East Africa & Rhodesia - 21/2/52 - Captain Jack Bonham one of the best-known shots in Kenya, and Miss Kathleen Le Poer Trench were recently married in Kiambu

Hut has J.D. Bonham, 1930, Chemelil

Pre-war volunteer to the Kenya Regiment (KR 557).

Gazette 29 Jan 1971 probate

Ancestry He settled in Kenya. In the early 1940’s he was described as “The ‘Lawrence’ of the Kenya front who worked up the revolt in the lonely regions north of Dukana was a blue-eyed Irishman [sic] with a vivid harum-scarum personality. He was Jack Desmond Bonham, a 42-year-old rover from County Wexford [sic], who had once been a sailor but had spent the last 20 years on safari in East Africa tackling jobs such as thinning out lions in the Masai Reserve". 
Allfree in Bluff: ‘He was the Game Control Officer of the Kenya Coast. A very boisterous, hard drinking, utterly self assured Irishman, he was an amusing companion. We learned to take his tales of valorous hunting with a small sprinkling of salt.  Jack Bonham was the confident and bright-eyed boy of the Chief Game Warden, Kenya, Captain Archie Ritchie. Jack Bonham preferred elephants to human beings. His job was to protect the human beings and their property from the elephants.’

Last Chance He was the game warden at the coast and had to shoot about 70 to 80 elephants every year along with Tana River. He has killed over 700 elephants up to date. His hut at Malindi was daub and wattle and thatched with grass mats made from the duom palms laid over heavy mangrove poles. For companions he had an old dog covered with sores. His camp at Casuarina Point is the base from which he does all his game warden's work and there is a jungle of almost impenetrable scrub and desert east and west of the Tana River, almost as large as England, which is hardly controlled at all. It is full of ivory poachers so it is not only a charging elephant that Jack Bonham might have to contend with.