Midday Sun - Daphne Moore attended a dance at Government House in honour of the Neville Chamberlains, but they got stuck on the plains and failed to arrive; meanwhile Tich Miles, the senior aide-de-camp, had invited all the people normally barred from Government House on moral grounds, and a good time was had by all. ........….. '

Tich, as his name implies, was tiny, and incredibly thin: a medical examination made in 1930 gave his weight at 6 stone 8 1/2 lbs. He was a bundle of energy, of laughter and high spirits when not racked by pain and fits of vomiting that left him weak as a dish-rag. Then he would bounce back and carry on with whatever he was doing as if nothing had happened. Enthusiasm, or sometimes detestation, would bubble up in him like a hot spring. He deeply loved his family, his many friends and those he considered to be the salt of the earth, and despised no less deeply those he believed to be its scum. His was a simple code, black and white, no half measures.

He came of a family of soldiers - Miles, Latin for soldier: genes have a long life. Tich had arrived in EA in 1910 at the age of 19 to seek his fortune, having absolutely none of his own, and had been taken on by a man called Isaacson who was promoting rubber-growing among the Nandi. For a salary of £8 a month he worked in a duka at Kapsabet from six am. to six pm. six days a week, selling trade goods and buying latex. His companions were a dog (taken by a leopard), a mule, a monkey (killed by a Nandi) and a lion cub which, to his grief, he had to shoot after it had sprung upon a goat. War relieved him of this drudgery. He joined the KAR and fought throughout the EA campaign, winning a DSO and MC, as well as a Belgian decoration and a mention in despatches.

After the war he stayed on for two and a half years in the KAR, mainly in the wilds of Jubaland, where letters posted in Nairobi took 2 months to reach him. ........ (more) ..... During  this period of his life he survived not one but two attacks of blackwater fever. Then in 1923, he successfully applied for the job of British Consul in Southern Abyssinia. His headquarters were at Mega and his salary £800 a year, plus £50 'horse allowance'. ........ (more) . It was not as if he liked solitude and rough living. On the contrary, he loved company, and friends, good food and drink, and laughter. It was poverty that bound him to his post. ............ he wrote to his sister Dolly - 'the bank was rather savage about my overdraft.' He concluded 'This is a wonderful country but a foul race inhabits it.'

He did escape for 2 years, when Sir Edward Grigg engineered his posting to Govt. House in Nairobi as senior aide-de-camp. Here he was the life and soul of many parties. He had a parlour trick he often practised at Muthaiga Club: he went all round the ballroom without touching the floor, swinging by his fingers from the cornice like a monkey. He loved these parties. At an earlier one 'Berkeley Cole announced that everyone was bathing at Trouville and every few minutes a large wave came and we had to hop over it. I've never laughed so much in my life.'

When his 2 years were up, it was back to the frontier. This could have been avoided. Through the good offices of friends, he was offered a job on the staff of the Governor-General of Canada. He wanted very much to take it, but the Treasury decreed that, if he did, he would lose his pension rights even if he returned to the colonial service. Small though the pension was, it was the only source of income to which he could look forward. Despite Grigg's intervention, the Treasury remained adamant. Tich refused the offer, and thereby signed his own death warrant. As time went on he grew more sensitive, rather than less so, to the brutalities and disregard of human life he saw all around him ......... (more)

Abyssinian tej ...... copious draughts of tej. Had he failed to keep up with his hosts in tej consumption, he would have earned their contempt. Tich's liver had been permanently damaged by amoebic dysentery, so that alcohol was almost a poison, but he refused to give the Abyssinians best, thereby winning their respect, or rather enhancing it. Their parting present, when he left Mega, was a silver-mounted drinking horn. I last saw Tich when he was lying on a sofa on Glady's veranda. He was too weak to rise, but not too weak to kiss my hand and make some joke or other. His face was like a death mask. He was on his way to England for treatment, but died in April 1934 within a month of his arrival. He was 44 years old.    

Lytton - [Isiolo 1923] - Tich Miles came with his sister, going to be consul at Mega. A dapper little man and most worthy, carrying two little dachsunds in panniers on either side of a donkey - Honeybee and Sweet William they were called. Miles died - too much frontier perhaps - but he was admired by Abyssinians and that in itself was a recommendation.                                                          

Markham - ADC to the Governor, Sir Edward Grigg

Cranworth - WW1 - Cole's Scouts - though comparisons among one's friends are odious, I think that he was perhaps the finest of the lot. Tich, as he was known to a multitude of friends since Nature had endowed him with a physique about ten sizes too small for the great heart it sheltered, came to BEA in August 1909, being then 20 years old. He was another of the inmates of Kedowa Farm at Londiani, which he shared with his great friends Colin Isaacson and Capt. Sandbach. Later he became the bosom friend of Berkeley Cole and was his inseparable companion in many enterprises. I think that his principal interest in Kedowa lay not in the farm but in the garden. He loved flowers and had a more than considerable knowledge of their cultivation.

I shall always remember how I acquired my first acquaintanceship with Tich. It was in the early days, about 1910, and I had to go up to Uganda after one of the bi-annual race-meetings ....... As a result of the night before I did not feel too good, and was rather annoyed that some other passenger had placed a suitcase and a bundle of rugs on the opposite seat in my carriage. However, to my satisfaction, he did not turn up and when we started I lay back in my corner and went to sleep for a couple of hours. The train stopped with a jerk and I woke up, and the first thing that I saw was 2 large brown eyes regarding me from under the little heap of rugs. It was Tich coiled up in the smallest possible space. From that day began a friendship that continued till the day of his death. He was a fine horseman, a great lover of dogs, and cared nothing for shooting. There was no better companion or one who loved a joke more, and the thing he hated most was pomposity ......... (much more) The war over he applied for and obtained the post of HM's Consul in S. Ethiopia, a post for which he had certain qualifications, in that he had recruited into his M.I. a considerable quantity of Abyssinians and had acquired from them a smattering of the language. Up in this dreary outpost he once again played a lone hand, and played it well .......... Still more toll was taken of his health, and when Sir Edward Grigg became Governor of Kenya he was able to persuade Miles to take up the post of ADC and Comptroller in Nairobi, where he carried out the attaching duties efficiently for 2 years.

He never liked the work, however, and at the end of the period applied to be returned to his post in Abyssinia ... He was brought home broken down but just alive, and died on April 10th 1934. He was only 44; but as Sir Edward Grigg so truly and eloquently wrote to the Times, if he had lived to have been a hundred he would have remained at heart a boy. Lillibullero - 1933 - buying stores - ..... he drove me to Elliott's then in Govt. Rd., and there I watched his royal progress down the aisles of varied provender. He bought superbly and with a great air. He strutted to and fro, up and down, among the serried ranks of wines and groceries, touching, appraising, tasting, choosing and discarding, like a prince among his orchards. With what a careless, lordly air did he achieve these household purchases! With what a natural sovereignty did he bestow his orders on manager and assisitants! A word carelessly thrown over his shoulder, a nod, a look, and the thing was done. They followed him like courtiers at a parade. Not quite that either, for they had about them not only a look of affection and devotion, but also - dare I say it? - the merest suspicion of a twinkle. At length, his regal perambulations at an end, he called for a pen and ink and with a great flourish wrote out a cheque for a trifle under £200. This was his final triumph and it left me humble and awestruck. ......…

Mega - there was no doubt that Miles lived in the knightly style ........ (life in Mega - Governor's lunch - drinking etc.!) ....... Miles getting more and more sick ........ In July Miles went back to Mega but in the last days of October, Vincent Glenday brought him to the hospital in Nairobi. He never rallied again, and died in London on 11th April 1934.

Mischief - Muthaiga - would climb into the roof and hang from the beams like an ape.

Debrett - Major, Reserve of Officers, late KAR, and Consul for S. Ethiopia; again Consul for S. Ethiopia 1924; European War 1914-18 (despatches, MC, DSO)

Land - A.T. Miles and Others leased 22109 acres at Laikipia, Soldier Settlement Scheme WW1

Gazette - 4/11/1914 - Appt. - East Africa Scouts - To be Lieutenant - Quarter-Master Sergeant A.T. Miles (without pay) Gazette - 11/8/1915 - Appt. - East Africa Somali Scouts - To be Lieutenant - Hon. Lieut. and Quartermaster Arthur Tremayne Miles

Mills - He was brought home broken down and but just alive, and died on April 10th 1934. He was only 44; but as Sir Edward Grigg so truly and eloquently wrote to the Times, if he had lived to have been a hundred he would have remained at heart a boy. Just as when I think of Denys Finch Hatton the noun 'personality' springs to my mind, so when I think of Tich does the adverb 'gallant'. - Lord Cranworth

Chandler - A small man, short and weighing less than one hundred pounds, Miles came to East Africa in 1910 to find work. His first job was as a counter clerk for £8 per week, but when war broke out in 1914 he joined the KAR and served with distinction, opening up a spot for himself in the colonial administration. Decorated several times, Miles remained in the Army after the war ended and was stationed in Jubaland, where he engaged in several bloody frontier incidents and quelled a mutiny among a disaffected KAR unit. ……….. [more]

Altrincham - The management of Government House never went quite well enough till I secured a master of the household in the shape of Tich Miles, a born, untiring host. Tich Miles was British Consul at Mega, a lonely post on the southern borders of Ethiopia. He came of an old Gloucestershire family, familiar with the hospitality of Badminton in its palmiest days. Though he had little company save that of a small dachshund called Honeybees, he led an ardent and colourful life on the frontier. On my urgent plea, however, he obtained leave from the Foreign Office to come and help me at Government House during the Prince of Wales' first visit and remained with me thereafter till the end of my regime. ……………… Tich Miles, to return to the gay master of our domestic economy, was a creature of irresistible charm. What I most deeply admired in him was that despite appalling health he never showed a sign of ill-humour or strain. …….. His way of running Government House was not only masterful but magnificent; he was a Michaelangelo of hospitality, vivid with imagination and quite indifferent to cost.

Red Book 1912 - A.T. Miles - Kericho

Markham - party trick was to climb all the way round Muthaiga dining room without touching the floor.

KAD 1922 - Major Coy. Comdr. 5th KAR, Meru

Old Africa - 18-5-15 - Christine Nicholls - Tich and Dolly Miles were born into a military family. Their father, Frederick Tremayne Miles, a captain in the 18th Hussars, had married an American from New Orleans, Anna Carolie Sellar, in 1883, and they had four children. Olive, the only girl, was born in Middlesex in 1887 and her brother Arthur Tremayne Miles, in 1889. By the time of Arthur’s birth the family was living in Bourton, Much Wenlock, Shropshire. The father died on 12 February 1896, under chloroform on the sofa while being operated on for piles, and Arthur was then sent to school in Rottingdean, Sussex. He did not follow his father into the army, but instead sought adventure in Kenya, where he disembarked in 1909, at the age of nineteen.

Arthur was taken on by a man promoting rubber-growing among the Nandi. His job was to serve in a duka (small shop) in Kapsabet for twelve hours a day, six days a week, selling goods and buying latex. With a long, thin face and toothbrush moustache, he was diminutive in stature, weighing scarcely more than seven stone, and was therefore universally known as ‘Tich.’ His friendship with Denys Finch-Hatton and Berkeley Cole led him, on the outbreak of the First World War, to join a unit called ‘Cole’s Scouts’, part of the East African Mounted Rifles, and Tich, Denys and Berkeley became known as ‘The Three Musketeers,’ so close was their friendship. Tich was a colourful and witty raconteur over evening camp fires, always cheerful and reckless. ‘Nature hath endowed him,’ said Lord Cranworth, ‘with a physique about ten times too small for the great heart it sheltered.’

Tich was highly respected by his soldiers and ended the war with a DSO and MC. He formed a land development company, known as Kiptiget Ltd., with Denys and four others. He then joined the King’s African Rifles in order to earn money, serving in Jubaland until in 1923. He was posted as consul to Mega in Abyssinia, with a salary of £800 a year plus a £50 ‘horse allowance.’ Mega was three days’ march (there was no road) from Moyale. Living in a palisaded pseudo-Saxon stronghold, his job was to encourage the Amharic governors to open their wells to Kenyan cattle herders, and for this he was appointed OBE in 1930. He devoted himself to his garden but Mega was a lonely post, so he abandoned it to become Berkeley Cole’s estate manager at his farm at Naro Moru. Berkeley died of heart failure shortly afterwards, forcing Tich to return to Mega. There was a respite for two years (1928-30) when Governor of Kenya Grigg made Tich his ADC at Government House in Nairobi, where he was the life and soul of all the parties. At Muthaiga Club his party trick was to hang from the beams and cornices and make his way round the room without touching the floor.

But the ADC job expired in 1930, so he returned to Mega. His health had suffered from bouts of blackwater fever, and by 1934 he was very ill. He went to England for treatment but died in Marylebone on 10 April 1934, aged 45. ‘At all times, however bad,’ said Grigg, ‘he saw life through a haze of knightly romance, and tackled every new physical trial that came his way like a fresh dragon to be met and slain.’

Tich never married and often played host in Africa to his extraordinary unmarried sister Olive Muriel Tremayne Miles, born in 1886 and four years his senior. Similarly tiny and strong, and known as ‘Dolly’, she had untidy, wiry hair, slightly protruding teeth, and dark olive skin. She had followed Tich to Kenya in 1910, but on the outbreak of war she set off for Salonika where she attached herself to the French army and worked in military hospitals. She then moved to the Caucasus to work in an orphanage for Armenian children. After the war she often went to East Africa to stay with Tich, at Mega and elsewhere. She was also a friend of Nellie Grant, Elspeth Huxley’s mother, who appreciated her wit and vivacity, though often tired of her incessant chatter. Dressed in bold, flowered chintzes, Dolly became an expert gardener and horse-rider and then took to the air, gaining a pilot’s licence. Once she disappeared for two years to China. She ended her years in England, falling down dead in 1971, at the age of 81, when she went to open the door to an electrician.