Gazette 10 Jan 1961 probate

Elephant People Woodley [son] lived in a small farmhouse on the Athi plains 9 miles from Nairobi, and a mile across country from Nairobi Park. ...... This was where Woodley came to live when he was 8, when his mother bought the place and 50 acres for £250 after his father died. She lived there alone, a straight-backed, clear-eyed Englishwoman from Woolwich, who had first come out in 1913 as governess to a family of prospective settlers.

Laura Ellen Hassam, as she was then, had married in 1919 an Australian named Frank de Medewe Woodley. He had been in Africa since the Kaiser War during which he had served in the campaign against the Germans; he had later settled in Kenya. They had two children, Judy and Frank William (Billy). Clive, a son of Frank Woodley's by a previous marriage, had completed the family. And a friend, and almost one of them, was a lodger, Arthur Orchardson. In 1929, when Billy was born, his father was the Secretary of the Kenya Jockey Club. Billy remembered him as a sort of folksy rolling stone with a fund of apt, if earthy, capsules of wisdom. Clive had been killed in 1937, in a mining accident and the following year Frank Woodley had died of a heart attack in Tanganyika, leaving the family practically destitute. .....…..

Away in the distance on either side they could just see the homesteads of the neighbouring white farmers - the Destros, who sold their milk in Nairobi; old McDowell, an ardent pigeon fancier; the Visagies; the Kloppers, who had several lovely daughters and made the best biltong, drying out the meat on wires stretched across the bedrooms; the Francescons; the Watsons; the Sands - all of them solid, no-nonsense people, with whose children and whose African servants' and squatters' children Woodley had grown up. Woodley's mother had never fussed over him. She was a positive, forthright character who believed in letting him learn to take care of himself. He went barefoot most of the time, and he might be away from home sometimes for 2 or 3 days, sleeping in the open and living on impala or Thomson's gazelle he and his friends shot for the pot ..... two important influences in Frank's life - Alan Black and Charles (Tiger) Marriott. ..........….

Gazette 10 Jan 1961 probate