WNB farmed for a number of years at Lone Tree Farm, Nairobi, which he bought from George Henry Newton-Wilson in 1915, and later at a property high in the Aberdare Mountains some 35 miles outside Thomson’s Falls as Peter Mills describes as he recollects meeting WNB in Mombasa in December 1937.

‘That evening, before dinner, I strolled into the hotel bar and immediately fell into conversation with a family from up-country who were there on a coastal holiday. They were Will Blain and his brother, and Will’s two daughters, Dar and Sue who were both about my age. They realised that I was new to the colony and was alone so they invited me to dine with them and, very quickly, I learned some of their life and family history.

They were pioneer settlers and farmed a large cattle ranch at an altitude of over 9,500 feet, close to the peak of Mount Satima in the Aberdare Mountains. Adjoining their ranch was a similar one, owned by Will’s brother-in-law, a third, by another brother-in-law, and between them was yet another occupied by a sister-in-law. They were a large family and the total acreage they ranched was vast.

They were all classic examples of Kenya pioneer settlers, and they dressed, spoke and acted the part. Will even had an unmarried sister-in-law who drank two bottles of gin a day, which was, she said, “to prevent malaria.”

Will was an Englishman, who had been a civil service engineer in India, and then in Kenya, where he had married into a family who had emigrated there before 1900. Having fought the Germans in East Africa during the 1914/18 world war, the family had taken up the Government’s offer to ex-soldiers, of unoccupied settlement farms, and though they claimed to be of Argentinian descent, they all spoke and behaved like typical English gentry.…’