Who's Who - Min. for Internal Security & Defence, Kenya; Rep. Dublin University at track and cross country running 1926-28; Rep. combined Irish Univ. track running 1928; Joined Colonial Admin Service 1930, Seconded to Army 1940, served in Ethiopia & Somalia; Col. 1945; Chief Sec. of Somalia 1945-48 East Africa & Rhodesia - 20/6/57 - CMG

Gazette 6 Dec 1938 Aberdare Voters List DO, Rumuruti

Terence Gavaghan, Of Lions and Dungbeetles, 1999 He was Chief Secretary in Mogadishu in 1945. He was a russet haired Irish colonial Casanova, said to have been seconded from the Kenya administration both for his easy brilliant mind and his agility in moving ahead of various irate spouses. He was a personality of some style and consequence. After a vigorous and exuberant pre-war career as a DO at Maralal and then on the northern frontier he had been transferred with military rank to the highly irregular Civil Administration of occupied Italian Somaliland. He served as deputy to the Administrator, Brigadier Denis Wickham, at the irreverently dubbed 'cockroach castle' in Mogadishu. During the Mau Mau emergency he returned to Kenya to become Secretary and then Minister for Defence. Urbane, effortlessly brilliant and detachedly self- indulgent, his sympathy was not likely to be engaged by the disciplining of recalcitrant detainees in his Prisons Department bailiwick.

Charles Chenevix Trench, Men Who Ruled Kenya, 1993 Some 'considered him to be a crafty, idle, able, cynical Irish hedonist'. He was Secretary for Law and Order in 1952.