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Name: BLYTH, James Audley, Hon.

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Nee: son of the 1st Baron Blyth

Birth Date: 20.2.1874 Westminster

Death Date: 21.3.1908 gunshot to head, south of Marsabit, near Laisamis

Last Date: 1908

Married: In London 20.1.1903 Ethel Jane 'Effie' Brunner b.16 Apr 1881 Northwich, Cheshire, d. 17 Nov 1931 Auckland, New Zealand (dau. of Sir John Brunner)

Children: Ian Audley James (28 Oct 1905 London-1977)

Book Reference: London Mag

War Service: Lieut. Essex Imperial Yeomanry

General Information:

London Mag - In 1908, according to Patrick Hemingway, [Ernest Hemingway's son] Col. J. H. Patterson, then superintendent of game reserves, went on a boundary survey of the northern frontier. Though he was not a professional hunter, he took the Honourable Audley Blyth and his wife with him on safari. When Patterson and Mrs Blyth returned to Nairobi three and a half months later, they said that Mr Blyth had contracted cranial malaria and shot himself, that they had buried him in the wilderness but could not remember the exact place of his grave.. All the Africans on the safari had been paid off and disappeared into the bush, and it was difficult to find and question them. The government officials believed that Patterson was somehow esponsible for Blyth's death; but - with no corpse and no witnesses - they could not prove it. Patterson was asked to leave the country and later married Mrs Blytth. Africans contradicted Patterson's account of Blyth's death and revealed that the white hunter and disaffected wife had sexual relations: …. after the death of the European, Colonel Patterson and the lady occupied one tent.
Gerald Gilbey (Blyth's great-nephew): I have the transcript of the inquest convened later at Nairobi in 1908 and letters from the Colonial Office relating to Audley's death. The porters/askaris were not "paid off and disappeared". On the contrary many of them gave sworn testimonies at this inquest, which makes engrossing reading. Patterson and Audley's wife Effie never married. At the time of this 'society scandal' he was married to Frances Grey B.A. and remained so until they both died within weeks of each other in California in 1947. Effie had emigrated to N.Z. in 1919 and died there aged 50 in 1931. It is acknowledged that Patterson and Mrs. Blyth conducted an affair during the safari although this is unmentioned, obviously, in Patterson's account of the safari titled "In the Grip of the Nyika" and published by Macmillan in Aug. 1909. The wording of the last statement of Patrick Hemingway's entry that "....they continued the sexual safari for 6 weeks".... (after Audley's death) is salacious. Patrick Hemingway's father did later write a short story loosely based on the above, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", later made into a film, "The Macomber Affair".  But both these were essentially studies in cowardice.

 

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