SE - Mrs M. Bent - Draper, Nbi. - Jul 1907

North - Mrs Mayence Bent, Belgian; b. c 1872 - Common law wife of W.S. Bent; Dressmaker at Nairobi 1901; Land Grant application, Fort Smith 29-6-1903.

Land - 1907 - Mrs M. Bent - Agricultural, 177.62 acres, Fort Smith, 29-6-03, Registered 14-2-07

Advertiser - 21/8/1908 - Mrs Bent - sold her business to Cearn & Co. - High class ladies & childrens outfitters, milliners & costumiers

Advertiser - 29/10/1909 - Partnership between Daniel Ernest Cooper and Mayence Bent under the style "Stanley Hotel" dissolved. Now under the sole name of Mayence Bent.

Nicholls - The hotel was run by Mayence Bent (neé Woodbury) who was the common-law wife of W.S. Bent, a railway worker and president of the Nairobi 'Railway Strike Committee' of 1900 …….. clothes made by Mrs Bent ……..

Nicholls - 1903 - A bungalow next door to Tommy Woods was built by Dan Noble, the Post Master, as the first 'proper' hotel, run by May Bent and called the Stanley Hotel.

Gazette - 17/12/1902 - Plague compensation after bubonic plague in March 1902 - M. Bent Rs180

Considine - European School Nairobi - Gladys Bent b. 30/4/1897 - 1/3/1904 Kikuyu - re-enrolled 19/6/1905

Block Notes - Nairobi 1903 - About this time a Mrs Bent (later Mrs Tate) with the help of Mr De Souza (a Goanese merchant) had started building a hotel four blocks from T.A. Woods place on the present Victoria Street and called it "The Old Stanley". It was made of corrugated iron. She had tables and chairs made by local Indian carpenters and imported the iron beds but no mattresses.

Having been an upholsterer and mattress maker among my many occupations I offered my services (if material could be purchased). Mr De Souza had ticking in stock so I gave him a sketch and his tailor produced a sample to my measurements. The great trouble however was to obtain 2 mattress needles. Luckily a blacksmith by the name of Bennett (whom I knew from South Africa) managed to make me 2 needles out of bicycle spokes. Next problem I had was to get material to stuff the mattresses and while riding about I had noticed great amounts of grass which had been cut by the railways so I immediately went to the superintendent and asked if I could use the grass. He offered it free of charge and also gave me men to gather and have it properly dried.

I was able to complete the job within 3 weeks and proudly delivered the mattresses to the hotel. They looked good but were not comfortable so advised Mrs Bent (Mrs Tate) to put a thick blanket over to prevent her customers from being severely pricked. I was paid handsomely at the rate of 10 rupees a mattress (10/-) for my labour and so ended my first job in Nairobi.

Old Africa - 22-8-13 - Christine Nicholls - Mayence Ellen Bent, the founder of the New Stanley Hotel (now the Stanley Ramada) in Nairobi, had a most interesting early life. She was born in the district of St Pancras, London, on 17 April 1868, the daughter of Walter Bentley Woodbury and Marie Olmeijer. Her own name and those of her sisters (Florence, Constance, Hermance, Valence, Fayence and Avence) alert us immediately to the fact that this was an unusual family. And indeed it was. Her father W.B. Woodbury was a famed photographer (just google him to see how famous he was) and her mother was the daughter of a Borneo trader, Charles William Olmeijer, of mixed Dutch-Malay descent. Joseph Conrad had visited his trading outpost at Tanjung Redeb on the Pantai river and this gave rise to his famous story Almayer’s Folly.

When Woodbury was photographing in the Dutch East Indies, he saw a beautiful schoolgirl, Olmeijer’s daughter Marie. He determined to marry her and this he did in Batavia in 1863, taking her back to England with him. There the couple had one son and six daughters with the unusual names – Mayence is the French form of the town Mainz.

How did Mayence get to Nairobi? She lived in Penge and Croydon as a child and then she and her sister Constance went out to South Africa, where Constance opened a boarding house. They were joined by their step-brother William Stanley Bent. What had happened was that the girls’ father, Walter Woodbury, had died in Margate in 1885, and five years later his wife Marie married Edward Stanley Bent, a struck-off solicitor who spent five years in jail for receiving stolen goods. One of his sons by a previous marriage was William Stanley Bent, born in 1858. On 30 April 1896 Mayence and William Stanley Bent had a daughter in South Africa – Gladys Mayence – and it may have been that this was frowned upon and the couple left for East Africa, arriving in 1898. There they were assumed to be a married couple (there is no record of them ever marrying). Gladys was baptised in Nairobi (27.12.1904) by Rev. Marcus Falloon, and she was enrolled at the Uganda Railway School in Nairobi when it opened on 20.1.1904.

William had previously worked on the Nigerian Railways, and he obtained a job as a chief clerk in the Loco Department of the Mombasa-Lake Victoria railway line. William was the Nairobi representative of the Railway Strike Committee on 31 March 1900. He was given three months’ notice by the railway in September 1901, and this encouraged him to make a land grant application in ‘Kikuyu’ (4.1.1902). had 40 acres and a two-acre vegetable garden. We find him winning a prize at the Mombasa Show on 24 July 1903. Another job he had was as an agent for the East African Standard (January 1903).

Mayence also put in a land grant application at Fort Smith (29.6.1903), and there she made farm products, which she advertised in the East African Standard. Her ad for her butter ran ‘Fort Smith Butter. Mrs Bent Nairobi. It Takes the Cake. It would Keep for Ages but People don’t Give it a Chance’. But the farm could not provide a living and May took a job in 1902 as a clerk in a store owned by Tommy Wood in Victoria St, Nairobi (now Tom Mboya St). The store served as a butchery, tea room, hardware shop and tailor’s (May was the dressmaker). Above it people could stay in four simple rooms with calico walls, called the ‘Victoria Hotel’ but there was never enough space and May saw an opportunity. She went into partnership with Daniel Ernest Cooper and opened a 15-bed boarding house, the Stanley Hotel (1.4.1904) in Victoria Street. It was a wooden building, of two storeys and soon had a liquor licence (March 1905). The following year a fire destroyed it. May moved her guests to a temporary building, under a tarpaulin. A permanent building was erected by 1913 where the Sarova Stanley now stands at the corner of Kimathi Street and Kenyatta Avenue (formerly Sixth, then Delamere Avenue).

Meanwhile William Bent operated in Nairobi a private labour exchange (one purpose of which was to keep wages low), advertising each week in the East African Standard. Things were going badly for the pair and William was declared bankrupt in Nairobi on 21.1.1908. He then got a job in the new Labour Bureau in Nairobi. He came to a sad end, dying of pneumonia in Nairobi on 14.7.1918. He is buried in Nairobi South cemetery.

By 1908 May had taken up with Frederick Francis Tate, fifteen years her junior (he was been born in Wolverhampton, 30.6.1883), who arrived in East Africa in 1906.

She abandoned her so-called ‘husband’, William Bent (actually her step-brother) and took up with Frederick Francis Tate, fifteen years her junior (he was born in Wolverhampton on 30 June 1883). He arrived in East Africa in 1904 and worked for the Uganda Railway, becoming pier master at Kisumu. He then moved to Nairobi, where he was a part-time barman at the Grand Hotel and a piano-player at the Railway Institute, Nairobi (his family was musical – indeed his sister was the famous soprano Dame Maggie Teyte, who changed the spelling of her name). Fred was the son of Jacob James Tate, a wine and spirits merchant in Wolverhampton (and later hotel proprietor near Euston station, London), and his wife Maria Doughty. Fred was six years older than Maggie. His brothers Jacob and Sydney later joined him in East Africa.

Fred and Mayence went to Zanzibar to get married, probably to avoid speculation about there being no divorce from William. The announcement in Nairobi’s newspaper The Leader on 20 November 1909 reads ‘The marriage of Miss Mayence Woodbury with Mr Fred Tate was celebrated on the 9th inst. at the Catholic Cathedral at Zanzibar.’ May’s partnership with D E Cooper was dissolved in 1909 (he moved to Sotik and became a JP there, dying in 1929), and Fred became the manager of the Stanley. The hotel had thirty bedrooms and an annexe, but Fred and May wanted to expand. After all, they had a Bechstein piano and a Thurston billiard table to accommodate. In 1912 two plots came up for auction, one facing Hardinge Street (now Kimathi St) and one Sixth Avenue (now Kenyatta Avenue). Fred Tate bid for both plots, which formed a corner. The Tates commissioned architects Robertson, Gow &.Davidson to design the new hotel. In 1913 May sold the Stanley Hotel to Daniel William Noble, formerly Nairobi’s postmaster. But when they wanted to transfer the name to their new hotel, Dan refused and there was a law case which the Tates lost. They were forced to call their new establishment the New Stanley, and Dan’s hotel became the Old Stanley. The New Stanley opened in 1913, though Mayence did not apply to transfer the liquor licence of the Old Stanley to Dan Noble until 1914 (Kenya Gazette, 28 October 1914).

The First World War saw Tate serving with the local forces as a lieutenant and he then served on Nairobi’s Municipal Committee (Kenya Gazette, 8 January 1919). Meanwhile the hotel went from strength to strength, but personal tragedy was soon to strike the Tates. It is not clear what illness struck Fred but soon after the war he went blind and general paralysis followed. Mayence took him to London for treatment in April 1926, leaving the Stanley in the hands of managers Albert Ernest Waterman and his wife, who were later assisted by their daughter Ruby. They stayed in London for several years, until 1932, but nothing could be done and they decided to return to Nairobi, to Buku estate in Karen. Fred lay flat in an iron bed in the sitting room bedecked with flowers. He was read to by Mayence, her daughter, and a nurse. He interested himself in the names of new arrivals in the New Stanley and even in details of its daily menus. He was apparently totally without self-pity. Eventually Fred died on 29 June 1937 and he is buried in Forest Road cemetery, Nairobi. Mayence stayed on for about twenty years but sold the hotel to Abraham Block in 1947. She lived to a good age, moving to England and dying in Hove, Sussex, on 17 March 1968, aged 99. The photo shows her on her 98th birthday.

SE - Mrs Tate - Nov 1908

In Stephen Ellis's ledger (1907) as Mrs M. Bent, a Draper in Nairobi.

North - Land Grant application 26/6/1903, Fort Smith

Gazette - 28/10/14 - Transfer of Liquor Licence at Stanley Hotel from Mrs Mayence Tate to D.W. Noble

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

Gazette 28/1/1914 - Application for General Retail Liquor Licence - Old Stanley Hotel, Nairobi - Mrs Mayence Tate {at same time F. Tate is applying for licence for the New Stanley Hotel}

Cuckoo - 1904 - 1st small building in Main st. was occupied by Mrs Bent, who had the first millinery and dressmaking shop in Nbi. Mrs Bent later became Mrs Tate, the wife of a former station master of Nbi. and owner of the popular New Stanley Hotel.

Gazette 23 May 1969 probate