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‘Africa – the last continent with a soul of its own’

Carl Jung

Joss decided to call his first home in Africa after his ancestral castle. This new Slains was backed by a dramatic forested ridge and watered by it streams, reminiscent of a Scottish landscape; the setting seemed to pay implicit homage to Joss’s past. Dinan, his heir, would begin her life here in the Wanjohi Valley, whose occupants were not so far removed in temperament from his ancestors: here too settlers had laboured, suffered, loved and lost. Instead of the fog that curled up from the North Sea to engulf icy ramparts, in Africa soft morning mists rose and rolled towards a rambling farmhouse to dissolve under the hot mid-morning sun.

When their ship dropped anchor off Mombasa’s old town, Joss and Idina were rowed ashore with their steamer trunks and all their heavy luggage. Two flags fluttered over the old Fort Jesus, built by the Portuguese: the Union Jack and the scarlet bandera of the Sultan of Zanzibar.

Joss was an experienced traveller in Europe, but nothing would have prepared him for the scenes in Mombasa’s old town. Its narrow streets were peopled with many different races. Women veiled in black purdah strolled among near-naked non-Muslim women, moving nonchalantly along in the heat with their unevenly shaped loads – such as bunches of green bananas or even a bottle – balanced perfectly on their heads. Commerce was noisy, shouted in many tongues as locals haggled for business; government officials, turbaned Sikhs and Indian dukawallahs^* seemed oblivious to the stench of fish and shark oil hanging on the air. In MacKinnon Square, another Union Jack hung limply from its flagpole above the District Commissioner’s office with its rusting corrugated-iron roof. Feathery coconut palms, blue sea and sky gave a feeling of infinite peace, yet Fort Jesus and the cannon standing resolutely beneath its low walls spoke of a history of bloodshed and strife.

The Hays spent one night at Mombasa Club, dining under the moon on its terrace, sleeping under nets as protection against mosquitoes; translucent geckos about the length of a finger darted about the walls, consuming the insects. One train per day left for Nairobi at noon, and the three-hundred-odd mile crawl on the single narrow-gauge track up country began, taking about twenty-four hours.¹ ‘Penniless, dashing, titled and an accomplished sportsman’, as he was described in a newspaper profile a decade after his arrival in the colony, Joss would now make Kenya his home.²

Kenya would suit him because he was not afraid of the unexpected. Africa is nature’s Pandora’s box and the gambler in Joss would respond to its uncertainties. Idina loved everything about the colony too; she ‘could muster wholesome fury against those who she thought were trying to damage the land of her adoption’.³ Her instinct that Joss would share her enthusiasm and strong feelings had been right. Life in the colony demanded hard work, rough living and life-threatening risks, but for an adventurer like Joss, who had all the right contacts and, thanks to Idina, plenty of money, Kenya offered the promise of the Imperial dream fulfilled. In addition, Joss had an open, inquiring mind and a willingness to seek advice from those more experienced than he was.

The Uganda Railway, by which the couple travelled to their new marital home, had been completed in 1901. The Maasai called it the ‘iron snake’ and those who opposed it the ‘lunatic line’. It ended at Port Florence (later called Kisumu) on Lake Victoria, and was a formidable achievement that took five years to complete, traversed wilderness and cost a staggering £5,500,000 without a jot of evidence to justify the expense. The Foreign Office, adept at muddling through, had then enticed out white settlers with cheap land flanking the railway-line.

Joss and Idina journeyed on the train from Mombasa in square compartments, nicknamed ‘loose-boxes’ – there were no corridors – and the train jolted ceaselessly while on the move, stopping, only for meals, at a series of Indian dak-bungalows. These breaks were refreshing on a long journey, which could be drawn out further if elephant or rhino blocked the line. Choking red dust coated every passenger. Any attempt while the train was at a standstill to remove the wire screens at the windows to get more air was met by a scolding from the invariably Goan stationmaster: ‘Bwana! Mosquito bad, Bwana. Malaria bad.’ The first stop at Samburu for tea was accompanied by toast and rhubarb jam. Menus were always the same.

Dinner was taken at Voi, where large hanging lamps like those suspended over billiard tables were bombarded by insects, dudus, which bounced off to lodge themselves in the butter or the lentil soup. The fish was smothered in tomato sauce to disguise its lack of freshness, and followed by beef or mutton, always curried, for the same reason. Lukewarm fruit salad or blancmange rounded off the meal, with coffee.⁴ Stewards made up bunks for the night with starched sheets, pillows and blankets, and in the dark, as the train rattled onward and upward, occasionally a cry would intrude in the night: ‘All out for Tsavo!’ Joss could mimic the sing-song Goan accent perfectly.⁵ At dawn everyone clambered on to the line to stretch their legs. Hot shaving water would materialise in jugs, produced from the steam by the engine driver and delivered with the morning tea by waiters in white uniform and red fezzes. Breakfast was taken further up the line at Makindu.⁶

As the journey progressed, Joss shared the excitement felt by every pioneer: at the spectacle of Kilimanjaro under its mantle of snow at sunset; at the endless scrub and the trickles of water optimistically called rivers; then disbelief, on the final approach to Nairobi, at the sheer dimensions of the Athi Plains, where mile upon mile of grassland teemed with gazelle, rhino and ostrich, and herds of giraffe, zebra and wildebeest roamed wild against the deep-blue frieze of the Ngong Hills. Seeing creatures in their natural habitat instead of behind bars was like rediscovering the Garden of Eden. And finally, beyond Nairobi, awed silence at the spectacle of the Great Rift Valley.

When Joss first laid eyes on Nairobi in 1924 it had become something akin to a Wild West frontier town patched together with corrugated iron. Windswept and treeless a quarter-century earlier, it had been unsafe after dark ‘on account of the game pits dug by natives’. Her Majesty’s Commissioner for British East Africa, Sir Charles Eliot, had embarked on a policy of attracting white settlers. When the European population amounted to 550 it was decided to build a town hall. All around was evidence of plague, malaria and typhoid as the shanty-town grew. These same diseases were still a life-threatening problem in Nairobi’s bazaar in Joss’s and Idina’s day.

By 1924, Nairobi had become a melting-pot, with settlers from all over the world bringing their different ways to the colony – their languages, their recipes, their religions, morals and social customs. Joss was no stranger to foreign languages, and before long Swahili would encroach too on his conversation: shaurie for ‘problem’; chai for ‘tea’; dudu for any form of insect life from a safari ant to a black widow spider; and barua for ‘note’ – important when there were no telephones by which to communicate. Sometimes English words with no Swahili equivalents were adopted into the language by the addition of an ‘i’ – bisikili, petroli. Indian words seasoned the mélange: syce for ‘groom’, gharrie for ‘motor-car’, dhersie for ‘tailor’. Settlers developed a local pidgin Swahili of their own, known by natives as Kisettla. When the settlers began conversing in Kisettla, notice was being given that all convention was henceforth left ‘at home’.

Beyond Nairobi the Uganda Railway traversed escarpment and volcanic ridges along the Rift Valley, with its lakes scattered like pearls; and further north, at Timboroa, the line rose to almost 8,000 feet in a stupendous feat of engineering, scaling ravines and descending again until it halted abruptly above the next large expanse of water, Lake Victoria, in Nyanza. At the railhead at Kisumu, the main crops were bananas and millet. There was still talk at the local bridge tables, of missionaries in the area who had disappeared, thanks to cannibals.⁷

Joss and Idina got off the train at Gilgil, about three-quarters of the way along the Uganda railway-line. A tiny dot, hardly on the map, Gilgil was so small that it boasted only a railway-siding, but it provided a vital link with Nairobi as travel by car was barely feasible because of the appalling state of the roads. The Wanjohi Valley was tucked away in the hills behind Gilgil. This broad and undulating virgin territory, where yellow-flowering hypericum bushes grew in profusion, was watered by two rivers. The Wanjohi and the Ketai, flanked by beautiful podocarpus, ran more or less parallel and fed many icy, turbulent, gravel-filled streams, crisscrossing the valley. Ewart Scott Grogan, a pioneer settler who played an important role in the development of Kenya, had stocked these with fingerlings in 1906 – brown as well as rainbow trout. As one left the valley going uphill to ‘Bloody Corner’, so called because so many vehicles got stuck in the mud there, the Wanjohi changed its name to the Melewa. Fed by the Ketai, it flowed down towards Gilgil, ‘through the plains and past an abandoned factory and former flax lands, through dust and mud, over rocks and stones, to Naivasha, the lake thirty miles away’.⁸

Joss’s and Idina’s new home, Slains, was situated just eighteen miles north-east of Gilgil. On arriving at the railway-siding they were met by their farm manager, Mr Pidcock, who drove them the forty-five-minute journey to the farmhouse. Slains nestled at one end of a private two-mile murram track leading in the opposite direction from Sir John ‘Chops’ Ramsden’s seventy-thousand-acre Kipipiri Estate and his home, Kipipiri House. Slains was a rambling, charming farmhouse, low-lying and beamed, with a corrugated-iron roof, open ceilings, verandas and long bedroom wings. The kitchen, as usual in Kenya, was housed separately. The rooms were vast with partitioned walls which allowed sound to travel freely, affording little privacy.

In Kenya, this style of housing, reminiscent of Provençal dwellings, was the inspiration of Chops Ramsden and unique to the district. The houses were constructed by a builder from Norfolk whom Ramsden, a hugely wealthy landowner, had initially brought to Kenya to construct Kipipiri House. This had pleased him so much that the builder stayed on and was employed to build every additional manager’s house and the neighbours’ homes as well. Before leaving for Kenya, Idina had asked Chops Ramsden to supervise the construction of Slains ready for her and Joss’s arrival. The uniformity of the Wanjohi Valley settlers’ houses reinforced the club-like atmosphere of the area.

Slains’ setting was as dramatic as its namesake in Scotland. The early-morning mists that swamped this moorland wilderness were damp enough to warrant the wearing of wellington boots. At sundown, a chill would come into the air, making night fires a necessity. Yet by day its climate was that of a perfect English summer. The equatorial sun at an altitude of 8,500 feet produced an exuberance of growth. Looking out from the front of Slains towards Ol Bolossat, which was more often a swamp than a lake, except when it was fed during the rains by the Narok River, occasionally one could see the gleaming water flowing over a two-hundred-foot shelf at Thomson’s Falls. In the distance up the valley behind the house rose the mountain Kipipiri, which joined the Aberdare range. The cedar-clad forest ridge which ran along the valley, dubbed by Frédéric de Janzé ‘the vertical land’, dwarfed everything below, and this haunt of elephant and buffalo lent grandeur to the simplicity of daily existence.

For life in Kenya in 1924 was far from an unbroken idyll. Joss was joining a community of pioneers who were still trying to redress the effects of their absence from their farms during the First World War. These early settlers might have picked up land at bargain prices but there had been a catch: every decision affecting their livelihood was made in London. Land for farms had in the early years of the twentieth century been parcelled out under ninety-nine-year leases ‘with periodic revision of rent and reversion to the Crown with compensation for improvements’, which meant that the settlers would forfeit everything unless they developed the property to prefixed standards.⁹

Only a few months before Joss first arrived at Slains, the Duke of Devonshire, then Colonial Secretary, had put the wind up European settlers in Kenya by declaring that ‘primarily Kenya is African territory’, and reminding them that His Majesty’s Government would pursue the ‘paramountcy of native interests’; furthermore, ‘if the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail’.¹⁰ While this meant little to Joss in 1924, he would become a champion of the European settlers’ interests in due course.

In 1920 Sir Edward Northey, the Governor, had made seven major innovations. Firstly, in that year the Protectorate graduated to Crown Colony. Secondly, a new Legislative Council was set up to represent the settler and commercial interests, and European settlers were granted the vote. The colony’s affairs could now be debated in the local parliament, ‘though it was stressed that the colony was still to be ruled from Whitehall’.¹¹ In due course Joss became a member of ‘Legco’, as it was known. Thirdly, the railway was reorganised; its finances were separated from those of the Protectorate and the railway system was placed on a business footing. Four, under the control of an intercolonial council, the first big loan was raised for a new branch railway. Joss would see its construction, as well as the harbour works, begun and completed. Five, the Civil Service was reshaped. The rates of pay were raised to put them on a level with other colonial services. Six, the budget was balanced and inflated expenditure was cut drastically ‘so as to bring the country’s coat within measure of its cloth’.¹² These innovations formed the framework of the political structure within which Joss would move and be affected as a settler.

Finally, it was under Northey that the Soldier Settlement Scheme was launched. In spite of setbacks, this was acknowledged to be the most successful postwar settlement project in the Empire. And – through Idina’s ex-husband, Charles Gordon – Joss benefited from the Government’s second attempt since the building of the Uganda Railway to fill the empty land with potential taxpayers and producers of wealth. These ex-soldiers got their land on easy terms, and Charles Gordon had been one of many applicants. Sir Delves Broughton, too, had drawn soldier settlement land, coming out initially in 1919 to inspect it. Allocation tickets could be bought in Nairobi and at the Colonial Office in London. ‘By June 1919 more than two thousand applications had flooded into Nairobi to take their chance at a grand draw held on the stage of the Theatre Royal.’ Like a lottery, the tickets were placed in barrels to decide who was to get what. ‘It took two revolving drums all day to distribute the empty acres by lottery to an audience of nail-biting would-be farmers.’¹³

One of the first settlers in Kenya, Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, had trekked on foot into Kenya in 1897 with camels from Somalia, arriving with a doctor, a photographer and a taxidermist. Africa infected him with its potential. In 1903, Delamere applied for land in British East Africa on the ninety-nine-year-lease scheme and was granted a total of a hundred thousand acres at Elmenteita near Gilgil and at Njoro beyond Nakuru; he called his first home Equator Ranch. Njoro was already regarded as the cradle of European settlement by the time Joss and Idina arrived in Kenya. While D, as everyone called him, was not the first to take up land, he became the most influential of all the settlers. He was to have a powerful influence on Joss – they were virtually neighbours – and gradually Joss would find himself drawn into local politics. D’Abernon had taught Joss about the Scramble for Africa, and so he knew more than most neophyte settlers about the political machinations with foreign Imperial powers that had gone before. Joss and D, both Old Etonians, were utterly different types who stood for quite different things, but they were united in their love of Kenya and a willingness to use all possible means for their cause.

D was the leading light among the settler community. When not working his farms, he headed deputations to Government House, even taking a delegation to London in early 1923 to fight the settlers’ cause with a Government now much less in favour of colonialist expansion. He also found time to sit beside his own hearth with several Maasai who had walked for miles to chat with him at Soysambu^* wearing only a shuka and beads. Gilbert Colvile and Boy Long, D’s former manager – the other two in the colony’s great trio of cattle barons – would also often consort with the Maasai, who were greatly respected for their knowledge of cattle-breeding.

Gilbert Colvile was a highly eccentric character, almost a recluse. His mother Lady Colvile ran the Gilgil Hotel with her maid.¹⁴ The hotel was something of a focal point for European settlers, who would regularly call upon Lady Colvile. Her son would later get to know Joss when Joss moved to Naivasha. Colvile became one of the most successful cattle barons in Kenya, doing a great deal to improve Boran cattle by selective breeding. He had been at Eton with Delves Broughton and Lord Francis Scott. The latter, like Broughton, whose commanding officer he had been during the Great War, had drawn land from the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme. Scott was chosen to replace Delamere as Leader of the Elected Members of Legislative Council and as their representative to London after D’s death in 1931.¹⁵

Once Joss and Idina had settled in, the rhythm of life at Slains was orderly and as balmy as the daytime temperature. Their prelude to each day was a glorious early-morning ride. Their horses would be groomed and saddled, waiting for them to mount. Before the dew was burnt off the grass by the sun, they would ride out for miles over the soft, turf-like vegetation that rose up as if to meet the sky. The muffled thud of hooves would send warthog scurrying and the needle-horned dik-dik bounding away in pairs. Ant-bear holes were a hazard for their sure-footed Somali ponies, as the scent of bruised wild herbs rose from warm, unbroken soil under their unshod hooves in their jog home afterwards. Joss would change into a kilt and then breakfast on porridge and cream.

Labour was cheap after the war, but not readily forthcoming. District Commissioners had applied to the local chiefs to exert ‘every possible persuasion to young men to work on the farms’.¹⁶ Every servant needed training from scratch – most candidates had never set foot in a European household before. Appointing a major-domo was a complete lottery. The Hays had two Europeans on their staff, one of whom was Marie, a French maid who would become integral to Idina’s households. At times of crisis, Marie could be heard throughout the house ‘wringing her fat little hands, her voice rising higher and higher, “Cette affreuse Afrique! Cette affreuse Afrique!”, her high heels tapping out her progress on the parquet floors as she sought out Lady Hay with the latest disaster’.¹⁷ Then there was Mr Pidcock, their farm manager, who also ran the Slains dairy.

Butter-making was done early in the morning or late in the evening; the butter was washed in the clear river water, which gave it its wonderful texture. Every other day it would make its way to Gilgil by ox-cart, wrapped in a sheet torn from the Tatler.¹⁸ The Slains cuisine would never want for supplies of farm produce and, thanks to a good kitchen garden, the table there was superb. Idina’s menus were sophisticated, and Marie taught the African cook how to make soufflés and coq au vin on a blackened Dover stove fuelled by kuni.^* The ring of the axe was a familiar sound since wood heated the water for baths.

Waweru, Joss’s Kikuyu servant, came to work for him in 1925 as a ‘personal boy’ and may well have started life as a kitchen toto, when Joss spotted his potential. He was only a little younger than Joss – the Africans kept no precise record of the year they were born – and had never been to school. He would work for Bwana Hay until Joss’s death, and was utterly dependable. By the time he was called as a witness during the murder trial in 1941 as ‘Lord Erroll’s native valet’ this Kikuyu man had been privy to many intimacies in Joss’s life. Eventually promoted to major-domo at Joss’s next home, Waweru ran the household very capably, performing his duties with all the expertise and dignity of a seasoned English butler, making callers welcome in Joss’s absence, arranging flowers and overseeing junior staff.¹⁹ Waweru’s opinion of Joss as a ‘good man’ made an impression in court during the trial, and certainly debunks the rumour spread after Joss’s death that he mistreated his staff.²⁰ At Slains, the African servants were given presents on Boxing Day, amid much celebration. As Joss once explained, one had to ‘budget on the basis of two to three wives, and half a dozen children per wife per family’. Nevertheless, everyone received presents.²¹

Another inaccurate assessment of Joss was the assumption that, because he was rich and titled, he was nothing but a ‘veranda farmer’. He certainly enjoyed life and drove around the area dangerously fast in Idina’s Hispano-Suiza with its silver stork flying over the crest of its great bonnet. His hair-raising driving earned him his Swahili name, Bwana Vumbi Mingi Sana, meaning ‘a lot of dust’. For all his high-spirited behaviour, though, Joss was serious about farming. The Hays were the first settlers to breed high-grade Guernsey cattle in Kenya, for example. And thanks to advisers such as Boy Long and Delamere, they were able to avoid the most common blunders made by newcomers, such as putting very large bulls to native heifers, which would result in calving difficulties. The pioneers had learned the hard way. Once the conformation problem was recognised, half-bred bulls were used instead and heifers fared better.²²

Joss knew a lot about horses from all his polo experience, and entrusted only Captain George Marcus Lawrence, a soldier settler who had ridden for the British Olympic team, with the schooling of his polo ponies and the training of his modest string of racehorses. Marc Lawrence would oversee the estate and the staff during Joss’s absences in Europe.²³

Livestock auctions were held in the Rift Valley at Gilgil, Naivasha and Nakuru, through which the only road to Nairobi passed. Each boasted a post office, a DC’s office flying the Union Jack and a police post with the usual sprinkling of Indian dukas;^* the only petrol to be found between Nakuru and Nairobi was at the garage Fernside and Reliance Motors Ltd in Naivasha.²⁴ At the auctions Boy and Joss always stood out amongst the crowd, chatting together. Boy Long, like Joss, was good-looking and popular with women. According to Elspeth Huxley, Boy dressed ‘like an English country squire with a dash of the cowboy, accentuated by a broad-brimmed Stetson hat and a bright Somali shawl’. Joss too was establishing something of a reputation for his eccentric dress, but behind the libertine appearance of these two men were fine brains attuned to the business in hand.

On sales days just before 9 a.m., sumptuous cars would park behind the auction stand. A fine red dust with a peculiarly harsh smell would be lifted by the wind, spiralling into the sky. As the dust settled behind Joss’s Hispano-Suiza when he stepped out, it would rise again around the hooves of the Abyssinian ponies as they were trotted out for inspection, ‘thin, footsore and weary’, having been driven down by Somali herders. Joss’s polo ponies as well as his hacks were taken from Abyssinian stock, because they were exceptionally sure-footed and coped well in the rough terrain.

Wives ‘looking radiant and glamorous, smoking Egyptian cigarettes’, would gaze down at pens full of pawing, butting cattle as the bidding went on.²⁵ Idina never seemed to suffer in the dust and heat – one of her least tolerable offences in the eyes of her detractors. Joss and she both seemed to tolerate African conditions effortlessly.

Joss often met up with D and Boy, whether at Soysambu or Nderit, where Boy lived, or Slains, and the three of them would discuss farming problems. Emergencies were forever cropping up: everyday shauries – crises among the African staff, thefts, sicknesses, snake bites and the sudden need for a vet.²⁶ Within eighteen months of arriving in Kenya Joss, who was not a vain man, felt that he had learned enough through practical experience to describe himself as a cattle farmer.

To diversify their produce, Joss and Idina tried planting pyrethrum – in those days nobody knew for sure what would or would not grow at any altitude – a flower used in the production of crop insecticides. For this the land had to be tilled; teams of doe-eyed oxen, sixteen at a time, would drag the heavy tiller through the earth. If the wooden harness broke, it took Pidcock more than an hour to drill each hole through the hard olive-wood using a brace and bit, to make a new one. Slowly and painfully, several hundred of the Slains acres were transformed into furrow upon furrow of lacy white pyrethrum. What Joss learned here formed the basis of arguments he would later use as a member of Legislative Council, defending the high-quality production of pyrethrum for export.

Elspeth Huxley praised the Hays’ farming activities: ‘They enhanced rather than damaged the natural charms of their valley, by leaving native trees alone and … by paddocking green pastures for butter-yellow Guernseys, stocking streams.’ Idina taught her shamba^* boys how to lay and look after lawns, to prune, and to cultivate English spring bulbs. Her legacy survives today on Mombasa’s north coast, where a garden of exotic shrubs and trees enhances the house where she died. At Slains they grew pansies, Albertine roses and petunias with success and around the cedar trees they planted daffodil bulbs. When these bloomed the effect was that of an English country estate. Elspeth Huxley’s parents, Joss and Nellie Grant, would drive over from Gikammeh to swap yarns and exotic cuttings.

Joss’s and Idina’s neighbours ran into one another in Gilgil – everyone used the railway-siding there. The dusty main road sported one signpost, which pointed north to Nakuru and south to Nairobi.²⁷ Vitalbhai’s in Gilgil was the largest in a string of iron-roofed dukas. Just outside its entrance, a dhersie^† toiled away on his treadle Singer sewing machine. Here, Joss and Idina bought basic provisions as well as yards and yards of corduroy in different colours on the chit system. The dhersie would stitch kanzus – long, white cotton robes rather like night-shirts – which were worn with a red cummerbund by houseboys. He also made Idina’s and Joss’s slacks in the corduroy – a fashion set by Idina, so practical that everyone followed it.

The ‘cow-town’ of Nakuru was the farming heart of the Rift Valley, and was Lord Francis Scott’s nearest shopping centre. The Scotts were never invited to Slains, though Joss and Francis Scott would become friends later. The Scotts, having met Idina first as Charles Gordon’s wife, never stopped condemning her. Eileen Scott wrote in her diary: ‘She has done a lot of harm to this country and behaved like a barmaid.’²⁸ Elspeth Huxley’s description of Eileen suggests that the disapproval would have been mutual: ‘Eileen Scott lingers in my memory draped in chiffon scarves, clasping a French novel and possibly a small yappy dog, and uttering at intervals birdlike cries of “Oh François! François!”.’²⁹

Notwithstanding her low opinion of Idina, Lady Eileen was among the first to recognise potential in Joss: once he joined the Naivasha Farmers’ Association she found him ‘much improved’. Joss’s success there came as a surprise to some, Lady Eileen continued: ‘Contrary to the expectations of most people, Joss Erroll was voted to the chair … It is a pity Joss hasn’t had a year’s more practice and experience; he has a brain like lightning and it is difficult for him to listen patiently to this slow-minded, if sound, community. However it is a very great step in the right direction, he is very able and a gentleman.’

While the Scotts were never guests at Slains, Joss and Idina did not want for extra companionship. With an eclectic flow of friends and visitors, local or from overseas, at Slains the mood of each gathering was dependent on kindred spirits – playful, debauched, sophisticated or civilised. Idina would preside, perpetually reloading her long amber cigarette-holder. The more often her glass was recharged – ‘Another little ginnies, dahling,’ she would drawl – the more amorous she became, a signal that things were about to liven up.³⁰ Joss, however, ‘never smoked, seldom drank, sipping wine in small quantities at dinner; he never touched spirits’.³¹ He would act as barman to his guests, topping up their glasses for hours on end without any sign of irritation. Whenever alcohol was served at parties, whether in the role of host or guest, Joss kept his glass full to avoid seeming to be a killjoy when others were knocking it back. He would decline courteously if anyone pressed him to drink more and, with a knowing twinkle, would murmur, ‘I’m not going to impair my performance.’³²

Joss and Idina had their own polo ground at Slains and played at weekends, generally attracting a crowd of spectators.³³ The polo crowd loved Joss: ‘He was a first-class player … Clever, always had a brain … and was always ready to take advice.’³⁴ A typical gathering would include some of Joss’s Old Etonian friends, neighbouring settlers and a sprinkling of titled guests from abroad.

Reclining in leather-covered armchairs, with those relics of life in England, a fox’s mask and crossed whips on the wall, they would talk of ‘light things – horses and the latest gossip from Government House’. Inevitably their exchanges would include chat about any new divorcees. Since the arrival of the new Governor Sir Edward Grigg, divorcees were blacklisted. ‘Queen Mary had issued her own writ to Lady Grigg: no divorcee was to be received at Government House.’³⁵ Idina could not have cared less, though the exclusion was humiliating to some.

It soon became custom in the Wanjohi Valley for each household to throw one huge annual party. Guests converged, bringing with them a bevy of servants and tents, to be erected in the gardens as accommodation. Having come from afar, they expected to spend at least three days there – longer if the rains were making the roads impassable. A visiting mpishi^* would usefully pick up tips for new dishes, and this practice caught on rapidly, further enhancing Slains’ excellent culinary reputation.

Visitors from abroad would be especially enchanted, after a dusty journey along a remote unpromising track, to reach such civilised surroundings. Slains was filled with comfortable old furniture, Persian carpets, family portraits, silver ornaments, and studded Zanzibar chests gleaming from applications of lime juice and salt. Unlike most homes in Kenya, however, there was not a stuffed animal trophy to be seen. There were baronial arrangements of flowers, spacious bedrooms with private bathrooms and a library – ‘huge and varied … full of biographies … No one knew more about contemporary literature than Idina.’ This room was dominated by Joss’s desk.³⁶

According to its owner in the fifties, Slains’ principal bathroom was ‘superb … vast, and in the centre stood a bath of green onyx … Idina would bathe in champagne occasionally. She was a darling but very naughty.’ Idina’s excesses were conspicuous to all, and her reputation for outrageousness did nothing to improve opinion of Joss among serious-minded settlers. Idina had a walk-in cupboard, leading off their morning-tea room, which housed her shoes, shelf upon shelf and pair by pair – which was a puzzle to her African staff since she went about barefoot, even when riding, just as they did. Idina often suffered from chafed feet. One young woman friend, while applying a bandage to one foot which ‘was very swollen and obviously painful’, failed to see how Idina could bear her touch. Noticing that she did not flinch, the friend asked her if she was not afraid of anything: ‘“Yes,” Idina had replied, “old age.”’³⁷

In every bedroom a bottle of whisky and tumblers stood on a tray, and on each pillow was a pair of folded silk pyjamas.³⁸ This courtesy was extended to guests from overseas because they were unlikely to be accustomed to changing into glamorous dressing-gowns and pyjamas for dinner. Joss had decided to use those boldly patterned beach pyjamas from Venice where they had been all the rage as daytime wear. Since they were comfortable, attractive and practical the fashion became de rigueur as evening wear. Boy Long concluded that ‘the quality and colour of one’s pyjamas and dressing-gown worn for dinner revealed one’s social standing’.³⁹ This fashion did not meet with everyone’s approval – King George V was not impressed when he heard about the habit after the Duke and Duchess of York’s visit to Kenya in 1925.

When Idina saw her guests off with her husky ‘Goodbye, my dears!’, they were always sad to leave. Often they could not expect to return for a whole year. Their only meeting, meanwhile, might be by chance at Muthaiga Club. Being separated by such great and hazardous distances, the settlers were inclined to make the most of their get-togethers, an exuberance that unfairly contributed to their reputation for debauchery.

In May 1925 Idina discovered she was pregnant – her baby was due the following January. But her condition evidently did not get in the way of her social life. Shortly after finding out about her pregnancy, the Hays invited Frédéric and Alice de Janzé to Slains – in the autumn, when the weather made Paris less appealing. They agreed to come out to Kenya for two months including Christmas. Leaving Paris in late November, the de Janzés treated this holiday as a delayed honeymoon as, in the two years since they had married, Alice had produced their two daughters, Nolwen and Paola. The girls stayed behind in France.

Frédéric and Alice were seduced by the glorious Wanjohi Valley, and no doubt by the thought of becoming neighbours with such close friends. Wanjohi Farm, about five miles from Slains, came up for sale while they were staying there, and Alice bought it. She and Frédéric did not move in until the end of 1926, however.

Idina seemed to be fully aware of, but indifferent to, Joss’s affair with Alice. She knew they had been close since Paris days and their flirtation carried on intermittently during their stay as well as when the de Janzés came to live in Kenya. Some say that Alice turned up in Kenya because she could not bear to be parted from Joss, but this theory exaggerates hers and Joss’s feelings for one another. They enjoyed hopping into bed together occasionally, but Alice had far stronger feelings for other men, such as Raymund de Trafford, and Joss found the temperamental Alice far too much trouble to become seriously committed to her. Frédéric was also unaffected by Joss’s and Alice’s sporadic affair. He would nonchalantly refer to Joss as ‘the Boyfriend’.

The de Janzés accompanied Joss and Idina to Muthaiga, an exclusive residential area about three miles from Nairobi’s centre, where they spent Christmas of 1925, so that Idina could be in Nairobi for the birth of the baby. Their daughter was born on 5 January 1926 and they called her Diana Denyse Hay. As a toddler Diana took to calling herself Dinan, a nickname she soon came to be known by.

The first ten months of 1926 would see an epidemic of the plague in Nairobi’s Indian bazaar. There were to be no fewer than sixteen deaths by November, when Dinan was ten months old. Worries over raising children were not confined to the plague. Malaria was another life-threatening disease, and at the time there was a wide-spread conviction that the altitude and the sun would have an adverse effect on growing European children. For this reason, there were few living in the Wanjohi in the twenties. Even as a toddler, Dinan was made to wear a double terai and a spine pad^* between the hours of eight and four. Joss, pictured in a snapshot holding his baby daughter, looks incredibly happy – even astonished by the tiny doll-like creature in the crook of his right arm. Whatever his paternal instincts, however, Dinan would be raised by a nanny, as was customary amongst the aristocracy in those days.

While Idina was still in Nairobi recovering from Dinan’s birth, Joss had stopped on his journey home to Slains at the water-splash in the Kedong Valley, where everyone took on extra water before attempting to climb the two-thousand-foot escarpment. At this bubbling stream the glade was inhabited by a pride of lions – quite uninterested in the presence of humans – whose footprints could be seen in the mud; handsome black and white Colobus monkeys leapt about among the branches above. From the splash, the more cautious would reverse their cars up the hairpin bends, to lessen the strain on the engines. Joss had Waweru with him: no European ever travelled alone in Africa then, a wisdom that has never changed. Not long afterwards, Cyril Ramsay-Hill fetched up with his gunbearer.⁴⁰ He too was on his way home, but from safari to a newly completed house on Lake Naivasha into which he and his wife Molly had just moved. Ramsay-Hill, dying to show off its splendour, invited Joss back for the night to save him driving on up to the Wanjohi.

Though they had not met before Joss had heard of Ramsay-Hill: it was rumoured that he had made his money out of hairdressing. In fact he had been attached to the 11th Hussars. Apparently the natives, who could not pronounce the word, much less understand what a ‘Hussar’ might be, had concluded that Bwana Ramsay-Hill was a hairdresser. Frédéric de Janzé had already come across him that Christmas – a flamboyant fellow, he said, resembling Salvador Dali, replete with moustache and monocle. During conversation Frédéric discovered that he and Ramsay-Hill shared an interest in the cinema and in literature. It then transpired that Ramsay-Hill’s ‘interest’ involved a collection of classic French pornography, paintings and books, many of which were eighteenth-century originals.⁴¹ Next to the library in his new house was a small locked room where he housed his ‘secret library’, ‘a very special collection of books and highly erotic pictures by Boucher, Lancret, Fragonard and Watteau from the collection of the Duc de Richelieu’.⁴²

Ramsay-Hill would live to regret his impulsive invitation by the water-splash, for it was thus that Molly Ramsay-Hill was introduced to Joss, the man who would ‘remake her world’. Their affair, which began some time later, was managed very discreetly and, just as Joss had kept his parents in ignorance about his intentions towards Idina, so here no one guessed at the outset that there was anything other than Joss’s habitual flirtation and charm in his conduct with Molly, who was nine years older than he was, the same height as Idina and ‘petite and quite a beauty, Titian-haired with green eyes and a flawlessly pale skin’.⁴³ In contrast to many women of her age in the colony, whose faces were devoid of any artifice and weatherbeaten, Molly’s face was ‘deadly white as if it had been dipped into a flour bag; she wore dark red lipstick and dark red nail lacquer to match. Everyone thought her terribly exotic.’⁴⁴

Kiki Preston, who had been part of the American glamour set in Paris, came back to her splendid house Mundui at Naivasha some time in 1926, having been persuaded to stay by a friend who had given her land on the lake. Frédéric called Kiki and Gerry Preston ‘Black Laughter’. The Paris clique was beginning to re-form around the shores of Lake Naivasha and along the Wanjohi Valley.

When Frédéric and Alice came to live in Kenya at the end of 1926, as before, their daughters were left behind in France. At this time the Wanjohi Valley was inhabited by less than a dozen Europeans, including the Hays and the de Janzés. Since their arrival the Hays had held court here and, with Frédéric and Alice, they would form the core of an exclusive set. As with all groups of intimate friends they developed certain rituals and habits which marked them out from others. Idina frequently held hands with Alice in the garden at Slains, illustrating how relaxed they were in their shared passion for Joss, which seemed only to bring them closer together. Alice would often sing for her three friends, accompanying herself on the mandolin.

They would go on safari together. The fact that Joss chose not to hunt, fish or shoot did not prevent Idina from doing so. Joss seemed content to be out in the field. Every evening on safari they would gather by the fire between seven and eight, before bathing and changing for dinner, to devote an hour to composing limericks and storytelling. Each took it in turn to recite to the others. This was Frédéric’s idea. He had moved in literary circles in Paris, keeping company with people like Maurice Barrès, Proust and Anna de Noailles; his standards were high. Frédéric’s creations were the cleverest, Joss’s the funniest, Idina occasionally cheated, and Alice always tried to outwit the men. A typical contribution from Joss ran:

There was a young lady from Nyeri

Whose lusts were considered quite eerie,

On the night that she came,

And we both did the same,

It was fun, until I said, Kwaheri.’^45*

Rules were strict when it came to the stories. First, a round of ‘cold hands’ at poker was played, to determine who should start. Whoever won must begin with ‘Once upon a time, Kenya was not Kenya but British East Africa …’ and follow with any subject except shooting.⁴⁶ Sometimes Idina, in her low throaty voice, would declare Kenya taboo: ‘Let’s be jolly and think of Paris tonight.’ They would all shut out Africa and everyone in it until the Swahili servant interrupted their reveries – ‘Chakula tyari’ – and they would go into the camp tent for dinner.

The foursome also enjoyed jaunts to Nairobi, usually confined to race week four times a year when they would make merry like everyone else, staying at Muthaiga Club. The visits involved a drive of a hundred miles, taking six hours. The de Janzés had a Buick and they would race the Hays to Muthaiga Club, testing the qualities of the Hays’ Hispano-Suiza against the Buick.⁴⁷ The de Janzés frequently won, which is perhaps why Joss favoured Buicks later himself.

Fernside and Reliance Motors Ltd, the garage in the ‘tiny dorp’ of Naivasha, looked after the Hay vehicles for Joss all his life. Its European mechanics would lay bets with him on whether he would break his own record time to Nairobi. ‘Bwana Hay was no remittance man, cheerful when he lost, and bills were always paid eventually, if spasmodically.’ Robert Creighton serviced all the Hay engines, including the Hispano-Suiza. Joss was the only man Creighton had ever met to leave a Rolls-Royce in a ditch after it had skidded off the road in the rains and turned over. Joss’s ignorance of car engines left Creighton baffled. ‘How could so intelligent a man learn nothing about motor-car maintenance?’⁴⁸

The murram road from Naivasha to Nairobi formed easily into corrugations, shaking vehicles mercilessly and making travel for farmers with heavy loads very laborious; the Hay – de Janzé races cannot have been comfortable. It was always a relief to arrive in Nairobi. Alice, ‘in grey slacks and green jumper, and wide-spaced grey eyes’, would calmly defy all the club rules, gliding into Muthaiga Club and daring anyone to stop her bringing in her animals – ‘a tiny monkey, an Airedale and a lion cub’.⁴⁹ Even when she was persuaded to leave them in the car, each was brought indoors to her for regular inspection.

By now Nairobi had street lights, so fewer citizens were likely to fall into the open drains at night. Rickshaws plied their trade along Government Road between graceful blue gum trees, lining both sides of the wide thoroughfare between Nairobi Station and the Norfolk Hotel. In the mid-twenties Government House was rebuilt on the orders of Sir Edward Grigg, who was Kenya’s Governor until 1930.^* Joss, who had barely set foot in the old black and white ‘Tudor’ residence, would frequent this stately new building often in the 1930s. The cost, an astronomical £80,000, would be made much of by taxpayers, who ‘squealed indignantly and spoke of folies de grandeur’.⁵⁰

Idina, coolly defying the harsh African climate itself, would appear at the Nairobi races in one of Molyneux’s latest innovations, on one occasion a brown hat covered in oiled ostrich feathers.⁵¹ Because Joss liked black and white, he had hit on the idea of Idina wearing unmatching earrings as a pair – one white pearl and one black pearl – a fashion she made her own.⁵²

Joss always paid one visit to his barber Theo Schouten’s whenever up in Nairobi – men tended to visit their barber every three weeks then. His only alternative, meanwhile, was to get Idina to trim his hair. Theo Schouten was a ‘cheerful little man’ who, having been in Nairobi since 1911, was already looked upon as one of the town’s characters, running his Government Road establishment with ‘West End staff’.⁵³ Schouten’s catered for both sexes in a humble wood and iron building with a corrugated roof and, like the best barbers everywhere, knew everyone and everything that was going on. Joss and Schouten came to know and like one another, and the barber’s was conveniently near to Joss’s and Idina’s lawyer, Walter Shapley of Shapley, Schwartze & Barratt. In London Joss had always used Truefitt & Hill in Bond Street, including their range of lotions known as CAR, and eventually he would persuade Schouten to stock this exclusive range. Joss’s dance partners were always aware of the pleasant scent. Men noticed it too – the distinctive aroma would pervade a changing room shared with Joss before a game of cricket or polo.⁵⁴ Later, when Schouten moved to grander premises in the New Stanley Hotel on Delamere Avenue, and Joss was living in Nairobi, the one appointment he never missed was his massage and manicure, so as to garner information, useful gossip, about town.⁵⁵

The Hays and the de Janzés took their rituals to Muthaiga Club: ‘the squash court ladder was sacrosanct’. They all began at the bottom, playing their betters, climbing rung by rung until each found his place, either to be ‘ousted by or ousting the rung just ahead’.⁵⁶ Joss would always reach the top of the ladder, the champion for two seasons. He usually won at poker too, notwithstanding the fancy footwork that was going on with Alice under the table. He went along with that old poker adage – if you can’t spot the mug at your table in half an hour, it’s you! He relished that moment when the atmosphere became taut to breaking point and the game was played out in silence but for the orchestra of insects outside.⁵⁷ Joss was of course an excellent bridge player, remembering easily which cards had gone into each trick.

The parties at Muthaiga during race week were notoriously wild. Evenings began with sundowners in the peristyle before dinner, and the celebrations lasted well into the night. According to one who saw it all for himself:

The gayest and most light-hearted community in Africa was to be found amongst the British settlers in Kenya, possibly because the Highlands, where most lived, were 7,000 feet above sea-level and this seemed to stimulate gaiety and exuberance. Many lived and worked on the farms that had developed from a country previously uncultivated and uninhabited bush. This was a community mainly of young people who worked hard and played hard and enjoyed life. The leading Muthaiga Country Club was the scene of many of the evening festivities. These would start very correctly with men and women in full evening dress gravely sipping glasses of sherry before dinner. By the end of the evening the company would probably be playing some riotous game or if an occasion such as New Year’s Eve, dancing round a bonfire in the garden. [On one occasion] six people were placed at the same table in the luncheon tent at the race meeting in Nairobi, who had by chance all been married (to one or the other) before … An air of restraint dominated until one of the men broke the ice, observing that it was quite like an old comrades’ dinner.⁵⁸

After race week, back to the Wanjohi Valley the Hays and the de Janzés would go, for another month or so of isolation.

While out riding one morning, Frédéric and Alice discovered a lioness with three cubs hiding under some rocks and went regularly to the lair to observe them. Soon afterwards two young Indian princes with an older ADC called at Wanjohi Farm to invite the Hays and the de Janzés to come for dinner at their camp. They accepted gladly and discovered the camp was supplied with every luxury. The hunters displayed their trophies, ‘a greater kudu and two lion skins’. When Frédéric found out where these had been shot, he realised the princes had found their family of lions. ‘But didn’t you see any cubs?’ he asked. No, they had only seen the male and female, who had charged so they shot them both. Next morning Frédéric and Joss rode out to look for the cubs. ‘The poor little brutes had starved for three days, one was already dead, another died that night.’ Frédéric and Joss were angry with the hunters, for they believed that the killing of a female ‘of any of the species’ was a crime.⁵⁹ Samson, the surviving cub, remained with the de Janzés, and gradually the dogs, ponies and even Valentino the baboon accepted him. Samson and Frédéric established a deep rapport. When Frederic fell ill with malaria, Samson would sit by his bed like a dog, waiting for his master to regain health.

They all had adventures with wild animals. One insistent elephant wandered up the valley from Laikipia on to Slains, trampling the Hay shamba. Joss would not allow anyone to shoot the animal but, needing a gunshot to scare it off, sent over to a neighbour for help. The neighbour appeared with a large rifle and some servants, and this shooting party succeeded in driving the elephant away, getting within a hundred yards of it, into thick forest. Then it came swiftly down wind, having heard the men, ambushing and knocking the helpful neighbour down with a side slash of its tusk. The man squirmed between the elephant’s front feet as it dug around with its trunk. He then claimed he stuck his fingers in its nostrils and was finally saved by being kicked backwards into a clump of thorns. Dr Henderson of Nakuru treated him for three broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder, ‘all in return for the kindness of loaning his gun’. He was black and blue all over.⁶⁰

Samson disgraced himself at the first party that the de Janzés gave at Wanjohi Farm. The place was ‘hectic with twenty people staying, in and about the tents in front of their big veranda, and the courtyard at the back … was cluttered with cars’. The African staff loved entertaining and parties, notwithstanding all the additional work. Guests often brought their own cooks with them, who were ‘bringers of news from afar’ for the household staff. Africans are born chefs. The local staple diet is posho – maize meal – hardly varying over the years, and yet they astonished their employers with their diverse repertoire. Idina’s chef whipped up omelettes as light as air, or produced paupiettes of sole or truite meunière for as many guests as was wished, often at short notice. At Wanjohi Farm, every bench, easy chair, camp chair and dining chair had been brought into commission, and, ‘for once the table looked magnificent with a tablecloth and all necessary “adjuncts” in their place’. Samson, ‘much petted and spoiled’, soon got into the party spirit. Frédéric, changing indoors, heard the first crash: ‘I was in my bath … a towel, a leap and I was rescuing the table fittings where Samson tugged determinedly – a sparkle of fun in his eyes. A broken plate, sundry glasses on the floor – he was thoroughly enjoying himself.’

Everyone contributed to their ‘Dutch treat party’, where Joss and Frédéric, ‘mere abstainers’, handed out cocktails. Joss would mix the fashionable drinks of the day expertly, shaking up Manhattans and Martinis. Cocktails and jazz were expressions of modern life which Idina and Alice had brought from Paris. From Naivasha, the two newcomers Major and Mrs Ramsay-Hill had brought along stout and champagne because Molly’s favourite cocktail was Black Velvet, a mixture of champagne and Guinness.⁶¹ Idina’s tipple was gin and orange bitters. During the main course at dinner Molly Ramsay-Hill suddenly leapt to her feet and let out a wild shriek as a servant dropped a bowl of mayonnaise down her back, having tripped over Samson. Now, as Molly retreated to clean herself up, she too almost tripped over Samson’s outstretched paw. Someone leapt forward in time to prevent a heavy fall. ‘The good lady took a lot of pacifying … dinner came to an end without interruption.’