Report From Kenya, 1955 – Part Eight

In 1955, at the height of the Mau Mau Rebellion, my uncle John Alldridge produced a series of reports from Kenya for the Birmingham Mail and the Manchester Evening News – Jerry F

Wally’s lion hunt will cost you £900 (plus extras)

Nairobi

So you want to shoot a lion? Fine. There’s a chap here called Wally King who has fitted out safaris for practically everyone from the Duke of Windsor to Stewart Granger.

Give Wally 48 hours’ notice and he’ll send you off into the blue looking like Gregory Peck in search of Ernest Hemingway.

But I’m warning you. It comes a little expensive. Wally’s rock-bottom price for his Big-Four Safari — lion, elephant, rhino, and buffalo — works out at just about £30 a day. The average length of a big-game safari is a month. So that will set you back £900 before you’ve even been measured for your bush-shirt. (Bring the wife along and Wally will do the two of you for £1,050.)

And, mark you, this doesn’t include your game licence (for one lion £50), hire of rifles (you’ll need a heavy double barrel 465 Holland and Holland which Wally will lend you for £12), your hotel bills before and after safari (say, 30s. a day), ammunition, and, of course, taxidermist’s fee for stuffing your lion’s head and dipping its skin (say ten guineas).

But otherwise you’ll find that Wally has taken care of everything.

For your £30 a day he’ll provide you with the services of an experienced white hunter (who’ll lead you right up to your lion and even shoot it for you if your aim is a little unsteady), a full staff of native gun-bearers, skinners, personal servants, cooks, drivers, and camp porters. You’ll travel in real Hollywood style in an exciting-looking hunting car with a 5-ton truck for your gear.

He’ll put you up in a double-fly sleeping tent (with veranda and bathroom attached): mosquito-proof dining tent and all the usual offices: enough food to last you a month: a portable radio to keep you in touch with base: water filters, D.D.T sprayers, and a complete snake bite outfit.

Everything, in fact, except a refrigerator. That’s an “extra”!

Your most expensive single item (if you were trying to kit yourself out) would be your white hunter. White hunters come cheap at £7 a day. There aren’t many of them available just now — most of them are busy tracking down Mau Mau — but you wouldn’t get far without one. Wally has 17 on his books at the moment. They include one Belgian, two Danes, and a former United States Marine. None of them looks particularly like Clark Gable. But they are as tough as they come: and, as Wally’s little brochure tactfully points out, “besides their hunting proficiency they are agreeable companions.”

Thanks largely to Mr. Hemingway, some romantic notions have grown up around the white hunter.

In the Norfolk bar — where the biggest lions in Africa are shot — they like to remember still the noble idiot who, many years ago, arrived in Nairobi with a lovely lady friend of whom he was quite rightly jealous. He wanted a “safe” white hunter, he hinted to Captain Richie, the game warden.

Now Richie was having a drink at the time with Phil Percival and John Hunter. Phil has guided such choosy clients as the Martin Johnsons and Ernest Hemingway and is often called, to his embarrassment, “the Dean of White Hunters.” John, too, is a mighty hunter. Richie suggested he should go out either with Percival or Hunter.

The nobleman whipped out a little notebook and did a quick cross-check. Then announced, “John Hunter is out of the question. It says here he’s a devil with women.”

“Well, then, what about Phil?” suggested Richie.

Out came the notebook again “Yes,” decided his Lordship at last. “Percival will do very well. I have him listed as safe!”

But that was many years ago.

White hunters nowadays are tactful chaps. They have to be when you consider some of the clients they have to take out. (One portly Oriental Wally fitted out demanded a vehicle to carry him along the narrow game trails since he could neither walk nor ride. Wally got round that one by building a single-wheel rickshaw affair, pulled by a man in front and pushed by another behind. It proved most successful.)

You may not know the difference between Thomson’s Gazelle and Rorke’s Drift. But after a month in the bush with a good white hunter you come back talking like Trader Horn.

Some clients, of course, feel that this tact can be carried too far. There was the American lady who returned to Nairobi complaining bitterly about her white hunter.

“I was three months alone in the bush with him,” said the lady indignantly. “And all he did was show me animals. Did he think I came six thousand miles to look at a lot of darn rhinos?”

Perhaps the most tactful of all the white hunters was the Hon Denys Finch-Hatton. It was Finch-Hatton who took the Duke of Windsor (then Prince of Wales) on his famous safari in 1924.

The Duke, a keen amateur photographer, wanted above everything else to get a picture of a charging rhino. The camera was set up and a rhino induced to charge. Finch-Hatton let the beast get within reasonably safe distance of the royal photographer, then killed it with a shrewd shot. The Duke was furious. “How dare you shoot without orders?” he snapped. I wanted to have him get right up to the camera.”

To which the white hunter is supposed to have replied: “Your Royal Highness, suppose you look at it my way. If you, the heir to the throne, were killed what is there left for me to do but go behind a tree and blow my brains out?”

So there you are. You’ve got your white hunter. You’re fitted out and ready to move off on safari. Given ordinary luck you should be able to get in a month specimens of 20 types of game, including rhino, buffalo, an elephant — maybe even a lion.

But remember: if you are lucky enough to bag an elephant that will cost you another £75 — unless you chase him over the border into Tanganyika, where the licence costs only £30.

Oh — and one other little “extra.” If you want a picture of yourself after the “kill,” standing proudly with your foot on that lion’s head, Wally can arrange for a professional photographer to be on hand. It will be another £7 a day, or £8 10s if he provides his own camera.

Maybe after all it might be cheaper to do your lion-stalking around Belle Vue Zoo.

Reproduced with permission
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Jerry F 2024