Kenya 1949 to 1966
Nyeri Primary School, Hill School
Eldoret Highlands School Eldoret, Loreto Convent, Mombasa
Father was a Norwegian who went out to Kenya in about 1926 to join his uncle, Ole Arnesen, who farmed at Burnt Forest and who arrived in Kenya in 1905. Ole Arnesen had both a farm and a sawmill and my father worked for his uncle on both of them.
Her father returned to Scandinavia to do an mechanical engineering degree in Sweden and then returned to Kenya rather than stay and farm in Norway.
Her father joined Timsales at some point and worked for them for a few quite a years running their sawmills at Timboroa, Nanyuki and one or two other places. He left Timsales after running the mill at Nanyuki for many years right through the emergency.
Family left Nanyuki in 1955 or 56 and moved to the Algao escarpment area about 35 miles from Eldoret – near a place called Iten where her father ran/managed the Algao Sawmills for Kenneth Rawson Shaw.
They left Algao in 1963 and lived at Nyali and us girls changed to schools in Mombasa. Through the three years at the coast her father worked for the Ford Motor Company.
Family left Kenya in 1966 and moved to England.
Her mother was British but born in Kenya (Nairobi) Her grandmother, was British but came up from South Africa and her grandfather, was British but came from the Argentine. They married at Mombasa Cathedral and then settled at Ol’Kalau where her grandfather had bought land after the war and they began to farm. Her mother went to Nakuru School and then went to South Africa to attend an agricultural college in order that she could return to Kenya to farm. She did farm for a while, but when she met her father they then lived at Nanyuki sawmills on Mount Kenya and so the only sort of farming she did was have a couple of acres of shamba for a veggie garden cut out of the forest and about 5 acres of garden. She could handle a gun every bit as well as her father and in the early days they went hunting a lot. Her mother died in 1951 and her father remarried a few years later to another Englishwoman who was the sister of an Englishman who was in the police force in Kenya and who later became the Assistant Commissioner of Police. His name was Peter Mills.
Her grandparents Marjory Ellis and Frederick J Roberts split soon after the birth of her mother and Marjory took off and as far as we know never saw her daughter again. She died about ten years later of yellow fever and is buried in Port Sudan. Frederick married again – a woman from England called Vere Knox. After Ol’Kalau where Frederick died in a farm fire in 1938, she bought a farm in Turbo not too far from Eldoret. After the death of her husband in the farm fire in 1938, Vere married a man called Charles Bedford Pim but this marriage was very brief. So she lived alone on her Turbo farm and she lived and farmed there for years, very successfully.
Her sisters
Karin Moen
Kenya 1947 to 1966 Nyeri Primary School Hill School, Eldoret Highlands School, Eldoret Loreto Convent, Mombasa. Emigrated to Australia. She bred limousin cattle on a small holding of about 80 acres and when not doing this she was a nurse in a small hospital near Perth. Elder sister Karin died in W Australia 1989.
Angela Moen
Kenya 1950 to 1966 Hill School, Eldoret Primary School, Mombasa Loreto Convent, Mombasa. Angela died England 1992.
Love anyone who can help with the history regarding Kenneth Rawson Shaw at Elgeyo Sawmills in Kenya
to Email:
mwmcfarnell@gmail.com.