had a PPL but having recently crashed into Lake Victoria, he did not have too many takers for seats on any plane flown by him. Colin's accident had been bizarre to say the least. He had managed to put the aircraft into a flat spin from which it pan-caked onto the water where it comfortably floated. Colin clambered out and crawled on top of the wing and before long a posse of local fishermen rushed to his aid in their dugout canoe. In their zeal the rescuers punched a hole in the flimsy fabric of the fuselage with their boat's prow despite Colin's frantic yelling. Down she went to the bottom while Colin, infuriated shouted dire curses and threats at the hapless rescuers as he clambered onto the canoe to be paddled safely ashore.
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The plan was for Tony and I to "borrow" two of the club's aeroplanes and fly them to Northern Rhodesia where we hoped to get a sympathetic hearing.
To say that it was a half - baked idea would not be an exaggeration. We had no idea how we would get fuel along the way, find airstrips in foreign countries or anything else very much. One thing we were confident of was that there would be no aerial pursuit. Uganda did not possess an air force. Fortunately, we were saved from crash landing or an ignominious arrest in Tanganyika because we had a contact who was a British expat senior officer seconded on attachment to the Uganda Police Special Branch. Our "mole" was untainted because, although he was one of the invited guests, was nursing a heavy cold on the party night and had stayed away. If there was any suggestion of physical harm or imprisonment, he would have been the first to know and assured us that a tip-off would come in good time.
From Chapter 19: The Rhodesian Bush War - Part 2 - Dead Weight. One of the airstrips in the heart of the ops area was feared and detested by all pilots. This was the infamous Mutawatawa in the Mrewa district, a mere fifteen flight to the south-west of Forward Air Field 5 (FAF5). In common with many of the operational airfields, it had a narrow dirt runway prone to being dug up at night by the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) guerrillas and planted with landmines. Although the runway was combed for land mining activity every morning, in February 1979 it was the scene of the death of Byrne Gardener, an Internal Affairs (INTAF) pilot who lost his life when an anti-tank mine went undetected. Byrne's Cessna 206 detonated the device and the resultant shrapnel wounds to his legs caused fatal bleeding. The other problem was that the locstat (location statement) was within a bowl of low hills so that no matter the direction of take-off or landing, a late afternoon arrival or departure frequently drew guerrilla gunfire because it would then be too late for ground forces to give chase to the perpetrators before nightfall. Another INTAF pilot, Russell Kilner suffered a bullet wound to his stomach from ground fire in the same area. Fortunately, he survived the ordeal. Tempting fate anywhere near Mutawatawa was not to be recommended.
One September afternoon as the shadows were lengthening after a long day's flying, I was sprawled in a deck chair on the lawn enjoying the early evening sunshine. An air force reservist, Air Lieutenant Syd Kelly, who was then directing operations at FAF5 poked his head out of the ops room door with an unusual request. "John, I have a bit of a tricky one here. The fuzz - British South Africa Police (BSAP) - at one of our locstats have a problem on their hands. There was a contact with some gooks earlier today and one of their Shona sergeants was badly wounded. Unfortunately, he has just died and his mates are highly superstitious. They don't want the body to be in camp overnight as they fear the tokoloshe may visit. Do you think you could bring the body out? The guys there would really appreciate it." The tokoloshe was an evil spirit in the form of a sprite, much feared by the Shona people and their superstitions had to be taken seriously.
"Hmm...Syd, never been asked to do anything like that before, but I suppose I could give it a go. Where is this locstat by the way?""Mutawatawa." "Oh...shit!" "John, I understand your feelings. I can always tell them the PRAW plane has gone unserviceable. It's really up to you."
I replied with a jauntiness I did not really feel. "OK Syd, I'll get airborne. But you’ll definitely owe me a beer for this one." With dusk approaching there was not enough time to refuel and at take-off my gauges were indicating less than a quarter of a tank in each wing. I had totted up the flights I had already done that day – just over four-and-a-half hours on tanks designed to give five-and-a- half hours of flight. So I had enough but it was going to be tight. Mutawatawa appeared in the gathering gloom and I approached the strip at high speed anxious to get the job done and hopefully avoid coming under fire from the ground. There was a standard procedure in place whereby a truck would drive up an unmanned airfield to demonstrate to pilots that there were no mines lurking in
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the sand. Impatient to land, I did not even wait for the dust to settle. The Member-in-Charge and a couple of constables were at the end of the strip sitting in an open Land Rover. In the back was a black body bag containing the corpse of Sergeant Nyagano, killed in action.
There was no time to waste; the short African dusk was already fading into night. This was the most dangerous time to be taking off from Mutawatawa and despite my armour-plated, supposedly bullet-proof seat, small arms fire from the ground was a real threat. Besides, I was also worried about my low fuel state. Circling the airfield during the ground clearance process had used up more than I had bargained for. Cutting the engine, I jumped out and explained the reasons for my haste. If I'd had the time, I would have removed the front passenger seat before leaving Mtoko, but this had not been an option. There was only one way I would get Sergeant Nyagano into the 182 – and that was to push back the front passenger seat as far as possible and strap the bag containing the rigid corpse on to the seat in a semi-upright position. This used up at least five minutes and I took off into the gloom with the airstrip now barely visible.
Until I had cleared the surrounding hills, I was on edge, waiting for the snap and crack of small arms fire but fortunately any gooks in the area chose to leave us alone. Now I had two problems - darkness as well as fuel. I could do nothing about either. The fuel gauges were bouncing on empty and night was now approaching. With my lifeless companion, his body bag suffused in the soft red glow of the instrument panel, I flew towards Mtoko. The remaining ten minutes or so felt like an hour and to distract my mind from the problems, I had a one-way chat with my “passenger”. "Sergeant Nyagano," I said out loud, "you were a very brave man and I am proud to be able to do this small thing for you and your family. I wish you well in your afterlife and maybe our spirits will meet. Who knows? Anyway, I hope the tokoloshe will not trouble your spirit."
Flying in total darkness over the African bush with a dead passenger, no spare fuel and no navigation aids was an eerie sensation. At any moment I expected the heart-stopping cough and then silence as my engine quit. I prayed that my fate would not be a catastrophic forced descent into the hostile rocky territory below. There was little wind so by holding a steady compass course I should not be blown off track and miss Mtoko. Then at last, when it seemed I would never get to my destination, there it was. A faint line of light shed by the gooseneck paraffin flares that Syd Kelly had arranged to have lit for me along one side of the runway. Relief overtook my fears as we were now almost close enough to glide in if the fuel ran out. I suddenly felt a surge of kinship with the late Sergeant Nyagano. Leaning across to the passenger seat I gave him an emotional pat on the shoulder.
"Looks like we are going to make it, my mate! Thanks for your company and go well." Descending fast to runway height I switched on the 182's puny landing light and picked out the welcome sight of the white painted runway number 06. Syd was waiting for me outside the ops room. "Thanks John, was all Syd had to say. It was enough.
From Chapter 19: The Rhodesian Bush War – Part 3 – Yorick. A major plank of the Rhodesian defences against the hordes of guerrillas crossing the northern borders was the “Cordon Sanitaire” or “CORSAN” as it came to be known. The strategy was to build an impregnable fence thus preventing the entry of gangs from the north. The idea was to eventually surround the whole country with this barrier which consisted of two rows of heavy duty barbed wire game-fencing between which were planted a profusion of anti-personnel mines. It was widely rumoured that the South African Government, sympathetic to the Rhodesian cause, had footed the entire bill for this costly project.
The job of maintaining this expensive edifice fell to the Corps of Engineers, better known as the Sappers. Tough jobs breed hardened men and there were not too many units tougher than the
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Sappers. The north-eastern border of Rhodesia was marked by the wide Zambezi River which rises in Barotseland and runs all the way to the Indian Ocean via northern Mozambique. The terrain is rough, infested with tsetse flies and murderously hot during the summer months. One of the Sappers’ bases was at Mukumbura, a dusty, scorching hellhole near the confluence of the Mukumvura River with the Zambezi. The base HQ was an open-sided tent which also served as the mess for the men consigned to this inhospitable spot. Their sense of humour was undiminished by the inhuman conditions. A hand-made placard at the entrance ironically welcomed visitors to the “Mukumbura Surf and Sporting Club”.
Close to the camp was a dirt airstrip and occasionally PRAW was used to deliver men or spares to this unappealing destination. Once, whilst I was on deployment to FAF4 Mount Darwin in late 1978, an RLI Colonel had need to spend a morning at “Mukkers” as it was generally known. We flew in during the early morning to avoid the searing midday heat. While the RLI officer went off with the senior base NCO on a tour of inspection of the CORSAN, I was left to my own devices in the mess tent. The camp cook rustled up a good breakfast of bacon and eggs and while enjoying this, I was joined by a pair of young Sappers, clad solely in khaki shorts and “vellies” (veldschoene - bush boots, the ubiquitous Rhodesian military footwear), their skin sunburnt to a deep chocolatey brown. The dining-table had a curious artefact placed strategically in the middle. It was a human skull with a neat triangular hole punched through the forehead. Although no one expected gracious surroundings, this seemed a little incongruous despite the circumstances. I enquired about the origin of the macabre centrepiece. “Oh well, ja,” said one of my companions, “it belonged to some gook who tried to get through the CORSAN and didn’t actually make it. We found it on a patrol. And ja, the eye sockets makes a bleddy good candlestick holder.” “Certainly an unusual one,” I murmured.
Although photography in the operational area was strictly forbidden, as a PRAW pilot I had to carry a camera to photograph suspicious objects from the air. I took advantage of this privilege to get one of the Sappers to take a shot of me with the gruesome relic. And then, unable to resist the temptation, I picked up the skull and holding it at arm’s length, theatrically intoned the Bard’s immortal words. “Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well!” My table mates stared at me in wordless astonishment. At length one of them blurted out. “How the fokken hell did you know this ouen (bloke)?!” This was said with a tinge of suspicion about my having any kind of relationship with the unfortunate former owner of their table decoration. As best I could, I explained that it was simply a literary quotation and that the original words were those of none other than Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. I should have realised that the school curriculum of my new friends was unlikely to have laid much emphasis on Shakespeare’s immortal dramas. The explanation thus fell on stony ground, and as I left with my passenger to return to the airfield, the duo was still muttering and casting quizzical glances in my direction, not wholly convinced of my bona fides.
From Chapter 30: George and the Rhino. "I'd like you to talk to Anthony Hall-Martin who is sitting here with me now, about that chat we had on flying a rhino in one of your aeroplanes." Anthony was one of the legends of South African wildlife conservation. He wasted no time in outlining the proposal. The TV wildlife channel, “Discovery”, had agreed to finance a movie about the aerial translocation of a pair of black rhinos to be donated by South Africa to Malawi where these magnificent creatures had been hunted to extinction. Panthera productions, an American company founded by South African born William Taylor, had been commissioned to do the filming and were looking for a suitable aircraft to undertake the flight. How about it?
It was a golden opportunity for Sky Relief to make a contribution towards wildlife conservation and by the end of the phone call, I had agreed to provide a Buffalo free of charge to fly the rhino to Malawi from Skukuza airfield in the Kruger National Park. The dimensions of the crate were faxed through and while its height meant that the fit would be excruciatingly tight, preparations for the
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trip went ahead. Putting pressing business issues on the back burner, I decided this was a trip I simply could not miss. It turned out to be one of life's great experiences.
With two of our top captains, Robin Hood and Blake Few at the controls, Delta flew into Skukuza airfield the day before the scheduled flight to the Liwonde National Park in Malawi. A key man, Sky Relief chief engineer Bill Hurrell and myself were also on board and met the stars of the upcoming show, game ranger George Phiri and his charge, Chimpanye, the first of “our” two rhinos.
Chimpanye was not in a good mood. Until a few days before his incarceration at Kruger, he had been a resident of the Pilanesberg Game Reserve freely browsing the thorn scrub and generally living what could be described as the good life for a rhino. Then a highly specialised team of game trappers from the wildlife service had arrived to give chase by helicopter, dart him with anaesthetic drugs and to be trucked off ignominiously to Kruger where he impatiently awaited transport to a new home. The black rhino is a notoriously irascible species and Chimpanye was no exception. He trotted ceaselessly around his holding pen, tossing his head, snorting and occasionally mock- charging the wooden stakes in a show of extreme irritation. Anxiously watching over him was his friend and guardian, George Phiri.
From early childhood George had seen the effects of poaching on the rhino population in his home country of Malawi but could do nothing to stop it. Some 20 years earlier he had left his birthplace to take a job in the South African National Parks as a monitor within the Pilanesberg rhino project. George had nurtured a lifelong dream of seeing black rhinos re-introduced to Malawi in the hope of starting a new population. Balding and bespectacled, diminutive George did not fit the popular image of a rugged game scout. George’s modest appearance belied his steely courage, bush craft, and deep affection for wild animals, especially rhinos.
There was no time to be lost, it would take the Buffalo a little over three hours to cover the 650 nautical mile distance between Skukuza and Liwonde in Malawi, and the punishing heat of midday in Malawi would be an extra hazard to Chimpanye's well-being. The immigration officer stamped our passports while the customs man wrote out our clearance using the bonnet of a truck for a desk. This final document was handed over with a flourish and without wasting any more time, Delta took off into the stiff breeze and climbed to an altitude of 10,000 feet heading for Malawi.
The mood in the cargo bay was one of controlled excitement. Half a dozen of the original paratroopers' folding canvas seats had been put in place for the passengers which included the camera and sound men, William Taylor, and two game capture scouts from Kruger. Throughout the entire flight George spoke softly to his charge whispering, "Don't worry. Don't worry. Don't worry," in a gentle singsong tone which seemed to calm the animal just as much as the drugs administered by Markus Hofmeyr who continually monitored Chimpanye's vital signs. If this rhino was not going to survive the journey, it certainly wouldn't be through lack of care.
Flying north-east above the grey green bush of the South African lowveld across the Limpopo River and then over the lush green of Malawi with a live rhino aboard was a magical experience. I went forward to sit in the crew jump seat between the two pilots and chatted to Robin and Blake through the engineer's headset.
"How's it going back there?" Robin wanted to know. "It's fine. Chimpanye is sleepy but awake and he isn't trying to punch holes in our aeroplane, so all is well. Still, George and Markus will be really happy to see him safely on the ground."
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I reflected, perhaps a little too smugly, that apart from our hitch with the loading, our epic trip was going beautifully to plan. But it is usually at such moments that Robbie Burns' dictum that the best laid plans o' mice and men gang aft agley, comes to taunt us. A rude shock lay in wait.
As we crossed the Malawi border, I heard Blake in the co-pilot's right-hand seat make a routine radio call to the Malawi air traffic control centre at Lilongwe. "Lilongwe this is Zulu Sierra Romeo Delta how do you read?" "Go ahead Sierra Romeo Delta – you are coming through strength five." "We are a DHC-5 Buffalo at flight level 100. We have eight pax and one live rhinoceros aboard. Requesting VFR descent clearance into Liwonde." "Sierra Romeo Delta, you are clear to descend VFR to Lilongwe, no reported traffic for your descent."
As the Buffalo started to descend towards our destination, Robin was clearly uneasy and asked, "Didn't he say Lilongwe, not Liwonde?" Blake keyed the radio again and repeated our request for clearance direct to Liwonde but the controller took his time to respond. When he did, the answer was emphatic.
"Sierra Romeo Delta, this is Lilongwe, you cannot go direct to Liwonde. You must first come to Lilongwe for customs and immigration."
The choice was stark – risk total disaster for the project or violate the aviator's code by defying Air Traffic Control. There was only one solution. While the two captains busied themselves with pre- landing checks, I took over the hand mike, and holding it about a foot away from my face, called our intransigent controller.
"Lilongwe, this is Sierra Romeo Delta. Please say again your last transmission – you are breaking up, I say again you are breaking up. Confirm we are cleared for a final approach to Liwonde." "Sierra Romeo Delta, negative! I say again negative! You must proceed immediately to Lilongwe!"
Holding the mike even further away, I responded, "Lilongwe, Sierra Romeo Delta, you are now coming through only strength one, I say again you are unreadable, you are unreadable, we will call you from the ground at Liwonde."
And so in defiance of Air Traffic Control, we landed on the dusty national park airstrip to be met by a full contingent of dignitaries and wildlife enthusiasts. The best news was that our rhino was alive and well. The huge steel crate was disgorged from the belly of the Buffalo and Chimpanye was safely installed in a temporary boma where the antidote jab administered by Markus soon had him cantering around the enclosure making mock charges at the journalists who were capturing the moment with cameras poked through gaps in the wooden stakes.
The only cloud on our horizon was the small matter of an angry air traffic controller at Lilongwe. Delta was due to return to Skukuza the next morning and collect a female companion for Chimpanye. Any difficulty with the aviation authorities could prove very problematic. We need not have worried. Phone calls were made and strings pulled by one of the senior Malawi Government officials and we were assured that the return journeys would be unhindered. We discovered later that the stubborn controller had indeed been aware of the existence of our special clearance but was miffed because he had not been consulted or notified officially. Little did he know that his fit of pique could have sparked both the tragic loss of a rhino as well as a major diplomatic incident.
The next morning when I emerged from the tent I was sharing with Robin Hood, there was an itchy red spot on my right hip. Assuming that a mosquito had somehow evaded the barrier of netting, I
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thought nothing more of it. However, a few days after my return to Harare, I was struck with a debilitating raging fever. The spot had become an angry welt with a red line extending to my groin producing swellings of a most unwelcome variety.
I took to my bed, sick as the proverbial dog. After the first diagnosis of malaria proved incorrect, it transpired I had unwittingly shared my sleeping bag with a particularly nasty little creature. A sac spider. This cream coloured harmless looking member of the Clubionidae genus is only a few millimetres in length yet can inject a cytotoxic venom producing a spreading wound that quickly becomes necrotic. Eventually with good medical care, the wound healed leaving nothing but minor scarring - a small price to pay for the privilege of playing a part in this historic operation.
The resultant movie George and the Rhino was aired several times on both Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. Whenever I replay the video, the message of hope that shines through in George Phiri's engaging natural performance evokes the wonderful sense of achievement we all experienced when Chimpanye was later released into the wild.
George's dream of rhino returning to his home country had been fulfilled and was the forerunner of further successful translocations. Today Malawi is home to a small but viable black rhino population and many of the females relocated from South Africa have produced young. Safari operators in Malawi are already offering rhino tracking trips for tourists.
It is a beacon of hope for a species that has come close to global extinction.
[Ed: I thought a longer than normal extract from John’s book would be of interest to readers, many of whom, myself included, ended up in Rhodesia, before emigrating after Zimbabwe attained Independence. John joined the RAF, qualifying on provost jet fighter trainers before resigning in 1960. He later moved to Rhodesia and joined the Police Reserve Air Wing. I joined the British Army before resigning and joining the Rhodesian Army. One of many good, honest books that have been written post-Independence and worthy of a place on your book shelves.]
*****
KING'S ROYAL RIFLES CORPS ASSOCIATION ANNUAL DELHI DAY LUNCH
John Davis writes: The following KR members attended the lunch at the Victory Services Club, London on Saturday 8 September 2018. Many ex-KRRC and Royal Green Jackets were present, and we were made very welcome at what was a splendid event. The Honorary Life President of the KRRCA, Field Marshall Lord Bramall, was present and some of us had the pleasure of meeting him.
ABOVE: L/R: JOHN DAVIS [KR7457], GERALD ANGEL, [KR6066], JOHN BOULLE [KR6193], IAIN MORRISON [KR6111] AND TONY PERKINS [KR7029].
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DOWN MEMORY LANE - KENYA FEB/MARCH 2017
[Sue Johnson (née White) w/o the late Alan (Cactus) KR4993, Jeremy and Eve]
In 2016, the UK branch of ‘Nandi Hills,’ organised a three-day reunion in Dorset, to take place in September of that year. I was inspired to visit friends from Kenya’s 50s-60’s era who had retired in UK, so decided to include the reunion in my itinerary. My brother, Jeremy and his wife, Eve who live in Wiltshire, and my daughter Davina from Australia, drove to Chichester for the event. From the time we arrived it was ‘party time’ - three days of fun, laughter and reminiscing….
On our return to Wiltshire, Jeremy casually asked, “How would a safari ‘Down Memory Lane’ grab you?” No hesitation I said “Wonderful! When?” And left it at that.
Early December 2016, I received a phone call from Jeremy advising ‘they were booked to fly to Nairobi on Wednesday 15th February and suggested I fly in from South Africa on Thursday 16th.
That done, we had to locate a suitable, reliable and affordable all-terrain vehicle. Who better to approach than Dennis Leete, our Kenya Regiment man on the ground so to speak. He was ultra- efficient and within days had put me on touch with Tony Hanagraaf of Rongai Workshops, who very kindly rented us a Landrover for the planned five weeks at a very reasonable price. Tony had new tyres fitted, plus two spare wheels, drinking water containers, three camp chairs and steps to get up into the vehicle. An added plus was that he would supply a driver, for the entire period if we so wished. [LEFT: EVE. SUE, JEREMY AND THEIR DRIVER]. The driver met us in Nairobi with the vehicle; we decided to keep him for the five weeks – he was an absolute blessing and a pleasure to have him with us to take care of the driving. Traffic is hectic on the main arterial roads. Jeremy came with a TomTom; good plan as it covered main roads to ‘tracks’…. A very useful tool to have….
Stayed overnight in Nairobi and pushed on for Naivasha where we stayed for a few days. On our way we took a diversion to check out my old school, Limuru Girls School (LGS). What a pleasure it was to see and visit. The current Headmistress, Margaret, was quite overcome to have an Old Girl visiting her school. A big Inter-School Sports Day was in progress; how well behaved, polite and proudly dressed the students were, all in differing school uniforms. The LGS grounds were immaculate as were the school building. So different when I visited back in 1992, when I felt there was a very unkempt feeling.
Limuru All Saints Church - just the same as I remember it when we used to attend the Sunday Service. The School built their own chapel when I was there, so that was the end of our walk down the road… I was very impressed at the expansion of the tea Estates.
We chose to go down the ‘old’ escarpment road into the Rift, the view from where we paused was fantastic. We stopped in Naivasha to pick up some provisions from a recently opened shopping mall. Arrived at Green Park (north side of Lake Naivasha), where we were renting Tony and Suzie Church’s lovely house. 50
What a stunning view of the Lake. Lots to see and do. I guess our first adventure was to look for the family farm in Upper Gilgil/Oleolondo. Once off the tar roads the dirt roads vary from OK to tracks in river beds……just as well we had a four-wheel drive…
Finally found the farm; it had been divided up into small shambas .....as had, we discovered, most of the farms in that area. We took a short diversion to go to Ol Kalou [now Nyanarua] where a friend of Jeremy’s had spent his early childhood when his Dad was the local vicar of the local St. Peter’s Anglican Church. [Ed: Land on which the church stands was donated by Daisy Griffin (née Aggett. On 2/03/1952, her daughter Heather and Ian Rooken-Smith [KR4687], were the first couple to be married in this church]
The askari proudly took us round the gardens and the Church, all well kept.... a pleasure to see. We decided to have Sunday Lunch at the Gilgil Club to meet up with the locals. There seem to be a lot of retirees who live nearby. The golf course is well used. Pembroke House is still considered to be a top school
Having spent a few days exploring the area we moved on to Elburgon to stay in a lodge on a farm. Lovely spot. We pushed onto Nandi Hills via Londiani. Road good, tarmac until we turned off at Muhoroni, intending to drive up the escarpment to Nandi Hills. As a bridge had been damaged – storms! – we took a diversion… well it was a ‘river bed’ going through the sugar cane…. However, at Songhor we hit the tar road again and so up the hills to the areas of Nandi Hills. Spent three nights at the Nandi Bears Club where we were well looked after, food very basic but OK. Interesting in the bar where we indulged in a sundowner, we met the locals. A few of them remembered me and Alan from the days we lived there - lots of habari’s.
Our local Club was well patronised by us at weekends and Wednesday evenings. Tennis, squash, rugby, cricket, golf etc. Fred Jackson who manned the Sunday evening film show – after the news/cartoons, half time, Children put to bed in the back of our cars….. so parents could enjoy whatever was showing that weekend. So many memories of our young married years, living in a wonderful community...The expansion of Tea in the Nandi Hills area is startling. Made me feel quite nostalgic of the wonderful years we lived in that area. [Ed: See next page for a sketch of shambas/tea estates before Independence – ignore the Legend]...., Paid a visit to Siret Tea Estate for a look at the Estate we had lived on for some years – so beautiful, tea is a lovely crop to look onto.
Kisumu was our next port of call. Past Kapsabet – the local Government ‘boma’. Hoped to pass Kaimosi Tea Estate and the large missionary hospital, but road has been re-routed. Going through one of the many villages, a political baraaza was about to take place – a local would-be Councillor trying to motivate his people to vote for him at the August 2017 Elections.
No problems at all; the road we were on was packed with the local populace; we were shown another track to take to meet up with the Kisumu – Kakamega - Uganda road. An excellent road; down the escarpment and into Kisumu. My goodness! Kisumu was crowded with vehicles, tuktuks, motorbikes, buses, people, horns hooting; chaos seemed to rein supreme! Pushed onto Homo Lime (sp?) where we spent a comfortable night at Jimmy and Maggie Brookes’ farmhouse looking down the valley to Lake Victoria. Caught up with the Brookes and to my surprise Maggie’s mother, Pat White lives with them. Wonderful to catch up...so many years since I last saw her.
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On down to Lake Bagoria, Lake Hannington that was, for three nights at the Hotel... took a day to saunter through the park which runs beside the Lake. So many beautiful flamingos, all in their pink livery….. soda spouts [?] popping up in the Lake. A few animals wandering around - very hot….made full use of the Hotel swimming pool.
Problems at Lake Baringo – due to the Lake rising some years ago, accommodation was washed away, though you can paddle out to an island – very rustic quarters I believe; though we did take time to drive to Baringo for a look-see. Had a basic lunch at a pub; some overseas tourist back- packers… they use the local Matatu buses for transport….no problems, they were welcomed by the other travellers who appeared to enjoy their company…
Continued our road trip to aim for Nyeri for two nights. Drove via Thomson’s Falls. Hotel [Ed: No Barry’s Hotel on the internet - assume renamed ‘T/F Lodge’ (?)] appeared just the same as when I last visited; everything very clean, food good. The Falls [LEFT] unchanged..why should they be any different?
Lovely, scenic drive onto Nyeri, good roads. Hoped we would be greeted with Mt. Kenya showing herself as we arrived in town, but no...covered by clouds…
Visited Ol Pejeta Conservancy for the day; interesting. Saw the four (now only three) Northern White Rhino....enormous animals...guarded 24/7, each with its own guard. Also fed the old Black Rhino with Lucerne – favourite food… since then we heard that he had passed away…sad. Interesting to see wild animals running with Brahmin and other cattle… There is also a Chimpanzee cantonment.....60 Chimps split into two camps...all rescued from further west...worth a day’s visit. Before we left for Machakos, popped into see a friend involved in exporting roses...a fascinating interlude... big business in Kenya.
Finally, Mt. Kenya showed herself on the way south [RIGHT]. Lunched at Blue Posts...still as lovely as ever, overlooking the Fourteen Falls... though Thika has outgrown itself…. Well...guess that applies to most of Kenya.!
Arrived at Betty Round-Turner [near Machakos) late afternoon, in time to enjoy a drink at a dam on the property. Like much of Kenya, water is very precious, but somehow people cope. Betty (as in Kenya residents) was so hospitable...we thoroughly enjoyed our two night stay, with an invitation to return before we flew out of Kenya.
As the Mombasa road is hectic…..huge transport trucks, nose-to-tail, over-taking... cars etc, it was suggested we drove through Machakos and down the Escarpment to pick up the coast road at Emali...there, stands a delightful mosque...visitors are encouraged to pop-in for a cuppa etc.
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Yes..food is vegetarian, simple but delicious, a place to splash water over your face to cool off. A spot, I would encourage anybody passing-by, to pop in even for a look-see. A place of tranquillity and peace.
Well the ‘Hell run’ [LEFT – photo by Mary R- S]...very interesting. Trying to overtake is interesting...though approaching trucks will generally flick their lights and give you time to overtake. Another laughable incident, were totos taking their animals across the road to the water troughs...the little guy simply goes onto the road to stop traffic, which comes to a shuddering halt to wait for the stock (cows, donkeys, goats, camels etc) to cross the road...finished...back across the road, same procedure……population down that road is amazing…hawkers everywhere, thirsty, hungry, what-ever, they are there to sell....
We were aiming for Salt Lick Lodge, Taveta for two nights....so impressed that we booked into Lions Bluff (another Taveta lodge) run by the locals, for our return from the coast to Amboseli.
Don’t think I have ever seen so many buffalo come to the three water holes near the Pub..then onto Mariakani, where we turned left and eventually came out at Kilifi. Spent two nights with Gail Outram...lunch at the Driftwood, Malindi...lovely as ever. After-time with Gail...super to chat and catch up with a friend from yesteryear….
We motored to Tiwi to spend a week at Sand Island Beach - the Foster family’s delightful cottages on the coast [RIGHT]....still so Old Kenya….just lovely. The mpishe assigned to us made sure we were well catered for....fresh seafood/fish etc...every day....[Ed: Sadly, both Robert and Francis now deceased.]
Our time here was swiftly running out… we made a day-tript to the Shimba Hills, views amazing from the top, sadly no Elephant or Sable…but the scenery, forest, monkeys, antelope etc made up for it.
Back to Voi and the Hell Run.....we took the Kwale road to avoid Mombasa, which is hectic...picked up the big road near Mariakani and onto Voi and down to Salt Lick again, to our lodgings at Lions Bluff... well looked after....
Had to leave early for the long drive to Amboseli...up the Voi/Taveta/Moshi road...excellent surface..very little traffic. Near the Tanzanian border, we took the road/track to Amboseli...different...definitely no speeding…. The locals appear to be very industrious...working on their farms. Water from Mt Kilimanjaro flows through furrows and channelled onto their lands... stacks of tomatoes, pawpaws, bananas, citrus etc, for sale on the road.
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Amboseli, our last treat to ourselves....Ol Tukai, a lovely old hotel...pampered. Still very Old School. Next day, finally saw Mt. Kilimanjaro [LEFT] in all her glory...magic…. Off to Namanga across Lake Amboseli, very dry, easy to lose one’s way in the sand… But then Tom Tom came up trumps.... (no pun intended).
Namanga River Lodge beckoned...a well- chilled Tusker or two….after a hot, dusty drive..deliciously thirst-quenching!
Kajiado ...sort of increased in size, and onto Athi, unrecognisable…watu, watu, animals, tuk tuks, motorbikes etc...thought provoking...
Our last night in Kenya, at Betty’s....following day, off to the Airport to return home, me to South Africa, Jeremy and Eve to England.
Five weeks of a wonderful adventure....down Memory Lane...
Would we do it again? Yes, if the opportunity arose.... go with an open mind, accept the changes for what they are....enjoy and have fun.
[Ed: Took the liberty of adding some photos from SITREP files. Assuming Sue’s trip took her through Nakuru, have included another, of the War Memorial Hospital [LEFT] where many of us were born, trained, convalesced; and whence we dated the nurses whilst at KRTC?]
******
A request for information: John Cynddylan writes that he is looking for information on the whereabouts of Nicholas (Nick) Edwin Milner Ward [KR4267] who enlisted in the Kenya Regiment in 1953, and was on the third Salisbury course. John and Nick were at school together in Brecon, Wales. If you have any information please contact John whose email address is
*****
THE MELAWA RIVER
[G.N. Paterson]
'You cross at your own risk' read the notice before the Ol Magogo bridge, which was to be our starting point. This solemn warning belies the strength of the bridge which is a massive, solidly
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built affair, made of the biggest cedar trees I have ever seen. Standing like a giant letter A, the bridge dominates the chasm through which the Melawa River runs.
While we were assembling the canoe, a battered old car drew up and an equally battered old hat appeared out of the window. A rather irate 'old settler' demanded to know if we were fishing. When we assured him that we were only canoeing, he was extremely affable and helpful, giving us a lot of advice on the rapids and falls we were likely to encounter ahead. We remarked on the skilful construction of the bridge we had just crossed and which towered over us.
"Yes," he exclaimed, "built by the British Army during the Mau Mau emergency. Then they used to ambush it at night and as likely as not, it would be covered with brains and blood next morning; most unpleasant." Presumably the notice before the bridge had been for the benefit of the Mau Mau, I thought.
We launched the canoe and paddled gently off into the main stream, steadied ourselves for the first rapid and sped through the gap, the spray tossing all round us.
The first part of the Melawa was through a sandstone gorge. The banks come down sheer to the water's edge, though where the slope is slightly favourable the banks are covered with thick undergrowth. It was not long before we noticed the insistent zeet-zeet of the paradise flycatcher. This beautiful bird is usually cautious and secretive, but on this trip it was a familiar sight, with its glossy violet head and neck, bright chestnut body and magnificent tail formed by the two elongated tail feathers. We never tired of watching them darting from a bough to hawk an insect or hovering over the water, their tails floating daintily below them.
Our other constant companions were black river duck, similar in size to a mallard, coloured black: and speckled with white. These duck used to swim just ahead of our canoe, or fly off downstream if they inadvertently allowed us to get too close. Then, when they were too far from home, they would turn and fly fast and straight, just over our heads back to their familiar stretch of water.
After a couple of miles of fast going, we came to our first serious test. We reconnoitred the rapid and, in spite of it having a couple of bends in it, thought we might just shoot it. The final drop, if you kept in the main channel, was about five feet. If you did not, it was considerably more.
We paddled into the pool above the rapid and started to accelerate towards the gap in the rocks. My paddle snapped when I dug too deeply into the water with it, and we slewed badly as we approached the first corner. Before we could steady the canoe, the rolling waves caught it and turned it over. We surfaced spluttering, pulled the canoe into a quiet backwater and baled it out.
Once again we launched it, but we were no more successful this time. We paddled into the main stream, where the current hit us amidships and once again we were struggling in the water. I was able to swim to the bank, but Simon, my companion, was caught by an extremely strong undertow and swept down the main rapid but not through the gap we had chosen. Furiously the water tore at him and drew him towards the main fall, where the water tumbled onto rounded rocks about ten feet below.
In desperation, he clutched at the canoe which was following close behind him. The bow caught on a rock and the stern swung round, grounded on the bank, slipped and then caught again. Slowly, Simon worked his way along the waterlogged canoe. It seemed impossible that it could stand the strain put on it by the weight of the water. Watching from my place of safety, I felt that at any moment the canoe might be displaced from its precarious position and both of them would be
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dashed onto the rocks below. Inching his way along, Simon crawled onto the bank. His body and legs were bleeding profusely from the pounding he had just taken, though he made light of it.
When we had taken stock of ourselves and what we had lost, we found that the rudder and spray cover and my camera had all disappeared. The former were expendable but I was upset at having lost my camera. I waded into the stream near where we had capsized and felt around with my feet. When I came across something that felt about the same size as my camera, I ducked down and groped round with my hands. This was completely unsuccessful as each time I was carried away downstream by the current. No doubt the camera still remains there.
The canoe had very creditably withstood the battering it had received. Three spars had been smashed and the deck canvas ripped, but apart from this minor damage it was in good shape. Throughout the trip, we never failed to be pleasantly surprised at the toughness and resilience of this collapsible canoe. On many other occasions, we hit sharp submerged rocks and branches, but never once did the skin puncture under the water-line.
Between hair raising descents of rapids, we cruised along gently and silently except for the splash of our paddles. Most of the game we saw was completely oblivious of our approach. Bush buck, which are normally very shy, were common and we had excellent opportunities of observing them. Usually, from the land, they were entirely hidden, but from the river they were easily visible. Almost black males, with murderous looking horns, regarded us with vague interest from behind leafy bushes. Timid females, russet red in colour, would suddenly start as they realised they were being observed. One, in her hurry to escape from us, tried to climb up a vertical, crumbling cliff and fell into the river, not a paddle's length from the canoe, and swam desperately and surprisingly well until the bank gave her a chance to escape back into the thickets.
A majestic fish eagle [LEFT] looked imperiously down at us as we dared encroach upon its kingdom.
As we approached the fig trees that leaned precariously over the river, thirty or forty green pigeons suddenly burst out from the trees with a tremendous clatter. There followed a few hornbills which cawed loudly and flew with tremendous energy, but seemed dangerously close to losing control of themselves altogether and collapsing into the stream. In one fig tree the usual cawing of hornbills broke out while we were still some distance away, but they did not fly away. Unable to perceive what had disturbed them, we peered up into the higher branches of the tree and there a genet had caught a hornbill by the throat and was killing it. The other birds, instead of flying away, were hopping from one branch to another, looking on and squawking loudly in a tremendous state of excitement.
A fallen tree blocked our path and, in negotiating our way through its branches, we noticed a snake curled up asleep on a limb overhanging the river. While we were hauling the canoe through, the snake awoke, reared its head and, swaying gently, spread its hood, revealing itself as a spitting cobra. I heard a gentle plop as it fell into the stream below. Not ten yards farther on was yet another fallen tree, against which the canoe jammed. Simon slowly lowered himself onto a submerged
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branch to lever us off the snag. Suddenly he noticed the snake just where he was about to place his foot. He lurched backwards, upsetting us both.
We frantically trod water against the driving current, trying desperately to avoid any contact with the submerged tree on which the cobra lurked. Every time a twig touched me or a reed entwined itself round my legs, I thought it was the cobra. When, at last, I saw it slide up a branch and disappear hastily into the bushes on the bank, it made a mockery of my fears, though even now I can still remember the cold clammy feeling of what I could have sworn was a cobra wrapping itself round my legs.
Dark clouds had for some time been building up. At first one or two large raindrops splattered round us; then the heavens opened and a torrential downpour descended on us. We paddled vigorously to keep warm and then baled harder to keep afloat. The river banks that had been bathed in sunlight earlier in the day were covered by a dull grey pall of falling rain. We put our heads down and paddled hard; the scenery slipped by unnoticed as we tried to force the miles behind us. All wild things had hidden themselves. Only the wild duck paddled round unconcerned, skittishly ruffling their feathers and seeming thoroughly to enjoy themselves. It was bitterly cold. Two hours later, the fury of the storm spent, the sun came out, and we decided to make camp.
Simon produced a fishing line which he had contrived to smuggle into the canoe under the eagle eye of the old settler. Much to our delight he succeeded in catching four trout in as many minutes.
Surprisingly, we had retained a dry box of matches, and we were able to coax a fire to life. The discoverer of fire could not have been more thankful for its warmth than we were. We dried our clothes and sleeping bags as best we could and cooked our supper over the fire. The trout were so small that after cooking they merely imparted a fishy flavour to the baked beans.
Slowly a mist rolled down the stream until it billowed up from the water's edge and finally enshrouded us. The sounds of a stream are strange, but when one cannot even see the water the sounds become magnified and one hears things that do not seem to belong to the stream at all. One can understand why primitive people say they are able to talk to the water. That night, it seemed to be chuckling to itself.
Just as we tried to sleep, a tree hyrax [RIGHT] screamed as if it were being butchered. After a time, I sincerely wished it had been. We often had to get up during the night to stoke up the fire as the mist made the valley damp and very cold. We piled on logs and crept in closer to the leaping flames. The dawn was cold and silent. As soon as it was light enough to see, we slipped away, warming ourselves by paddling hard.
The lower part of the Melawa River is a complete contrast to the upper part. Instead of bounding and sparkling round rocks and rapids, the river meanders gently through fields and papyrus swamps until it empties itself through a maze of small channels into Lake Naivasha.
The river is wide, open and slow moving, so we were able to avoid duckings, except once. This was when we tried to rescue what we thought was a helpless duckling, though it was not nearly as helpless as we imagined. We paddled gently up to it and tried to grab it. Whereupon the duckling
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dived, the canoe capsized and we sprawled spluttering in the water. As we came to the surface we saw the duckling reappear on the far side of the river, and swim about as if nothing had happened. We decided to let nature look after its own.
Not long after this incident, I was startled to hear a shot fired from somewhere close at hand. At the time we were passing through a patch of high rushes that concealed us from the bank. An African dressed in an old army hat and a dirty, stained, khaki overcoat ran down the bank towards us, carrying a rifle. He peered in our direction, and when he saw us said, "Behold, I thought you were a buck." We retorted angrily and asked if we looked like a buck. "Truth of God, he said, "I thought you were a buck. It is your good fortune that you are not dead." Our good fortune, we felt, lay in his poor marksmanship.
In spite of the bad start, the river was full of interest that day. We stopped to watch a pair of pied kingfishers hovering over the water. As one spotted a fish, it closed its wings and dropped, hitting the water with a splash and sometimes completely submerging itself in the river. They averaged a kill about once in every four dives. What angler ever averages one fish for every four casts?
We were regarded coldly as the wake of our canoe lapped teasingly at the feet of a heron, spoiling the reflection it had been admiring so intently. By lunchtime, the pleasant paddling in the warm sun with the smell of fresh hay was behind us; and we were already struggling through papyrus in a rapidly narrowing channel. We ate our last tin of beans, surrounded by a swarm of mosquitoes whining like a high speed dentist's drill and insinuating their way into our ears, noses and, every time we opened them, our mouths. We soon gave up in frustration and continued to force our way through the papyrus. Each ten yards we gained was greeted by an increase in the volume of the dentist's drill, as more mosquitoes rose into the air and swooped down to join in the feast.
We took one of the many branches of the stream and, by a stroke of luck, found ourselves in a still, clear lagoon, separated from Lake Naivasha by a wall of papyrus. The silence produced a feeling of remoteness; and the abundance of duck, purple gallinule, lily trotters, and other exotically coloured water birds with their strange cries, gave the place the air of a lost world. The pelicans were so tame that we could race alongside them. It was surprising how fast they moved without any apparent effort. They half opened their wings and paddled, speeding along like ancient men-of-war under full sail. There were fish too.
As we approached the rushy side of the lagoon, the water became disturbed and turbulent as hundreds of tilapia scattered at our approach. We were sorry to have to leave this forgotten backwater. After a considerable search, we found a vague channel forced through the papyrus into the lake by a hippo. It was impossible to paddle through this matted mass. I climbed out to push the canoe and promptly disappeared through the rushes, fortunately reappearing in the same spot. After trying various combinations of pushing and pulling, I succeeded in moving the canoe slowly forward.
While doing this, I remembered seeing a photograph of a hippo yawning [LEFT]. It was not so much the capacity of the mouth that had impressed me but the size of its teeth. The recollection of the photograph came back to me just as I realised that I was
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trespassing on a hippo's private property. This alarming train of thought was superseded by another more urgent one, when I became aware that I was covered with leeches. It was quite amazing with what speed and accuracy they found the most intimate parts of my body.
When, eventually, we succeeded in penetrating the papyrus, it came as a surprise to see waves breaking onto our papyrus bed. However, we set off across the lake, and from our lowly perch in the canoe the waves looked terrifyingly large though, in fact, they could not have been very high. The length of the canoe ensured for us a fairly smooth passage, but occasionally I felt that the canoe was about to bury itself in the side of a wave before it could ride over it. How we longed for the missing spray cover.
We were forced to paddle into the wind which became stronger as we progressed across the lake. We took quick turns with the one good paddle, for if we stopped paddling for a moment the canoe would be turned sideways by the wind and would be in danger of being instantly swamped.
Almost imperceptibly we reached the lee of Crescent Island and were able to alter course towards our goal, a small cottage standing on the shore of the lake. Before we reached it, we could visualise the blazing log fire, the dry clothes and the hot soup that we knew awaited us behind the distant lighted windows.
[Blackwood's Magazine - Number 1833 - July 1968]
*****
REUNIONS IN ENGLAND: JULY 2019
KENYA REGIMENT RAFIKI CURRY LUNCH:17 JULY 2019
Venue: Victory Services Club, 63-79 Seymour Street, London W2 Time: 12h45 for 13h00 Cost: £38pp Contact: John Harman
HILL SCHOOL, ELDORET : LUNCH : FRIDAY 26 JULY 2019
Venue: Cricklade House Hotel, 1 Common Hill, Cricklade, Wiltshire SN6 6HA. Time: 12.45 Cost: £25 per head. Contact: Roger Steeden
OLD YORKIST REUNION DINNER: SATURDAY 27 JULY
Venue: Holiday Inn, Taunton, Somerset (M5 - off junction 25) Time: 19h00 for 20h00 Dress: Jacket & tie for the men, cocktail dresses for the ladies Cost: £25pp, including pre-dinner welcome drink Contact: John Tucker
*****
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ROBIN LEAWALLER [KR4151]
[24/04/1934(?)-28/01/2018]
[by his daughter]
Dad – what can we say about him? Clever, funny and cantankerous – he could argue the hind leg off a donkey! Robin Waller was born in London in 1934 the oldest of six children. As a small boy he had an accident with an electric fire and the scar on his face from the burn caused him anxiety and shyness for many years.
When war broke out the family moved out of London to escape the bombing, they also took friend’s children with them and the kids had a wonderful time digging tunnels and making cigarettes with tea-leaves. He went to St George’s College in Weybridge for his early schooling and often spoke of the wonderful teachers there. He was always late getting home because he would be dragging his feet in the gutter full of leaves in a world of his own.
The family moved several times before making the big move to Kenya where Grandad got a teaching post in 1952. This was not a good time for a young man of eighteen. He was called up to do National Service (then an apprentice surveyor) and that coincided with the Mau-Mau uprising. Dad as a sensitive person was traumatized by this experience which affected his life for many years. He was good at languages and learned Swahili quickly. He was then seconded to the Police and at the age of nineteen was in charge of a prison camp with 200 Mau-Mau detainees. Dad told his brother that when he was in the army he could not sleep due to fear. He learned to manage with very little sleep.
After the Mau-Mau emergency ended Dad joined the Survey Department. Many adventures came about while working as a surveyor in the bush. One night while camping in a tent as usual he could hear lions roaring. They had made a kill and needed a drink, Dad’s tent was between them and the river! He could hear them panting nearby and pumped up the pressure lamp. In the morning there were huge pug marks near the tent.
On another occasion when on patrol, they were asleep under a tree in sleeping bags. He heard the word buffalo and found himself at the top of a thorn tree still in his sleeping bag. After the herd had passed it took an hour to get down!
When the time came for the family to go on leave to the UK, his sister remembers that Dad had gone with his mates for a final drink and had not returned when the tug boats started to pull the ship out. He arrived just in time and was brought aboard by rope much to the consternation of his parents!
Back in England he joined the Royal Engineers and met up with Mum who was at Teachers’ College with his sister Rosemary. When the College training finished they became engaged but Dad was posted to Bahrain Island, where they were married a year later.
Dad remained in the army for six years and then decided to do a mature age teacher training. By then my sister Nicky and I were on the scene. Most of the family were back in Africa so Mum and Dad decided we would go too. Dad got a teaching post with the Natal Education Department and we moved to Durban. Great family gatherings were had with people converging from Zambia, Angola and South Africa. [Ed: Rob died in Perth, W Australia]
**
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Extract from an e-mail in response to my request for a photo of Rob: Rob spent a short time as an escort/lookout to surveyors in the Kenya Regiment Mapping Unit. We were operating in Central Province in an area known to be concealing Mau Mau gangs at high altitude in the Aberdares.
Working our way on foot to higher ground, suddenly there was a distinct rustling and movement of watu ahead. We had crossed the forest boundary, so fired short bursts from our Sten-guns, paused to assess the situation, and discovered discarded simis and food supplies. No sign of the opposition, and no action from our escort, who was armed with a ·303 rifle. One member commented 'You're supposed to be our escort, why didn't you open fire?'
A pause and a confession, 'I forgot to bring any ammo!' Stunned silence! 'Well do please try to remember the next time we venture forth.' Alas, no photo of Rob available.
As we moved to different areas for mapping, we were often escorted by soldiers from British battalions and KAR askaris. No complaints about the Black Watch, Northumberland Fusiliers and 23KAR.
****
LOCUM TENENS
[Charles Chenevix Trench]
"The common cormorant or shag," enunciated the President of the Examining Board, with scholarly precision, "mutes into a paper bag. Translate that into Somali."
Fortunately, the junior member of the Board, the Somali interpreter from Isiolo, was far too kind- hearted and loyal a government servant ever to fail a District Commissioner. Also, he had been fixed by the D.C. Isiolo beforehand. I passed and was promptly transferred to Turkana, which is about as far from a Somali district as it is possible to go.
The District Headquarters, Lodwar, seemed at first sight a dreadful place. The houses and offices are clustered on an outcrop of volcanic rock, which protrudes like a boil from a flat, dusty plain. For a few weeks the Turkwell River flows past Lodwar; but for most of the year the river-bed is dry, retaining in its sandy bed barely enough moisture to give a precarious supply of well-water to the boma, and to support a straggling growth of acacias and dompalms. On the rock itself practically no vegetable life can survive; incorrigible gardeners are reduced to growing tomatoes and zinnias in four-gallon petrol-tins filled with imported silt.
As for the Turkana, they are certainly the most primitive tribe in East Africa. No other people have, no other people could, survive with so few material possessions. With a long spear, a fighting-stick, a wooden stool which he uses also as a pillow, a cooking pot, a thin blanket, a few goats and a couple of wives, a Turkana can regard himself as positively opulent, and display his independence of fortune by a striking display of beads, necklaces, bracelets, and ostrich plume headdress. He lives in a hut made of sticks which barely shelters him from the sun and gives no protection at all against torrential rain. His land is incredibly barren, consisting, for the most part, of wide stony plains where the vegetation can support, with luck, one skinny cow or half a dozen goats to fifty acres. Whatever his inclination, he is forced to be a nomad, constantly wandering in search of pasture. Living on a little milk, a little meat (often the leavings of lion and hyena) and in certain seasons on berries, the Turkana are the have-nots of Africa. They are tough, brave, brutal fighters, the terror of their neighbours, whose cattle and grazing they steal quite undeterred by such punishment as can be
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inflicted on them; for they are too poor to be fined, and to people whose life is so hard, a spell in prison - regular meals, shelter from sun and rain. - is an agreeable rest cure.
I took over as locum tenens from E. Whitehouse, who was going on ten months' leave. 'Whouse' was in his fifties, a charming and witty person, immensely popular, who had been DC Turkana for so long that neither he nor his subjects could really imagine, indeed they rather resented, anyone taking over even temporarily from him.
He was a great builder. On the rock, scattered over the surrounding desert, bungalows and guest houses, a store, an office, a guardroom, a prison, a boarding school, a hospital testified to his skill. Many of the buildings, especially the school and the prison, were roofless: on no account, during my ten months' tenancy, was I to roof them. Partly he distrusted, with good reason, my ability to do the job properly: partly, I think, he could not bear the idea of anyone else completing his creations and performing the opening ceremony. So the Turkana boys went unschooled, the Turkana prisoners lodged with friends in the town, reporting when they felt inclined for a little light work and a heavy meal. Our prison without bars - without, indeed, locks, bolts and doors - was perhaps the most contemporary and enlightened feature of administration in Turkana: but when Whouse returned and completed the buildings he could no longer evade the distasteful necessity of shutting up people in them. He even had to surround the prison with a barbed wire fence, not, indeed, to keep the prisoners in, but to keep their friends and relations out. The prisoners then suffered from a sense of restriction, and from time to time used to ask for a few days' leave.
Whouse had made brick kilns at Lodwar. One day, when I visited these, the workmen all downed tools and, surrounding me, burst into song. It was a splendid song, deep-toned, rhythmic, melodious. Rather flattered, I asked why they sang for me. "We sang," explained their spokesman, "for a rise in pay." It was a nicer tactic than striking, but, alas, less effective. When I refused their request they sang again, doubtless referring to me in unseemly terms; then, cheerful as ever, they resumed work.
Before leaving, Whouse said, "You know, it's rather hard on you having to write the Annual Report when you arrived only in November. I'll tell you what, I'll do it for you, on the voyage home. It will be much easier for me."
Gratefully I accepted his offer, and he departed with all the secret and confidential files. I never saw them again. By April, the Provincial Commissioner's demands for my report could no longer be denied; and I was obliged to write it with no files, no background knowledge and no information about the year's events except such as Kaaman, Whouse's interpreter, could provide from memory. An open mind, I found, markedly assists literary composition. Whouse at the end of his leave brought back his arcana imperii, still inviolate, still screwed down in the heavy packing case in which we had placed them.
Scattered thinly over thirty thousand square miles, the Turkana were difficult to administer, almost impossible to assist. How could their incredibly low standard of living be improved, except by removing them, lock, stock and barrel, from their desert and putting them somewhere else? One's first thought was to give them more water; but the water-table was generally too low for boreholes, and the soil too light for dam construction. Besides, they needed grass even more than water: development, even in Africa, must be related in some way, however remote, to economic return, and no one could seriously contemplate spending ,2,000 on a borehole or dam when the country up to twenty miles away could support only a few hundred emaciated cattle, goats or camels.
Quite big areas in Turkana could be fairly fertile under irrigation, and Whouse had started an ingenious pilot scheme to try out a form of flood irrigation which had proved successful in Aden.
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Alongside one of the many dry water courses that are swept by floods during the rains, he had constructed, with tractors and the help of an imported Aden Arab called Bisbas, a chequer board of one-acre plots, each surrounded by a five foot earth wall. The idea was to let in the flood water until it was nearly five feet deep, then hold it there by plugging with earth the hole in the wall through which it had entered. Seeping slowly into the parched soil, the water would leave moisture enough for the cultivation of one crop of quick-growing millet.
Thousands of pounds were spent on this scheme, one of hundreds of abortive projects whose ruins litter African colonies but provide signposts and warnings to guide future development. The river changed its course, leaving one chequer board high and dry. Just as the millet ripened, the birds of the air in hundreds of thousands devoured it, leaving nothing but the bare stalks. For Whouse's ingenuity and the zeal of Bisbas, the Turkana had nothing but admiration: certainly they had no idea of emulating them, a conception as remote from their comprehension as space travel. But I believe that in time, thanks to Whouse, irrigation may improve the Turkana's lot; nothing else can.
Its remoteness, its rather spurious reputation for hardship and danger, attracted visitors to Lodwar like flies to honey. All had to obtain passes, the issue of which was jealously restricted. Some were official visitors, like the Irish-Afrikaner who kept the main road in order. He combined a prodigious capacity for gin and work with an addiction to shooting without a licence, and his visits usually resulted in a desultory correspondence with the Game Department. He wore a suit which he had himself made of home-cured gazelle skins. With a skin hat, skin coat and skin trousers he looked like Robinson Crusoe, and smelled like nothing on earth.
European women, with a single exception, were not allowed to visit Turkana; but a crafty medical officer insisted on bringing a nursing sister to help him inspect the hospital. Having penetrated our Iron Curtain, she triumphantly disclosed that she was his wife. I had sometimes heard of doctors going round with nursing sisters to whom they pretend to be married, but never before of one accompanied by a wife masquerading as a nursing sister.
The least expected visitor was one whom I had, at the Colonial Office three years before, interviewed for a job as Principal of a Technical and Trades School. Having once been an undertaker, he was (as I wrote in his interview report) 'qualified by a long if somewhat narrow experience of wood- and metalwork.' Now he arrived on a semi-official mission to investigate and report on the possibility of establishing a technical school in Turkana, about which he had clearly been misinformed.
He accompanied me on one of my early morning walks round the town during which I daily fought a losing battle against the aversion of the Turkana to using the public conveniences provided for them. On the outskirts of the town we came upon a half buried, fairly fresh human skull. This was not an uncommon sight; for the Turkana throw out their dead to be eaten by jackals and hyenas, and though the practice is frowned upon in Lodwar itself, they seldom bother to dig graves deep enough. But the spectacle shocked my visitor's professional pride. "Is there," he asked, "no funeral parlour here?" For a moment I thought he would offer his services; but, evidently deciding that the Turkana were beyond hope or help, he returned that day to Nairobi.
The District Officer was an intelligent and studious young man, unhappy away from his wife who was not allowed in Lodwar. Both had been medical students, and were still interested in anatomy. Some- time after the ex-undertaker's visit, I found him addressing to his wife a square box with ventilation holes in the sides. I asked what it was. "It's the skull," he replied, "of that old man who died three weeks ago. A very interesting shape. Look..." He began to unwrap the parcel.
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I begged him to desist. "I only hope it's dry." "Oh, perfectly, I saw to that myself, kept it in a meat safe on my roof, where the birds could not get at it." Such devotion to science I could only admire. As for the Turkana, they probably thought it no more strange than many European eccentricities.
My friend, Mike Cooper, an ex-cavalryman now employed as a Locust Control Officer, came up for Christmas. He arrived before breakfast, after an all-night drive. "I read your book," he said, referring to a recent lamentable publication of mine, "at one sitting." I prepared a suitably modest reply. "Yes," he continued, "I felt I just had to get it over." Only authors will appreciate how wounded I was; but it was salutary to be told thus early, by a friend, what the sales figures were soon to confirm.
"Hurry with your breakfast," I replied, keeping a stiff upper lip. "I've entered you for the three mile race veterans' contest." Christmas festivities at Lodwar consisted, by a tradition at least three years old, of a feast of beer, beef and goat meat, followed by a sports meeting in which bloated competitors staggered round under a blazing sun. No Olympic times were recorded, but the enthusiasm of the spectators was such that they had to be restrained by Tribal Police from participating in the tug-o'-war and spear throwing competitions. Indeed the Tribal Police team itself, pulling against the prisoners, was found to have two extra members, who were furious at being taken off the rope. The honour of government, they felt, depended on their victory.
"I like to see your boys work," murmured Cooper. "Efficiency, sureness of touch, know-how." Yuletide ended officially at half-past two, when we went back to my house to sleep it off. The verandah was crammed with a sweating, dancing, ululating mob of half naked women. "Faithful little things," said Cooper, complacently tugging at his ginger moustache. "It's years since I was last here." But his smirk vanished when, as he opened the door, they surged in after him, almost trampling him underfoot. Dancing like Mænads through my rooms, flipping their breasts so as to spray the walls with the fat and goats' blood with which they were generously bedaubed, they pranced round us with singularly immodest postures and gestures, uttering shrill demands for Christmas backshishi. There was no help in sight - my Somali servants had prudently deserted for the day; and the Tribal Police, even had I been able to summon them, would have proved broken reeds, for their wives were taking a leading part in the bacchanalia.
Mike and I fought our way to the bathroom and, while I held like Horatius the door, he squeezed through the window and hurried off to the shops for a bag of small change. With this, we were able to disperse the ladies - or, at least, to send them over to the District Officer's house. "You know," said Cooper, breathless and dishevelled after his adventures, "you shouldn't have laid on all this for me. I don't expect V.I.P. treatment."
After Christmas we called a baraza to collect tax and explain about locust control. As we drove towards a shady acacia, a hundred or so Turkana warriors, in a dense phalanx, spears at the slope, danced towards us. Turkana dancing can be artistic and clever, if somewhat unseemly when they mime the mating of giraffe, rhino and other animals: this was more of a rhythmic march, faintly reminiscent of the Lambeth Walk. As they stamped and swayed, they sang deep down in their throats. Then, suddenly, they were silent.
They jabbed the butts of their spears into the ground some way off, and sat on their small stools under the tree. They were all in full plumage, with white ostrich feathers and black ostrich pompoms in their coiffure. Most of them had their hair dressed with patterned red and blue clay into short, egg-shaped chignons: some of the older men, clinging to an outdated fashion, had chignons, hanging half way down their backs, in which their own and their ancestors' hair was matted.
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It was not easy to persuade them of the virtues of exerting themselves lest locusts, breeding in their desert, take flight and descend on farms hundreds of miles to the south. For a while they listened with scepticism to my exhortations: then one of the grandfathers said, "We don't want your poisoned locust bait. It will kill our goats." There were grunts of approval all round the ring. Patiently I started to explain, for the fourth time, that the bait was harmless to anything larger than a locust. They burst, spontaneously, into deep toned song.
Politely pausing till they abated, I asked, "What song were you singing?" "It is the Tobacco Song." Taking the hint, I told a Tribal Police constable to distribute a sack of strong native tobacco, which they happily chewed, listening quietly until I again mentioned locust bait. Promptly the song began again.
Cooper then dramatically intervened. "I think if you leave this to me...." He rose slowly to his feet, a picturesque figure in faded blue jeans with a check tweed cap pulled down over his eyes as though at a point-to-point. He reached into a sack, took out a handful of poisoned bran, chewed it and swallowed it. From our audience came a long drawn "E-e-e-e-eh!" They watched with distended eyes and open mouths. "Arsenic, old boy, tastes bloody awful. I hope they haven't mixed it too strong." "I hope," I said, "the Turks won't draw the wrong moral from this." They did. They broke open the bait stores and ate the poisoned bran.
We proceeded to the business of tax collection. At one table I sat with piles of silver shillings arranged in counted rows in front of me. Each man brought up in turn a sheep or goat. I assessed its weight and paid out eight, ten, perhaps twelve shillings. Generally this was accepted: occasionally the owner objected; the animal was then popped into a sack and, struggling madly, weighed on a spring balance hanging from the tree. If I had underestimated the weight, I paid out a shilling or two more: otherwise, the tribesman accepted my first offer. None of them could read the scales; but they felt it gave them, in cases of doubt, a square deal.
From my table they went, clutching their money, to the Tax Clerk's table where they paid their tax for the year, five shillings, and received a receipt. The sheep and goats were trekked into Lodwar and used as rations for Police, Tribal Police, road gangs, prisoners and others. It was a simple fiscal system, which worked tolerably well.
Some weeks later there arrived in Lodwar a Greek who owned a factory in Nairobi, where he made buttons from dompalm nuts with a machine which divided them into thin round slices. Dompalms grow along many of the dry water courses in Turkana: the nuts resemble miniature coconuts, about the size of a goose's egg, but solid inside the brown husk, hard and heavy like ivory. In the hardest famine, having boiled them for two or three days, a Turkana can just digest them. Incredibly, Mr Papadopoulos imported domnuts from the Sudan: he was now looking for a cheaper supply. I was overjoyed at his suggestion.
Here was a simple, practical way of helping the Turkana to better themselves, at no cost to government, without altering a way of life which they understood, and by which alone they could survive in this country. In my mind's eye I saw men, women and children diligently employed, gathering up the nuts that littered the banks of a hundred laggars up and down the district - a scene of happy and modestly lucrative industry.
We agreed on a price which, without spoiling the Turkana, would stimulate their efforts: we arranged for Somali traders, as middle men, to buy the nuts by the sack and transport them to Kitale, whence Mr Papadopoulos would have them railed to Nairobi. This would be something to show Whouse for my stewardship!
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After some weeks I began to receive disquietening messages from the stationmaster at Kitale. Sacks of stones, he wrote, were filling his goods sheds and littering the platforms. He understood they belonged to me. What did I want done with them? Letters to Nairobi went unanswered. Finally, on other business, I went there myself. With some difficulty I found the button factory: it was derelict, and Mr Papadopoulos was believed to be somewhere in South America. It was, fortunately, near the end of my tour in Turkana. Whouse was due back soon. I never learned how he sorted matters out. I never liked to ask.
[Blackwood's Magazine : Number 1771 : May 1963]
*****
WESTERN CAPE LUNCH: 5 JULY 2018
Geoff Trollope [KR6987]
Those who attended were: Verna & Roy Allison [KR7225]; Felix Baddeley [KR4030] and his son Andrew; Jane & Andy Cobb [KR6799]; Elizabeth & Stephen Cridland [KR7142]; Jack Esnouf [KR6395]; Barry & Jacky Powell; Gilly & Denys Roberts [KR6542] [RIGHT]; Rob Rooken-Smith [KR7427]; Annette & Mike Smith [KR7084]; Geoff & Joy Trollope; Colleen & John Williamson [KR3952]. Apologies: Camilla & Nigel Shaw [KR7291]; Andrew Ross Munro [KR7130]
ABOVE: ELIZABETH & STEPHEN CRIDLAND JOY TROLLOPE, DENYS ROBERTS & ROY ALLISON
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ABOVE: FELIX BADDELEY JANE & ANDY COBB
ABOVE: VERNA ALLISON, ANNETTE & MIKE SMITH, JACK ESNOUF
*****
[From your Editor, again! I would like to take this opportunity, firstly, to apologise for failing to get SITREP LIII out in December 2018, secondly to thank readers for their concern following the loss of the lower part of my right leg in October last year, and lastly, to express my gratitude to those involved in the presentation of a ‘Certificate of Appreciation’ for editing our Association magazine for some 24 years, and in so doing maintaining our esprit de corps; I understand that Heather Rooken-Smith [w/o the late Ian [KR4687]; Henry Hauschild [KR3874], Sid & Barbara Dyer [DoY CCF], came up with the idea. My cousin, Terry Griffin [sKR3151] compiled, and presented the colourful certificate.
A copy of the certificate is included on page 69; unfortunately, in black & white!
The oft asked question – how much longer will I edit SITREP? The answer - for as long as I am compis and able to continue using my aged computer with the XP program. The latest versions of Microsoft, in my opinion, are not user-friendly for most of our generation!]
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*****
VICE ADMIRAL PETER A. DUNT CB, DL
ROYAL NAVY – 1965-2007
Born on 23 June 1947 in Liverpool, Peter moved with his family to Kenya in 1952 where his father joined Magadi Soda Company Ltd (a subsidiary of ICI) as shipping manager in Mombasa. Schooled at Kenton College, he was at the DOY (Kirk House - 1959-1963) when the family returned to the UK. Peter completed his schooling at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby with ‘A’ levels in English, History and French. His schooldays were mainly remembered for sport - 1st. XI cricket, 1st. XV rugby, as well as squash, hockey, swimming, tennis, boxing....
In September 1965, Peter joined the Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC) Dartmouth as Cadet, following his brother John [Ed: Later Vice Admiral Sir John Dunt KCB] who had joined two years earlier. He entered as Supply and Secretariat Officer because of poor colour vision, and went on a Mediterranean 'cruise' in HMS TORQUAY for twelve weeks in the middle term of his initial year's training.
In August 1966, he joined HMS ARETHUSA as Midshipman for a wonderful year at sea, visiting Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, South Africa, South America and West Africa.
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He returned to BRNC in September 1967 for his 'Academic Year', in which he represented the Royal Navy for the first time at cricket, and captained the College team.
Peter completed his Sub Lieutenant's courses based at HMS EXCELLENT from September - December 1968, before joining HMS PEMBROKE in July 1969 for the Junior Supply Officers’ Course.
He took up his first 'proper' appointment in May 1969 as Captain's Secretary aboard HMS CHARYBDIS, a new Leander class frigate just completing building in Belfast [Ed: Decommissioned in 1991, and sunk as a target 11 June 1993]. An excellent two years, with return visits to the Mediterranean, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand; he much enjoyed secondary duty as a Flight Deck Officer.
From July 1971 to August 1973, he served as Flag Lieutenant to Flag Officer Medway in Chatham, before completing the Lieutenant's course at Greenwich from September to December 1973. At this time he became engaged to Third Officer Lesley Gilchrist, WRNS.
Peter joined HMS KENT as Deputy Supply Officer in January 1974, and had more sea-time in the Mediterranean, and both North and South America, and more time on the Flight Deck. His rugby days ended in San Francisco with a badly broken ankle which mended just in time for him to hobble up the aisle with Lesley in August 1974.
Returning to HMS PEMBROKE in May 1975, Peter completed the Supply Charge Course before joining HMS AURORA, which was emerging from refit in Chatham Dockyard (August 1975). There followed more Flight Deck work, with trials, work up and deployments to the West Indies and South America.
Then back to HMS PEMBROKE in October 1977 as the Deputy Officers' Training Officer, stepping up to become the Officers' Training Officer after one term (unusual, since he was still a Lieutenant). He was promoted to Lieutenant Commander, (automatic, but with time off for good behaviour) in 1978. Peter and Lesley bought their first house in Newington. Kent.
He joined the Ministry of Defence in October 1979 as Assistant Secretary to the Vice-Chief of Naval Staff. Daughters, Rebecca and Sarah, were born in November 1979 and August 1981, respectively.
Peter was selected for promotion to Commander at the first opportunity in June 1981, and joined the staff of Flag Officer First Flotilla as Secretary to Rear Admiral John (Sandy) Woodward [Ed: later Admiral Sir John Woodward, GBE, KCB], in January 1982. Almost immediately he embarked in First Flotilla ships for Spring Exercises in the Mediterranean and, instead of returning to the UK for Easter Leave, headed south from Gibraltar to the Falklands. For the duration of the conflict he assumed responsibilities of Group Logistics Officer on Admiral Woodward's staff, on board HMS HERMES, before flying back to the UK from Port Stanley in July 1982.
He had further sea time as Secretary to FOF1 [Ed: Flag Officer, First Flotilla] in HMS INVINCIBLE [Ed: Light aircraft carrier] and visited India, the Far East and New Zealand, before flying back from Australia in December 1993 to take up his appointment as Supply Commander at BRNC in January 1984. Peter introduced contract catering to BRNC - at that time a fairly novel idea.
Returned to the Ministry of Defence in London in May 1986 as Secretary to Director General Naval Manpower and Training and bought a house four miles south-east of Guildford.
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Peter was selected for promotion to Captain in December 1987 (at 40, the youngest Supply Officer since the 2nd World War), and in May 1988, took up his appointment as Deputy Director New Management Strategy, working for the Director Naval Staff Duties. A fascinating appointment setting up top level budgetary arrangements for the Navy Board, together with their first management plan.
Moved offices in December 1989, and as Secretary to Second Sea Lord was heavily involved in Prospect Study, especially forcing through the merger of the two top level budget areas of Second Sea Lord and Commander-in-Chief Naval Home Command.
He took command of HMS RALEIGH [Ed: Shore establishment] in October 1992, and spent two wonderful years running the Navy's Ratings' New Entry Training, the Seamanship School and the Royal Naval Supply School.
In September 1994, Peter was promoted to Commodore and appointed as Director Naval Personnel Programming to the now merged Second Sea Lord/Commander-in-Chief Naval Home Command in the newly built Victory Building in Portsmouth Naval Base. There he led the Navy's staff work on the Armed Forces Bett Review of Personnel Policies.
He attended the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1997, before returning to Victory Building, on 5 January 1998, on promotion to Rear Admiral and appointment as Chief of Staff to Second Sea Lord and Commander-in-Chief Naval Home Command, and Director General Personnel Strategy and Plans.
Peter served on the senior Directing Staff at the Royal College of Defence Studies from September 2000 to March 2002, during which time he also became the Chief Naval Supply and Secretariat Officer. Partly as a result of his experience in Falklands, the name of the branch was changed from ‘Supply and Secretariat’ to ‘Logistics’ and he became the first Chief Naval Logistics Officer.
In April 2002, Peter was promoted to Vice Admiral and appointed Chief Executive of Defence Estates, a new post, to form an Agency to manage all the Ministry of Defence’s property in UK and overseas. During this time he was responsible for managing an annual budget in excess of £2bn and for awarding contracts of over £7bn.
Peter was awarded the CB (Companion of the Bath) in the June 2002 Birthday Honours.
Following retirement from the Royal Navy in 2007, he joined a number of boards in a non- executive capacity and was Chairman of the Royal Surrey County Hospital, Guilford from 2010 to 2016. Peter was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant (DL) of Surrey in 2011.
After nine years as Chairman of Governors of Queen Anne’s School, Caversham from 2007 to 2016, he became Chairman of United Westminster and Grey Coat Foundation in April 2019.
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KRA (KWAZULU-NATAL) LUNCH - SUNDAY 17th MARCH 2019
Venue: Fern Hill Hotel, nr Howick. Attendance: Betty (née Jenkins) & Graham Bales [KR6563]; Harris, Angela (née Dawson-Curry); Shirley (née Brown) & Eric Holyoak [KR4230]; Howard, Ron [KR6747]; Sally (née Randall) & Ray Letcher [KR7118]; Marion & Pat Long [R6691]; Isobel Macgregor (née Smith); Peter Manger [KR4540] & Margaret Lead (née McKenzie) and carer, Mrs. Retha de Beer; Celia Moore (née Falck); Ros & John Moore; Karin (née Falck) & Chris Norman,
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Gill (née Salmon) & John Pembridge [KR7429]; Gary Plenderleith [KR4642] & Audrie Ryan; Angie & Terry Tory [KR6339]. Apologies: Colin Bompas [KR4926]; Tony Bowers [KR6961]; Danny McCleary, [KR4384]; Jenny & Bruce Rooken-Smith [KR6290]; Lydia Ward (née Royston).
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KENREG RAFIKIS CURRY LUNCH – 18th JULY2018: DEEPCUT, SURREY
Attendance: Anderson, Anthea & Euan [KR6069]; Andrews, Jean & Mike [KR6508]; Appleby, Anita & John; Armour, Eileen & Eugene [KR4446]; Bagehot, Richard [KR7306]; Bates, Anne & Mike; Bell, Evelyn & Gordon; Bind, John [KR6875]; Blunt, Michelle & Peter [KR6993]; Boulle, Jean [KR6193]; Chester, Beverley; Cuthbert, Christine & Norman [KR4776]; Davis, Jan & John; [KR7457]; Dowey, Graham [KR7301]; Ellis, Jenny; Finne, Lesley & Petter [KR7128]; Francombe, Pam; Gerrard, Peter [KR6847]; Halligan-Jolly, Lance [KR6881]; Hamill, Brigid; Harman, Carol & John [KR7227]; Howard, David [KR4487]; Knowles, Diana & Ray [KR6541]; Lebroue, Fiona; Lipscombe, Shirley & Francis [KR4273]; Male, Val; Marley, Mitzi [dKR399] & Chris; McKnight George [KR4246] & Christine Hart; McRoberts, Tilman [KR4799]; Milbank Mark [KR6122]; Mockridge, Jenny & Rick [KR6835]; Moore, John [KR7180]; Morrison, Elizabeth & Iain [KR6111]; Outram, Sally & Doug; Pelissier, Jackie & Jules [KR7220]; Perkins, Tony [KR7029]; Ross, Iain; Ryan, Gillian; Spence, Jannette; Storm, Jenny; Stott, Hugh [KR6866]; Tetley, Mike [KR4277]; Thornton, Vivienne & Stephen [KR7537]; Tucker, John; Waugh, Barbara & David [KR6204]; Wood, Anita & Brian [KR7285]
ABOVE: DAVE HOWARD HUGH STOTT JOHN HARMAN SALLY OUTRAM AND EUAN ANDERSON
ABOVE: ANITA & BRIAN WOOD; GRAHAM DOWEY; LESLIE FINNE 72
ABOVE: ANTHEA ANDERSON; JOHN MOORE JENNIE ELLIS; JOHN TUCKER
ABOVE: DIANA & RAY KNOWLES EUGENE &EILEEN ARMOUR
ABOVE: DAVID WAUGH; LANCE HALLIGAN-JOLLY; JEAN BOULLE TILMAN McROBERTS
Readers are, I’m sure, aware that: (1) following the closure of KRA(UK) Branch, John Harman very kindly assumed responsibility for arranging the annual curry lunch in England. The original venue, the Officers’ Mess, Royal Corps of Logistics, Deepcut, near Camberley, proved very popular, but for administrative reasons, John has selected a new venue - the Victory Services Club
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in London – see page 60 for details; (2) John Davis and Eugene Armour very kindly arrange printing and despatch of SITREP in Europe; and (3) Hugh Stott is Secretary of the KAR & East African Forces Association, which publishes Rhino Link bi-annually (March/April and September/October). A very up-market EA military journal, edited by John Catton – annual subscriptions - UK £15 and Overseas £20 - strongly recommend you contact Hugh
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KRA(Gauteng) Branch lunches are organised by its Chairman, Keith Elliot [KR4289]. Committee members are John Bind [KR6875] who attended the 2018 curry lunch in UK; Boet de Bruin [KR4296]. Mickey Shaw [KR3606] was a committee member but now lives in a retirement village in Limuru. Diana van Rensburg (w/o of the late Boet [KR3586]), and daughter Lynette, James [KR4848] and Val Daniel, Kosie [KR4292] and Eileen Kleynhans (née Woodlet), rarely miss these small, but friendly reunions.
ABOVE:MICKEY SHAW; DI VAN RENSBURG; KATHY CROMER WILSON; CHRISTINE LEONARD; BOET DE BRUIN; LYNETTE KOEKEMOER; JOHN BIND [Photo by Mark Shaw]
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THE CAVE ELEPHANTS OF MOUNT ELGON
[Brandon Brooksbank]
In 1936, my father bought 500 acres of African bush on the slopes of Mt. Elgon, about 5km up the mountain from Endebess. He slowly cleared the bush and developed it into a farm. He told me that one night a leopard killed his whole flock of sheep, some 40 of them. So he hunted down and shot the leopard and the skin adorned the back of our lounge room sofa for many years. He also told me that a black rhino was shot near our farm and I remember that, in my lifetime, the last lion was shot on Mt. Elgon in the late 1940s.
There are no longer any lion or rhino left on Mt. Elgon and, like it or not, these animals that had existed up there for thousands of years were all killed by white men, either for ‘sport’ or in order to allow for safe farming of the land. It is a common story of the early days of European occupation of Kenya and from which all of us who born there all benefitted.
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The good news is that there are still a few of the large iconic African animals left on Mt. Elgon. Numbers are difficult to verify but it is believed that between 200 to 300 elephants and a larger number of buffalo remain. Leopards still exist in the forest. It is estimated that the elephant population was once five to ten times larger across both sides of the mountain in Kenya and Uganda but the entire population of elephants on the Ugandan side of the mountain was wiped out in the period of Idi Amin’s rule.
In the 1980’s, the Kenyan elephant population came under heavy poaching pressure but this, fortunately, abated and no elephants are known to have been killed on the Kenyan side until 2013 when, it is believed, up to seven died. Since then the elephant deaths have continued due to more poaching and also because of human encroachment arising from recent changes in national Kenya Government policies on Elgon that are, unfortunately, driving the human/elephant conflict.
The Mt. Elgon elephants are unique in that they are the only ‘mining’ elephants in the world. In order to compensate for the lack of salt in their natural diet they have learned to penetrate deep into the mountain caves and dig salt out of the cave walls and floors with their tusks. They usually go in at night and can penetrate up to 150m from the entrance. How they navigate their way in and out in total darkness is still a mystery. This activity, previously unknown to western science, has now recently been recorded in many caves in a large remote area of Forest Reserve to the west of Mt. Elgon National Park.
It is now realised that a full scientific study is needed into an elephant culture that is more complex than previously realised and that has been only partially described. This may be of great importance, not just for the conservation of Elgon’s elephants, but also for efforts to conserve the species across its range. A team has been formed to scientifically investigate Elgon’s elephants and to establish a conservation programme to ensure their survival. The Programme Director is Dr Zeke Davidson who is a senior wildlife conservationist with a doctorate from The University of Oxford. He supervises a team on the ground and is supported by three key friends of Mt. Elgon:
(a) Dr Emmanuel Ndiema, Senior Research Scientist and Head of Archaeology at the National Museums of Kenya who grew up on Mt. Elgon and whose ancestors lived in the caves; (b) Charles Kerfoot, ex Kitale School, lived for many years near the key elephant range area and knows it and its people intimately; and (c) Christopher Powles, who began documenting the caves in the Forest Reserve in January 2017, is the grandson of Buster Powles (the founder of Mt. Elgon National Park), and whose uncle, Peter Powles, sponsors archaeological work being undertaken in Elgon caves.
The immediate problem is the escalating rate of killing of the few remaining elephants by poachers and local farmers. The elephants are not confined to Mt. Elgon National Park and wander into the adjoining Forest Reserve where poachers from Uganda and local areas target them. They also clash with (illegal) ‘slash and burn’ farmers and others now allowed to graze cattle in the forest or plant crops in felled areas of commercial plantation (under the “Shamba” or “PELIS” system).
Charles Kerfoot and Christopher Powles have been financing Zeke Davidson and three scouts since May 2017, building up detailed knowledge of the key area, devising a long term conservation plan and starting to gather scientific results. This has included placing camera traps in caves in the Forest Reserve which are giving an insight into the extent and frequency of the elephants’ cave- mining behaviour.
A conservation plan has now been prepared and the ‘Mountain Elgon Elephant Project’ (MEEP) formed. Zeke, Emmanuel, Charles and Chris have gained support for MEEP from an impressive number of institutions:
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(a) Kenya Wildlife Service (with responsibility for elephant protection), (b) Kenya Forest Service (the land owner), (c) National Museums of Kenya (the lead for a wider Elgon initiative, including the archaeological research), (d) East African Wild Life Society (the project co-manager with responsibility for funds and wider value add), and (e) The Elephant Crisis Fund (a lead donor which is an initiative launched by Save the Elephants and the Wildlife Conservation Network, in partnership with the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation). To date, the Elephant Crisis Fund has donated $37,000 and the Powles family $20,000. A further $30,000 is needed for year 1, to allow the team time to raise more money from other institutions.
So this is a plea to those who care about the legacy we leave our children, to help in this last ditch effort to save the remaining elephants in the area where we grew up, and love. The team has set up an account for a ‘crowd funding’ initiative and I would encourage all of us to give what we can to help. None of the money will be spent on ‘expenses’, ‘administration’, travel etc. It will all go to activity on the mountain and Charles has undertaken to report annually on progress, how much has been collected and where every dollar has been spent.
For more information, please contact Charles
The Bank Account details: Account Name: EAST AFRICAN WILD LIFE SOCIETY Bank: NIC BANK KENYA LTD. Branch: JUNCTION. Bank/Branch Code: 41106 Account Numbers: US Dollar: 1000022318. Kenya Shilling: 1000020733 SWIFT CODE: NINCKENA,. Address:The Junction Mall, Ngong Road, Nairobi. P.O. Box 44599 Nairobi, Kenya, 00100
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RIGHT: MIKE TETLEY MBE [KR4277] AT THE UNVEILING OF THE KAR & EAST AFRICAN FORCES NEW ASKARI STATUE, IN THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL ARBORETUM, STAFFORDSHIRE
[Ed: Photo submitted by John Davis – see Mike’s article ‘I return to the Roof of Africa – SITREP XXXX – should have read XL!]
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