A good man in Africa: in the steps of Denys Finch Hatton
Sara Wheeler
In 1931, the soldier Lord Cranworth described Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931) as ‘the man with about the most impressive personality I have ever met’. The pair had caroused together at the Café Royal and battled through the waterless wartime bush on the East Africa front.
But after his death, aged 44, in a plane e crash in Kenya 90 years ago, on 14th May y 1931, the elusive DFH escaped into legend. By the time he materialised in the e seven-oscar-winning Out of Africa (1985), Robert Redford played Finch Hatton with an American accent – and a full head of hair. The real man was as bald as a billiard ball.
In 2006, I wrote Finch Hatton’s biography. I trailed him through Africa, searching for clues as tiny, comet-tailed geckos invaded the pages of my notebook. Now he stands clear in my imagination. He was the archetypal man of action, a literary buccaneer who cared little for the shibboleths of success found in Who’s Who. He lived through tumultuous times – from Lord Salisbury to Lady Chatterley – but, in his fusion of the rebellious and traditional, he was a curiously 18th-century figure. His father was the 13th Earl of Winchilsea and 8th Earl of Nottingham. The boy Denys followed the standard trajectory from prep school to Eton, where he was President of Pop, to Oxford, where he represented the un university at golf. At six foot three, and a natural athlete to boot, he was already a loose-limbed heartbreaker. Nineteenth-century explorers had brought Africa into European drawing rooms during Denys’s childhood, and a after graduating he headed for the c continent’s eastern flank. There he d dabbled in a range of business ventures, fo for a short time owning a chain of dukas, th the small stores that sprouted everywhere m man turned the earth. At the outbreak of the First World W War, Finch Hatton joined one of the m many non-regular units in the only part of f the empire that the enemy invaded: British East Africa. It shared a long
border with its German counterpart, and the two armies fought each other – and rhinos – with smoking, 19th-century guns. With a Military Cross on his tunic, Finch Hatton shipped out to Mesopotamia before signing up to train with the Royal Flying Corps in Cairo. The life expectancy of a British pilot on the Western Front at that time was 11 days.
He travelled via Nairobi, where he met Karen Blixen (1885-1962) at a Muthaiga Club dinner. ‘I have been fortunate in my old age,’ Tania, as she was known, wrote to her brother, ‘to meet my ideal realised in him.’
When the war was over and British East Africa became the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Finch Hatton moved in with Blixen. He had formed a land-development company, and toured the region assessing potential investments, always tacking on weeks in which to hunt. In Out of Africa, Blixen’s 1937 book (written under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen) on which the Hollywood movie was based, she wrote of her lover, ‘He never did but what he wanted to do.’
Meanwhile, 21-year-old Beryl Markham was waiting in the thorn bushes and she also began an affair with Finch Hatton. Not yet the famous aviatrix who crossed the Atlantic solo, the sinuous Markham was turning all heads as a racehorse trainer in Nairobi. She and Finch Hatton shared a gift for gracious and unconventional living.
‘And, as for charm, I suspect Denys invented it,’ Markham wrote in her 1942 memoir West with the Night.
Finch Hatton was the open road made flesh. His story exemplifies the age-old dilemma of whether to go or to stay – the choice between four walls and the open road; security and freedom; or, as Tania put it, ‘the lion hunt and bathing the baby’.
In his late thirties, he set up as a white hunter. Big game sport was fashionable and the white hunter was a knight errant, one of the most romantic figures in colonial history. Crucially, Finch Hatton had become a serious student of photography.
Through his Kodak lens, he saw another Kenya: a pristine and ancient landscape in grave danger from the depredations of immigrants and their toys. Rich tourists were randomly slaughtering game from the open windows of motor cars. Finch Hatton was an innate conservative, and his passion for the African landscape led to a campaigning involvement in conservation.
In 1928, Edward, the jockey-size Prince of Wales, selected him as white hunter for his forthcoming tour. The Prince’s benighted assistant private secretary, Captain (later Sir) Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, relied heavily on Finch Hatton: ‘He has organised the whole expedition for me down to the last sheet of Bronco.’
When panicky cables from the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, announced the king’s illness and the vital need for the prince to return, Lascelles noted in his journal that his royal charge ‘spent the remainder of the evening in the successful seduction of a Mrs Barnes, wife of the local commissioner. He told me so himself the next morning.’
While I was researching my book, an auction house placed a news story in the Times, flagging the forthcoming sale of correspondence from the royal safari. I wrote to the firm, asking if they might kindly pass my request to read this material to the eventual buyer. Months later, a cut-glass voice invited me to the top of the Harrods building.
Harrods owner Mohamed Fayed had bought the letters to furnish the Windsors’ villa outside Paris, which he owned. In his stuffy office, I duly read the appalling future Edward VIII complaining to chums at home about missing the ‘divine new tunes’ in London nightclubs.
In 1929, Finch Hatton ramped up his environmental campaign. He wrote a long article for the Times extolling the pleasure of shooting game with a camera, citing ‘an orgy of slaughter in Tanganyika’. He had found a purpose at last. Most of his proposals, including the creation of national parks, were adopted, sooner or later. They were part of a legislative process that reached its logical conclusion in Kenya when hunting was banned outright in 1977. This is the real Finch Hatton legacy. Meanwhile, Tania’s farm had been on the brink of financial ruin for years; now it toppled into the abyss. Denys visited her as she packed her books. She knew in her heart that she had lost him, as one always does when one really has.
But, at 44, he was full of plans. He was going to start scouting elephant from the air for safari clients. To this end, he bought a custard-yellow Gypsy Moth, and he and his servant Kamau flew down to Voi to reconnoitre the terrain.
They stayed one night with friends. The sky was a tender blue on 7th May 1931 when the pair took off again. As the Moth banked to gain altitude, the wind played tunes on the struts. The plane circled twice and turned in the direction of Nairobi. As it was still gaining height, the engine faltered.
‘Denys would have greeted doomsday with a wink,’ Markham wrote, ‘and I think he did.’
Rich tourists were randomly slaughtering game from the open windows of motor cars