Lord Delamere: A story of misfortune, resilience and smile at the end of it

No other white settler embodies Kenya’s milestones in Agriculture like Lord Delamere.

Although he was instrumental in shaping Kenya’s political and social development too, his greatest contributions came from his catastrophic agricultural projects.

The Third Baron Delamere initially came to Africa in the late 19th Century as a hunter. After a 1,000-mile walk from Somalia into the land that would later become Kenya, Delamere fell in love with the countryside.

What followed were annual hunting pilgrimages that almost cost him his life and limb when he was mauled by a lion. But that did not deter him from dreaming about the Kenyan sunset.

MIGRATED TO KENYA
In 1903, Delamere, his first wife Florence, and their three-year old son, migrated to Kenya.

They settled in Njoro at a place he called Equator Farm. It was here that a series of colossal failures would bedevil the man and his projects, but he would eventually emerge victorious.

Delamere arrived at Njoro on a stretcher after a hunting accident in the Athi Plains had left him bedridden for over 10 months.

His purebred merino sheep and cattle from New Zealand and Britain were already on site. By the end of the year, however, most of the imported breeds would die, stricken by foot and mouth disease.

His imported herds of cattle were unlucky too. They were annihilated by Red Water disease and East Coast Fever. Delamere desperately tried to crossbreed the remaining flock and herds with local breeds.

This would be one of the earliest modern genetic crossbreeding attempts to produce hardy but productive breeds for the Kenyan agricultural sector.

CATTLE REARING
Lord Delamere was the first settler to experiment with cattle rearing.

The breeds imported from Australia died of lack of iron in the soil and diseases, such as ticks, East Coast fever, rinderpest, and red water.

The mineral deficiency was an oversight on his part. The land on which he sought to graze the exotic sheep was deliberately avoided by the Maasai, who knew of its deficiencies.

“The local Maasai never grazed their livestock in the area as over time, they withered away and died. Anyone else who brought livestock in suffered the same misfortune,” writes Andrew Nightingale in Hidden Histories-Njoro.

The pleura-pneumonia that further struck down his herds was reportedly spread by 1,000 oxen he had brought from Nyanza. In this pre-tractor age, ox-drawn ploughs were the only logical way of farming vast plantations profitably.

The Njoro failures set Delamere back £40,000, a large amount of money even today. Undefeated, he mortgaged his family’s vast estate in Cheshire and planted wheat on Equator Farm and Florida Farm in Rongai.

That failed too because the crop was struck by fungal rust disease. Of all his agricultural failures, this one seems to have obsessed Delamere the most.

WHEAT GROWING

He would invest even more heavily into wheat than anything else, eventually triggering the wheat fields for which Nakuru and its metropolitan areas are famous today.

The Delamere family then acquired a vast estate in Naivasha. Soysambu, the name of the new farm, means “the place of striated rock” in Maasai. Delamere turned it into an agricultural lab.

He hired a professional wheat breeder, G.W Evans, and a retinue of scientists in the years after, to develop a breed resistant to Yellow Stripe Rust and Black Stem Rust.

Another Wheat breeding station in Njoro, now part of Egerton University, sought the same end. The effort was fruitless for a long time because fungal rust mutates so fast that almost all forms of resistance to it is overcome in two or three crops.

Any hardy breed they created was only viable for a year or two.

Delamere single-handedly financed the wheat-breeding programme until 1920 when the Department of Agriculture took over.

At the same time, he tried to make profit by seeking out other ventures, such as pig, ostrich, and poultry farming.

The ostrich project was a failure too because of the advent of the motor vehicle, which had pushed ostrich feathers on hats out of fashion. He also ventured further into dairy and maize farming, two other industries that still bear the legacy of his foresight.

KCC
It was at a meeting at his Kileleshwa home that the seeds of the modern dairy industry were first sowed. At the meeting with other dairy farmers, the idea to form the Kenya Cooperative Creameries (KCC) was mooted.

The idea behind the KCC was a body that would lock out Africans from selling milk to hotels and other places directly.

Settlers would have exclusive access to the market. KCC eventually evolved into a parastatal in independent Kenya before being privatised and re-established to new glory.

Delamere also set up the famous flour mill, Unga Limited, to encourage wheat farming.

The Unga Limited Company, which is still in existence today, was tasked with assisting and encouraging settlers to grow more wheat.

Delamere, more than anyone else, knew the taste of failure in wheat farming, and had made a mortal enemy of wheat rust disease.

He later gave up his 40 per cent share-holding in Unga to the Kenya Farmer’s Association (KFA), to allow the company to obtain loans to finance farming and seek new markets for the produce.

Although Delamere died in a tumultuous decade that saw the Great Economic Depression, a period of severe drought and other changes, he had finally succeeded in making some profit from his three-decade-long efforts to tame the Kenyan soil.

He was heavily in debt at the time, owing the equivalent of £20 million today to the National Bank of India. His undying spirit bankrupted his family, leaving his successor with colossal debts and no Cheshire Estate with which to leverage for more loans.