E-Mail from James Holt 29/12/01 - My father Vernon Harrison Holt b. 1888 (or possibly 1886) to 1966 went to Cheam and Eton and came down from Magdalen College Oxford in 1910. Because his father was dissuading him from going into the family Hull oil-seed milling business as it was too risky, he bought a return ticket for a trip to South America in 1910 to check out some of the investments from his father which provided him with his allowance of £200 p.a. when he left university.

He looked at coffee in Brazil and cattle in the Plate River States. All the tram and electrification companies in which he held debenture were apparently insolvent, so he traded his return ticket to Liverpool for an onward single ticket to Cape Town. When he arrived there he found a Greek tramp freighter on its way to Mombasa and got a cheap passage. The Captain who spoke very little English was mad about playing backgammon and during two weeks of the voyage up the coast by the time my father was approaching BEA he had won from the Captain £50 in Indian Currency Gold coins which was the currency officially in use in BEA. He realised that he would never get this money off the boat he found two heavy metal nuts in the engine room which had come off a main bearing on the shaft and he put these in his dispatch case to be taken ashore by the crew. He wrapped the gold coins in two pieces of paper into a roll and wearing a sports jacket and holding these heavy rolls of coins in his hands taking the weight inside his jacket pockets, he sauntered off the boat. He never saw his dispatch case again but he had increased his yearly income by 25%

He got the train to Nairobi and went into the Government Land Office and bought two farms on the Mau Escarpment at Fort Ternan through which the original railway to Kisumu ran. He borrowed the purchase price of £2000 from his mother. …… My father planted coffee on the developed farm from 1911 and this came into production by 1915 or 1916. The other farm block, as was commonly the case was used as a labour farm.

In 1916 the war in France was going so badly that my father spun a coin at dinner with his neighbour George Orr and winning my father elected to come back and enlist ….. He left his farm in Kenya to be run by George Orr and he did not get back there until late summer 1919. By which time under the influence of the war the price of coffee had increased dramatically and George Orr had made a fortune for my father because by then all the farm was in production.

My father was a founder member of the Muthaiga Club when it was started in 1911 and stayed on in Kenya until he returned to marry my mother in the summer of 1925. …….. My father sold the developed farm in 1925 but retained the labour farm until the EA government bought it during or just before the Mau Mau emergency.

E-Mail from James Holt 15/1/02 - My father Lt Col Vernon Harrison Holt was born 20 Feb 1888 I expect at Highfield House, Driffield which was the family home until 1895 when my grandfather moved here with his wife Adolpha Wickham Holt to Ravenswick. My father had two sisters one older and one younger who in the event never married. …… When my father returned to Fort Ternan in 1919 ….. He found that George Orr had done extremely well managing both the farms. My father brought him home to stay at Ravenswick in the period from 1919 to about 1922 and he became very friendly then with my father's younger sister. I think he rode in point to points when he was in UK but on the last occasion he suffered appendicitis and died in hospital after a bodged operation. ………..

On 13th July 1925 he married Elizabeth Kathleen Reckitt of Sutton Hull second daughter of Sir Philip and Hilda Reckitt … Reckitt and Sons, .. Hull. Having waited nearly six years before her father would give his consent to the marriage because of my father's age and my mother's youth. My father had met my mother in late 1919 whe he was shooting grouse with her father Philip Reckitt and from then on he in the early twenties had one or more holidays a year with the Reckitts to one destination or another; a cruise to Colombo, Ceylon, a Nile boat trip, Golf in the French Pyrenees. My father would often join my grandfathers party in Egypt from Mombasa.

Every year he came back to Yorkshire for six weeks or two months grouse shooting on the North Yorkshire moors. ……

I was born 17/3/36 at Ravenswick after my parents had been married 11 years. My mother had been mad about foxhunting and had certainly had one miscarriage in that time. My sister Annabel Elizabeth Rose was born in November 1944 …… My father sold the farm he had developed with Coffee in 1925 when he came home to get married keeping only the second farm which he had used as a labour farm ……From about 1936 my father developed a bracken breaker, a sort of edged roller drawn first by a horse in traces to control bracken on Westerdale moor. After the last War he improved this and he made the machine in much larger sizes. He hoped to use it for scrub clearance in the whole of Africa. His marketing efforts fell foul of the administrations, first in Portuguese East Africa where my father declined to bribe the government official who had to sign the import permit, in South Africa where import restrictions barred items which could have been manufactured in S. Africa and later in newly independent countries where much the same happened.

Gazette - 7/4/15 - Liable for Jury service, Lumbwa

Eton (1909) - Lieut. 3rd Battn E. Yorks Regt. (Militia) 1911; served as Lieut. Volunteer Force, Uganda and Lieut. R. Field Art., Staff Capt in France and E. Africa in WW1 (Despatches, MC and Belgian Croix de Guerre)

Gazette - 3/12/1919 - Register of Voters - Lake Area - Captain Vernon Harrison Holt - Planter - Fort Ternan 

1939 England and Wales Register living with wife in Ravenswick, Kirbymoorside