Mention the name Delamere in Kenya, and most certainly the story
you will get is that they are a wealthy colonial mzungu family living
near Elmenteita, whose son, Tom Cholmondeley, shot two people and got
away with murder.
The truth is that Cholmondeley was acquitted in the first shooting and served eight months for the second shooting.
In
both cases, he pleaded self-defence against armed poachers who had
encroached on his family land. He died in 2016 at the age of 48
following a hip replacement surgery. End of story.
But with the Delamere family, more like a dynasty, the story never ends.
Their
family history is the story of Kenya’s colonial past and of white
settlers whose ancestors risked everything to make a life for themselves
in “new land.” And the story is still being written, now in the seventh
generation.
It is a warm September morning, and we
are sitting at the breakfast table with Lord and Lady Delamere and their
grandsons, Hugh and Henry (Tom’s sons) in Soysambu Conservancy,
Elmenteita, 100 kilometres west of Nairobi.
Lord
Delamere prefers to be called Hugh and Lady Delamere insists she
responds better to Ann. She is 80 years old and Hugh is in his mid 80s.
I
turn to look at their grandsons. The youngest of the Delamere
generation in Kenya. They have arrived for breakfast from an off-road
motor biking expedition with the adventurist Netta Ruthman.
She and the late Tom had a common interest in off-road biking in the remotest of places.
She’s
fulfilling her part of a deal she had with Tom to take the boys and her
son on a route they had worked on around western Kenya.
Soysambu
too is a perfect setting for off-road biking and Ruthman is allowed to
conduct exclusive motorbike safaris on the property.
The boys, approaching their early 20s, are taking up responsibilities at the ranch, much to their grandparents’ delight.
It’s
a typical family at breakfast with all the bantering going on,
including Hugh teasing his younger grandson Henry, telling him to stop
growing since he is already a towering figure at almost six feet seven
inches.
Incidentally, his grandmother is in the process of making a quilt big enough for the young man’s use.
The
height comes from Hugh’s mother, whom he remembers as being exquisitely
beautiful and more than six feet tall but still wore heels because she
had “rather good legs.”
Hugh is a great conversationalist, as is his wife and both are avid readers. Their house is overflowing with books.
Soysambu
The Delamere’s Soysambu Conservancy is a sprawling 48,000-acre piece of real estate.
The land, stretching between Lakes Nakuru and Elmenteita is not only a wildlife sanctuary but also a farm and cattle ranch.
At
Naivasha, the Delameres own and manage the 6,000-acre Manera Farm, half
of which was recently sold when the bank (then Barclays) closed on a
debt despite the loan being serviced without default.
I
am in Soysambu following up on one of the conservancy’s project as
hosts of the rare Rothschild giraffes, a colony of resettled colobus
monkeys and a sanctuary for rescued raptors who have either been hit by
vehicles or injured on power lines.
I have spent the night on the ranch on the invitation of the Delameres.
Sitting on the patio after breakfast, I ask Hugh what it was like to inherit such wealth.
Still
a towering figure with a strong voice despite his age and suffering
from Parkinson’s disease, he turns to look at me and typical of his
quick wit, he shoots back;
“Money? There’s no money in this. Do you see any Rolls Royces parked outside, ‘his and hers’ with the chauffeurs?”
Farming
Hugh
opens up about his family and the land. “My grandfather rented the land
from the Kenya government in 1906. It doesn’t belong to us,” he says in
a matter of fact way. The land is on lease.
“The land
in Soysambu has only an inch of soil covering the rock beneath. Little
can grow on it except miserable grass. It’s short of every mineral you
can think of,” says Hugh.
It’s no wonder his grandfather could hardly make any money out of farming.
In
the end, after consulting agriculturists, it was recommended that they
use a mix of soil and cobalt on the land, to make it fertile enough to
grow sufficient grass for the cattle and sheep to graze on.
The
grazing fields however ended up attracting herds of zebras, much to
Hugh’s chagrin, and now they are eating all his grass, leaving hardly
any for his livestock.
Hugh is concerned by the
ever-increasing number of zebras. He’s farmed all his life at Soysambu
since graduating with a degree in agriculture from the Cambridge College
in England.
“Eleven thousand head of cattle is
profitable,” he says. That was his herd before the zebra multiplied from
a few heads to 8,000 and growing, forcing him to reduce his herd. The
ranch now has 6,300 heads of the sturdy Boran cattle.
In
the past, the zebra were culled to keep their numbers stable but after
the blanket ban on game hunting because of the elephant and rhino
poaching crisis, the zebras numbers can no longer be controlled. “For
politicians all game is the same,” says a visibly angry Hugh.
However,
Soysambu is more than just a ranch. It has stunning landscape like the
iconic Delamere’s Nose, a hill straddling Lake Elmenteita; has amazing
wildlife being a World Heritage Site as part of the Great Rift Valley, a
Ramsar site because Lake Elmenteita is a wetland of international
importance and an Important Bird and Biodiversity Area.
The
conservancy also hosts researchers studying the dynamics of wildlife
management. Local schools are allowed free game drives in the
conservancy as part of community relations.
But the
land, as is with all wildlife areas, comes with a cost. The illegal
trade in bushmeat is rife, with snares being laid by poachers along the
ranch fence.
It’s an expensive, full-time job
patrolling the property. Land surrounding the conservancy that used to
be wildlife migratory corridors and was unpopulated until about 30 years
ago, is now human settlements, including the popular Kikopey roadside
settlement famous for open air nyama choma (roast meat) eateries.
From pioneer to current family
“My
grandfather blew all his money,” says Hugh. He had inherited the barony
of Delamere in 1887 at the age of 17. Hugh recounts this history with a
degree of humour.
“In 1821, my great-grandfather
bought the title of ‘Lord’ from the Duke of Wellington. He thought being
a lord was fashionable. All it did was put up the grocery bills,” he
recounts.
“My grandfather inherited a very fine estate
in Cheshire in England, called the Vale Royal. It was about 6,000 acres
of arable land with an abbey in the middle of the spread until King
Henry VIII abolished all monasteries in England and threw out the monks.
The property was his inheritance passed down by his ancestors, the
Cholmodeleys, but he ended up selling it.
“My
grandfather kept selling profitable real estate in England. My father
argued with him because of that but my grandfather believed that it was
more profitable to own property here in Kenya than in England.
“But it turned out it wasn’t.”
By
1930, the entire Vale Royal had passed on to receivers. All that’s left
in the Delamere’s name in England, says Hugh, is a fishing pond that
fetches 600 pounds a year in rent.
The present Delamere farm house at Soysambu was built in 1913 out of Nakuru stone.
It has had quite a few additions since with Hugh’s two stepmothers adding their bits to it.
One
of them was the notorious Lady Diana, the central figure in White
Mischief, the real life story of the unsolved case of the murder of Lord
Erroll in 1941.
There is nothing ostentatious about
the farmhouse save for a few stately portraits. In the dining room hangs
the portrait of King Charles and Lord Delamere, Hugh’s grandfather.
Fast
forward to 1931, Lord Delamere, Hugh’s grandfather died, owing money to
the then National Bank of India that is today’s Kenya Commercial Bank.
“He
died of a broken heart,” says Hugh. “He had asked the Kenya Farmer’s
Association, which he founded, for credit and they turned him down.” It
is quite ironic for a man who pioneered commercial agriculture in Kenya
despite massive losses.
“My grandfather was a very
peculiar fellow. When he moved to Kenya he lived in a mud hut with all
the furniture from the Vale Royal rotting away because the floor was
mud. I inherited very little of it,” says Hugh.
Hugh’s
father, Tom Delamere, was born in England but didn’t come to Africa
until after World War 11. “At the time, the Vale Royal was already in
the hand of receivers,” says Hugh.
Tom Delamere served
in the army during the Second World War. In 1934, he moved his family
into Vale Royal only to be forced out in 1939 by His Majesty’s
government, which used it as a sanatorium for soldiers from the war
front. But by 1947, the house and grounds had been sold.
Tom
Delamere was successful. He lived in London where he started an
advertising company and came to Kenya to find out if his father’s farm
was worth investing in. He thought it was, and he sold his advertising
company.
The company changed hands a few times. It is
today the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, with a
network of 114 offices in 76 countries.
Luck was on his
side. Thanks to the war, the price of steers shot to a high of 30
pound. “My father was able to pay off the bank,” says Hugh. By 1952, the
Delamere estate in Kenya was no longer under receivership.
Which
Tom Delamere knew nothing about farming or cattle, he did know a lot
about race horses, which he bred and raced. His third marriage to Lady
Diana brought the Delameres back into the limelight.
“She married him because she wanted to be a Lady,” says Hugh of his notorious stepmother.
The shootings
As
we discussed wildlife management and the menace of poaching, the issue
of the shooting of two people at Soysambu by Tom, and his sudden death
came up.
“We miss him terribly,” says Ann. We had by
now moved from the patio into the living room, where Tom’s picture sits
on the fireplace mantel. Understandably so. Tom was an only child.
“He was always bounding around, getting things done,” says Ann. “His boys are rather like him.’’
“He was always bounding around, getting things done,” says Ann. “His boys are rather like him.’’
She
tells me that the Delamere rest stop on the Nairobi-Naivasha Road ,with
its petrol station, restrooms and restaurants, was Tom’s project. ‘‘He
said people needed somewhere to stop for a coffee and use a decent
toilet.”
Hugh recounts the two shootings that captured the country’s imagination.
Of
the 2005 shooting, Hugh said: “The men arrived in a car that the police
were looking for. The driver shot at Tom and missed him by a whisker.
Tom shot back in self-defence. He was a crack shot. I taught him to
shoot when he was 10.”
According to press reports, the
men were Kenya Wildlife Service rangers investigating the illegal trade
in bushmeat. The man Tom shot was Samson ole Sisina. Tom was arrested
and charged but was acquitted.
A year later, in 2006,
the country woke up to the news of yet another shooting. On the fateful
day, Tom was out in the ranch walking with a friend.
Since Soysambu also happens to be buffalo country, it is normal for the staff and, Tom included, to have a gun handy.
They
stumbled upon poachers who were hiding in the grass, but who were given
away by their hunting dogs. This time he hit the dog’s owner hiding in
the grass.
Tom was arrested, charged, acquitted of the
murder of Robert Njoya but found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to
eight months in prison.
He served time at the Kamiti
Maximum Prison in Nairobi, where his parents say he was popular with
other inmates and helped set up computer classes for them. He was
released in 2009 and returned to work at the farm.
In August 2016, Tom, aged 48, was admitted at the MP Shah Hospital in Nairobi for a hip replacement surgery.
On August 17, Tom Cholmondeley, the only child of the fifth Lord Delamere, breathed his last.
He is buried in a quiet corner of Soysambu, near the simple stone graves of his pioneer great-grandfather and other relatives.
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