Red 22 - A. Bursell, Box 420, Nairobi

Kiambu Scrapbook - Ruiru Sports Club - The Club-house has undergone several renewals since its small beginnings. The first major improvement was just after the war when the bar was enlarged. Ake Bursell found some old telephone poles discarded on some farm and made good use of them as supports for the roof.

Kiambu Scrapbook - MB - In November 1918, my husband and I ended our honeymoon on landing at Mombasa, having left Sweden on July 17th. (This was travelling under war conditions). My husband had come out to Kenya originally in 1913 to start coffee on Baroness Blixen's farm at Ngong but by 1917 he had realised that coffee would not do well there. In that year he returned to Europe and started a company in Sweden with his family and friends, for the purpose of growing sisal in Kenya. So when we arrived here in 1918, we went about looking for land and eventually bought 1,000 acres below Ruiru, consisting of the upper part of Juja Farm which then belonged to Sir Northrup McMillan, who had planted 10 acres with coffee and 10 with maize. There was a small portable wooden house near what was then called the Thika Tramway, and that is where we lived the first month or so, having a tent for sleeping quarters. We had however found a spot where we intended to build our permanent home and had started making grass huts there. As there was plenty of game, Sir Northrup having prohibited all shooting, we often went out in the morning, shooting for the pot, on horseback. One day, having got a nice young wildebeest, I was riding home to tell the servants to collect the meat. I came to the site of the house but saw no tent, also no car and no servants! After a lot of shouting, the cook came and told how the house-boy had lost his head; he had wanted to show off so had taken the car key, started the car and run over the tent and all its contents. After this, by some miracle he had got the car into reverse and backed it up against a fence post on the railway embankment, and there it was, hanging! So a bit prematurely we had to move over to an unfinished hut on the other side of the farm. By 1923 we had got sufficient acreage planted and had installed the sisal machinery. We got the electric supply by tapping a line from Leo Lawford's Anglo-French plant; he had been running the sisal factory there for some years and could supply enough for our use as well. We had in the past years increased the coffee area to about 90 acres, had started a dairy herd and were also breeding pigs, so farm life had really started on all sides. ………  By 1925, Anglo-French could not supply sufficient current for our factory and EAP&L put a line across. It had to be transformed and I remember that getting the formidable transformer from the train over to the site was quite a job. We hired a flat wagon and had to have oxen pulling it foot by foot over the black cotton soil, putting logs in front of it every ten feet or so. When eventually in place and installed it was a very home-made affair, giving constant trouble to the engineers.

Kiambu Scrapbook - Ruiru - The Ryle Shaws were also early pioneers but most of their coffee was planted after the war by Mr Ake Bursell. Kiambu Scrapbook - The story of how Mr Ake Bursell entered the sisal world is told by his wife in her account of early days in Ruiru but she does not mention that most of the land on his estate (Kalimoni) is composed of black cotton soil. Mr Bursell was the first grower in Ruiru to make use of this soil for sisal, having seen it successfully developed by Mr Kell at Donyo Sabuk, under the same conditions. In this he opened the way for others, and large acreages of the plains hitherto thought to be only suitable for ranching, came under this crop. Mr Bursell also built the factory for the Bag and Cordage Company started in 1937, Messrs. Mann and Rutherfoord (from Makuyu) having invented the machinery.

Gazette - 7/4/15 - Liable for Jury service, Dagoretti - A. Bursell

Aschan - [Blixen's coffee farm] - the work was supervised by Blix and six European managers, among whom were the Swedes Ake Bursell, Emil Holmberg, and Ture Rundgren.

Aschen - 1916 - Soon after their return [Blixen and Karen] they lost their best manager, Ake Bursell. He had bought land of his own at Ruiru. Bursell certainly had more practical experience than Blix, and he would have been a real asset to them in getting the new venture going. He also had a more down-to-earth sense of economics than the Blixens, neither of whom had been brought up to handle money. .

Aschan - Bahati Tanganyika - the Dane Torben Herfort, ran Ndasagu Estate for Ake Bursell, who had come out in 1913 to manage the Blixen property at Ngong.

Richardson 1925 - "..drove out 26 miles east, toward Mt. Donyo Sabuk, to the sisal plantation of Mr A.K. Bursell, a Swede. He has 10,000 acres of which 5,000 are planted. It is the biggest of its kind hereabouts. ……. The estate was exceedingly well laid out and I heard from the Bank manager, later on that he considered it the best run business in the country. The reason he gave was that Bursell never employs any man who doesn't "pull his weight". We lunched with Mr & Mrs Bursell …….."

Red Book 1919 - A. Bursell - PO Box 420, Nairobi

KAD 1922 - Committee Member, Ruiru Farmers' Association.

Hut has Ake Bursell Kiambu.

Hut - 1st Sisal Kiambu 1937 Kalimoni Estate Ruiru

Gazette 8 Aug 1950 probate