From Enniskillen to Nairobi: The Coles in British East Africa

Patten, Eve

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_3

From Enniskillen to Nairobi: The Coles in British East Africa

Eve Patten⁵

Chapter
First Online: 06 November 2019

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Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

This chapter explores an early twentieth-century connection from Ireland to British East Africa in an account of Florence, Galbraith and Berkeley Cole—all children of the fourth Earl of Enniskillen—who settled in the protectorate during the years leading up to its designation as the crown colony of Kenya in 1920. Their lives are traced here through their family correspondence, and also through the works of several of Kenya’s literary memoirists, including Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Elspeth Huxley and Llewelyn Powys. From these sources, the experiences of the Cole siblings emerge to illuminate the convoluted and sometimes ironic position of Ulster’s aristocrat white settlers in eastern Africa’s formative imperial landscape.

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Notes

1.
Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford UP 1999), 7.
2.
Enniskillen Papers (hereafter EP) at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), D1702/9/7. I am grateful to the Deputy Keeper of the Records, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for permission to quote from these sources throughout this chapter.
3.
For details of Enniskillen’s commercial landscape in this period see Henry N. Lowe’s County Fermanagh One Hundred Years Ago: A Guide and Directory, rev. ed. (1880; repr., Belfast: Friar’s Bush Press, 1990).
4.
EP, D1702/12/46/21–40 includes most of the 1901–1902 Boer War correspondence between the family members. Specific references above are from EP D1702/12/47, 11–20, Berkeley Cole to Charlotte Cole, 15 April 1901 and 28 June 1901. See also Elspeth Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun: My Kenya (London: Pimlico, 2000), 94–95.
5.
Details from Charles Trevenix Trench, The Men Who Ruled Kenya: The Kenya Administration 1892–1963 (London: Radcliffe Press, 1993), 135–37. Delamere’s settlement in Africa is also covered in Elspeth Huxley’s biography, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya, 2 vols. (London: Chatto, 1935, 1953).
6.
“Court Circular,” Times, 12 July 1899, 12.
7.
Country Life, 15 December 1906, n.p.; EP, D1702/9/4; see also D1702/12/48/30 for Berkeley Cole’s 35-page Masai vocabulary typescript.
8.
Winston Churchill, My African Journey (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), see 3–7.
9.
Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun, 93. Florence Cole also features in the aviator Beryl Markham’s descriptions of her Kenyan adolescence in her 1942 memoir West with the Night (London: Virago, 1984).
10.
See Charles Miller’s The Lunatic Express (London: Macmillan, 1971) for a full account of the railway venture.
11.
Trench gives some overview of these attempted relocations, The Men who ruled Kenya, 97–99.
12.
See, for example, Eleanor Cole, Random Recollections of a Pioneer Kenya Settler (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Random Publishing, 1975), 34–35.
13.
Errol Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak: A Study of the Life of Denys Finch Hatton and His Relationship with Karen Blixen (London: Grafton, 1985), 122. See also her similar endorsement of the Coles in The Kenya Pioneers: The Frontiersmen of an Adopted Land (London: Mandarin, 1991).
14.
Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles (London: Macmillan, 1939), 64. Cranworth ’s earlier (and tellingly entitled) account of this era, A Colony in the Making, or, Sport and Profit in British East Africa (London: Macmillan, 1912) is dedicated to Lord Delamere and Lady Florence Delamere (Cole).
15.
Cited by Donald Hannah, ‘Isak Dinesen’ and Karen Blixen: The Mask and the Reality (London: Putnam and Co., 1971), 35–36; see also Trzebinski, Silence will Speak, 127–28.
16.
Much of this episode is described in his correspondence: see EP D1702/48/11, Galbraith Cole to Mrs Adrian Cave, 14 September 1914.
17.
The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, ed. Louis Wilkinson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1943), 86. See also Malcolm Ellis, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), chapter 7. Ebony and Ivory—containing some of Powys’s “Diary of an African Sheep Farm”—was published in 1923.
18.
Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 6 and 131.
19.
Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 46.
20.
The personal and business relationship between the two settlers is described by Sara Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun: the Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton (London: Vintage, 2007).
21.
Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 83 and 87–88.
22.
Donal Lowry, “Ulster Resistance and Loyalist Rebellion in the Empire,” in An Irish Empire: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Keith Jeffery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 191–215.
23.
John Cole ’s war correspondence is mostly undated and subject to wartime censorship; for these references, see EP D1702/12/50/9, 50/10, 50/30.
24.
Full demographics over the period are supplied by Keith Kyle, The Politics of the Independence of Kenya (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
25.
Galbraith Cole to Mrs Adrian Cave, 9 March 1915, EP D1702/43/3.
26.
A. Davies and H.G. Robinson, Chronicles of Kenya (1928), cited in Trzebinski, Silence will Speak, 164–65.
27.
This period is charted by Charles Miller, Battle for the Bundu (London: Macdonald and James, 1974); see especially 90–97.
28.
Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 187–88.
29.
Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak, 165.
30.
Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 196.
31.
Galbraith Cole to Mrs Adrian Cave, n.d., EP D1702/48/9; see also Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak, 213–16.
32.
Sara Wheeler discusses the Cole brothers in relation to Finch Hatton’ s wartime operations at this time in Too Close to the Sun, chapter 4.
33.
See Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) to Ingeborg Dinesen, 31 March 1917; and 29 June 1928, in Letters from Africa 1914–31, ed. Frans Lasson (for the Rungstedlund Foundation; trans. Anne Born) (London: Picador, 1983), 43 and 73.
34.
Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun, 102–3.
35.
Eleanor Cole to John Cole , 6 November 1929, EP 1702/48/29. For details of Roland Wilks Burkitt , known locally as “Kill or Cure Burkitt,” who arrived in the Protectorate in 1911, see Bernard Glemser, The Long Safari (London: Bodley Head, 1970), 22–25.
36.
The remainder of Eleanor Cole ’s life is described in her autobiography, Random Recollections; see in particular, 102.
37.
Lady Frances Scott, cited by Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun, 240.
38.
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Shadows on the Grass (London: Penguin, 1984), 17. See also Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen, The Life of Karen Blixen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 114–15.
39.
Isak Dinesen to Thomas Dinesen, 3 August 1924, in Letters from Africa, ed. Lasson, 223.
40.
Isak Dinesen to Ingeborg Dinesen, 14 June 1917, in Letters from Africa, ed. Lasson, 49.
41.
Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Out of Africa (London: Penguin, 1989), 185.
42.
Several influential studies of the Masai in this regard appeared from the establishment of the Protectorate onwards: see in particular A.C. Hollis, The Masai: Their Language and Folklore (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), introduced by Sir Charles Eliot, Commissioner to British East Africa between 1900 and 1904.
43.
Isak Dinesen to Ingeborg Dinesen, 1 June 1924, in Letters from Africa, ed. Lasson, 219.
44.
Blixen, Out of Africa, 188.
45.
Blixen, Out of Africa, 191.
46.
Hannah, “Isak Dinesen” and Karen Blixen, 30.
47.
Blixen, Out of Africa, 229–32.
48.
There is some discussion of Berkeley Cole ’s activity on the Council in C.J. Duder and G.L. Simpson, “Land and Murder in Colonial Kenya,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 3 (1997): 440–65; 442. See also Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak, 123.
49.
Elspeth Huxley, Forks and Hope: An African Notebook (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), 87.
50.
Blixen, Out of Africa, 193.
51.
See Eleanor Cole, Random Recollections, 57.
52.
See Lowry, “Ulster Resistance,” 198–99. The longer trajectory of settler agitation over Indian equal rights policy in Kenya is addressed by Christopher P. Youé, “The Threat of Settler Rebellion and the Imperial Predicament: The Denial of Indian rights in Kenya, 1923,” Canadian Journal of History 12 (1978): 347–60.
53.
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xv.

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Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Eve Patten

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Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland
Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

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Patten, E. (2019). From Enniskillen to Nairobi: The Coles in British East Africa. In: Roberts, D., Wright, J. (eds) Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_3
Published: 06 November 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25983-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25984-6
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