Midday Sun - ' the hotel could put up 8 guests and she was assisted by her daughter Tuppence [Kathleen]. Gertrude had sold Marindas at Molo after Hilda, her eldest daughter, married David Furse, and bought the Beynon's farm where they intended to grow wheat. Tuppence had become an expert self-taught mechanic and brought up 2 tractors, almost the first in these parts - this was in the mid 1920's - cleared some of the bush where I [E. Huxley] had stalked the wolfhounds' potential dinners, and got in several hundred acres of wheat. Warthog rootled in the wheatfields and then came zebras from the plain. The zebras were having their last fling. They were still out on Laikipia literally in millions, so that 'the very air', wrote Raymond Hook (Logan's brother) 'vibrated with their monotonous call'. The slaughter had already started, carried out mainly by Dutchmen on horseback who could get two or three shillings for each hide .........…

The Hill-Williams fenced against the zebras, but then locusts came. 'Have you picked your wheat yet?' Tuppence was asked - a sick joke because a few ears on broken stalks was all that was left, together with a nasty smell. Tuppence and her mother tried again. This time they reaped a splendid crop, sent it off, got an advance and reduced their overdraft. Suddenly prices collapsed. The Hill-Williams had to pay back most of their advance. That finished them as farmers; and Gertrude decided that she would like to start a hotel. An unusual ambition: she was by then in her 60s, and had no experience whatever of keeping hotels.

When I asked her what had appealed to her about it, she replied: 'I wanted to have a swinging sign.' Her son-in-law, farmer-artist David Furse, designed one for her, a splendid sign with a pair of leopards couchants on top, and underneath pictures of heads of buffaloes and several antelopes, and a pair of trout. This was the sign of The Sportsman's Arms .............. I wondered whether two women on their own in an outback kind of place might have had trouble with roughs and toughs and drunks. 'Not much', Tuppence said. 'We learned to cope.' I could believe it; Tuppence, tall, deliberate of speech and with a good handicap at polo, would not have been easily ruffled. The landlord's worst troubles, she said, apart from the normal crises of hoteliers, came from certain units of the British Army stationed in Nanyuki. Once a military lorry drove up at dead of night and carried off all the furniture on the veranda.'

Nicholls - Sportsman's Arms - run by Mrs Hill-Williams (Mrs Hilly-Billy) and her daughter Kathleen (Twopence) and for 250 shillings you could rent a cottage for a month. …. Twopence became a member of the Oxford Group, a movement strong in Kenya at this time, and refused to sell alcohol at the hotel. Financial exigency forced her to relax her principles, but she still insisted on the Quiet Hours with staff each afternoon - an irritant to guests who had to cope with newcomers unable to command attention.

Nanyuki cemetery - Plot G5 Gertrude Mary Hill-Williams 1873-1953

Gazette - 3/12/1919 - Register of Voters - Rift Valley Area - Mrs Hill-Williams - Widow - Molo

Molo - From Shropshire the English home of so many of Kenya's pioneer families Gertrude Hill-Williams came to BEA in 1908, being one of the first two if not indeed the first white women to settle in Molo. With their two baby daughters and their stout hearted young attendant Emily Bull, she was met by her husband with an ox wagon and boys at Molo Station. There was no road to their new land and the load of kit was more than enough for the oxen to struggle with across the rough rolling grass downs and through the unbridged streams and the party made the last stage, 15 miles or so,  of their long journey via South Africa on foot and carrying the children at an altitude of 8000' to 9000' in the rain.

'Home' - some stone huts and tents surrounded by a cattle tramped area of grass and mud was safely reached and here she lived under canvas for the next year while the next living quarters and farm buildings took shape.

Molo was her home for nearly 20 years. After her husband's death on active service in 1917 she and her daughters, then aged 14 and 12, carried on the development of their farm - 'Marindas' where the dairying, home-cured bacon and hams, horse breeding and corn growing formed some of her many activities. During these years her home was in full measure a 'Home from Home' to young and old throughout the district and many a bachelor must remember with pleasure the warmth and friendliness of 'Marindas' hospitality.

In 1926 she sold the farm and shortly afterwards moved to Mweiga where she and her daughter farmed until 1930 when she started building the Sportsman's Arms Hotel at Nanyuki. Here she stayed, a kind and courteous hostess, for over two decades and from here at dawn on 22 August 1953 in her 81st year this gallant pioneer once more moved on. Hers was the restless eager spirit of the 'Voortrekker' never content to sit back and relax while there was 'something lost behind the ranges'.

A fine and sympathetic horse woman she loved and understood all animals and while by nature reserved and undemonstrative to the point of shyness the sincerity of her friendliness was never in doubt.

She leaves a memory of kindness and integrity and above all of utter fearlessness and undaunted energy.