Denys Finch Hatton

The life and legacy of a legendary big-game hunter, passionate conservationist and champion of Africa.

- Sir Johnny Scott

ON THE morning of 14 May 1931 a yellow Gipsy Moth biplane took off from the little dirt airstrip at the foot of Mbolo Hill near Voi, on the edge of the Taru Desert in Kenya. The pilot circled the airstrip twice in a flamboyant gesture to the friends who had come to see him off. Then, to their horror, the engine cut out and the plane nosedived, crashing in a ball of flames and killing the big-game hunter and conservationist the Hon Denys Finch Hatton.

Finch Hatton was born in 1887, the younger son of the 13th Earl of Winchilsea, and grew up at Haverholme Priory in Lincolnshire. After Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford, he followed many of his contemporaries out to Kenya and investigated farming opportunities promoted by the pioneer settler Lord Delamere, arriving in 1910. Although only there for a month, he was immediately drawn to Africa and purchased land in Dorobo and Nandi country, north of the nascent settlement on the Uasin Gishu plateau above the Rift Valley, before heading back to England.

On his return in 1911 he bought a house in Nairobi and over the next three years acquired more land, including a substantial estate at Navaisha in the Rift Valley basin where he hoped to raise cattle. He joined the board of a consortium prospecting for minerals and bought a chain of small stores across Kenya. In 1913 he embarked on a six-month trip through northern Kenya to buy native cattle in Italian Somaliland, hunting game for the pot along the way. He drove the herd south to Kekopey Ranch, on Lake Elementaita, which belonged to the Hon Galbraith Cole, Lord Delamere's brother-in-law.