SE - A.E. Stobbs - July 1907

Permanent Way - On the platform on Dec. 11th 1945 to greet the Jubilee mail train from Mombasa - still on the staff at the time of the writing of 'Permanent Way'.

North - 1st Station Master, Nairobi; moved from Nairobi, but not dismissed by Railway, after contents of portable Post Office safe stolen from station by subordinate 29/11/1900; The Uganda Railway Committee in London wanted him sacked but George Whitehouse refused - "a sober and hard working young man - victim of a conspiracy" (Whitehouse, CO 537)

Drumkey 1909 - Railway Dept. - Lake Steamers - Office Superintendent

Red 22 - A.G. Stobbs, Box 78, Nairobi

Advertiser - 8/1/09 - Mrs A.E. Stobbs very kindly contributed …….. A fine Xmas tree bearing toys etc. for over 40 little ones. ….

SKP - 1938 - Society of Kenya Pioneers - over 30 years in Colony - arrived 1898

SKP - 1938 - Society of Kenya Pioneers - over 30 years in Colony - arrived 1904 - Mrs Stobbs

Barnes - Nairobi City Park Cemetery - Emily Edna Esther Hope Stobbs, died 22 May 1948 aged 72

Red Book 1912 - A.E. Stobbs - Nairobi

Web - Albert Edward Stobbs, was born in Derby in 1879, the youngest of 8 children, only 4 of which survived to adulthood. After Albert’s mother died when he was two, his father took Albert and his older sister to India. Aged seventeen and able to speak several Indian dialects, Albert was recruited by the Colonial Office to serve as a clerk with Uganda Railways who were charged with responsibility for building the railway line from Mombasa, on the Kenya coast, to Nairobi and beyond. (Sometimes referred to at the time in the British Press as The Lunatic Line.) Albert arrived in Kenya in 1896 and four years later, now aged just 21, was promoted to the rank of Superintendent and made Nairobi’s first Station Master. His secretary, Annie Dewhurst, the first white woman in Kenya to serve in such a capacity, met and married a journalist, George Aubrey. Albert married Hope (ne Smith) who gave birth to a boy in 1906, whom they named Edward Victor. Six years later the Aubreys named their first daughter Gladys, who later married Edward… their second son was named Norman. The marriage did not last beyond a dozen years… with Edward gaining custody of three of the four children. At the time of the divorce Norman and older brother Robin were at school in Grahamstown, South Africa. Their return to Kenya was an incredible journey. Unaccompanied and aged just eight and nine, it was an adventure that lasted five event-filled days in trains and planes. The last leg from Salisbury to Nairobi was in a small, five passenger, Dragon Rapide biplane with a night stop over at a small airfield in Tanganyika and a pilot who enjoyed ‘buzzing’ game in what was then an area of Africa abounding in wildlife. Not long after their arrival back in Nairobi they were introduced to their new (step) mother, sister and brother before being bundled off to boarding school in the North West Kenyan town of Eldoret. Life thereafter evolved around term times at boarding school and holidays, only one of which was a true holiday, usually at the coast. During the remaining ‘holidays’ the brothers were obliged to find ‘holiday jobs’, with the money earned contributing to the costs for the new school term. Edward Stobbs’s philosophy for his two sons from his marriage to Gladys, was to push them off the end of the bough when they could fly to fend for themselves. Flying entailed only a basic education… which did not inhibit the two brothers from achieving much at the University of Life in the years that followed. Life changed for Norman as a sports-mad fifteen year old when he contracted polio. When he’d recovered he continued to play sport to the best of his limited ability with a wasted right leg, both at school and as a young working adult. Having been rejected as medically unfit for call-up to the Kenya Regiment during the Mau Mau conflict, Norman worked for a shipping company in the port of Tanga, in what was then Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Shipping became his life, culminating in the formation of his own company in 1979, after moving to South Africa, specialising in Bulk chartering. At its peak in 1984 the company operated up to seventeen bulk carriers on time charter, and owned a part share in two new bulk carriers. The decade-long worldwide trading and shipping slump of the ‘80’s provoked a disastrous decision to switch the company’s major emphasis from bulk to liner transport.  Since the collapse of his shipping business and a year long attempt to start again Norman reached the conclusion that the entire face of shipping had undergone a radical change and it was time to focus his efforts on his new love, writing. That was thirty years ago during which he returned to live in England with his family unit of five, now back to two; written seventeen (conventionally unpublished) novels, with five more in varying stages of completion, and a developing interest in the idea that politics and government by politicians is a ‘dinosaur’ and in urgent need of drastic reform; that there has to be a better way to govern a modern hi-tech society such as ours at the start of a century that is going to see more changes to our way of life than ever before.