Curtis - 'Likoni Model Dairies' by Doris Morgan '......... My first personal memory is of falling out of a tree at the coffee farm at Ndarugu where Mummy and Daddy moved to try their hand at coffee farming. My next memory is accompanying my sisters on the ox-wagon to Thika Station from where they caught the train to Nairobi to go to school at the Loreto Convent. Times became very hard for my dear parents. Coffee prices reached rock bottom and the mortgagee foreclosed. I well remember walking with Daddy from the coffee factory and meeting Mummy with tears pouring down her face carrying the dreaded letter telling them that they must give up the farm.

After leaving Ndarugu, having lost everything, my parents rented the huge rambling wooden house in the middle of a coffee estate at what was then the end of Riverside Drive in Nairobi belonging to people called Watcham. Whilst Daddy took out safaris, Mummy worked like a beaver in an effort to recoup some of our lost fortunes. She started a dairy and built rondavels in the garden on one side of the main house and these she let. Here came Joy Nelson and her mother Helen (Joy is now Joy Mayers). We grew up as sisters. Two others, Bluebell and Noel Birdsey, must have been about seven and nine, but I can't remember why they came to live with us. .….

Daddy would bring his safari people to Riverside dressed in their khaki safari outfits, with their large cork helmets with flannel hanging over the back of their necks. I remember George Law, publisher of 'The Scotsman', Mr and Mrs Heinz of the 57 varieties, the Cherry Keartons and their chimpanzee, and many others.  In spite of all our dear parents hard work they failed to prosper, and in 1930 or 1931 we moved down to Mombasa ...... To Likoni to live ..... my parents, in partnership with Russell Douglas, started the Likoni Model Dairies ..........

At the end of 1934 at the age of sixteen I left school to go on a trip to England with my mother; this was her first and only trip out of Kenya since her arrival in 1913 ........ Vera and I attended a secretarial college for 3 months and both of us got a job. Vera on the Mombasa Times and I on the Mombasa telephone exchange. ...... Resident Magistrates Court .... On the bench was one Mervyn Morgan, new out of the UK. ...... During the lunch break I came out of court spluttering 'that young pup from England, what does he know?' My father firmly told me he sat there as the King's representative and I must call him 'Sir'. That 'young pup out of the UK' liked the look of me and by devious means through the Court Prosecutor, who was a friend, arranged an introduction. The result is the picture of the wedding which took place on December 17th 1938 in the Mombasa Cathedral ..….

Barnes St Francis Church, Karen Doris Ann Crichton / Morgan / 22.10.18 - 16.1.90 / Mervyn James Eversfield / Morgan / 16.2.07 - 31.7.90