Nanyuki Sports Club, Kenya

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Nanyuki Sports Club

The other day an email came in that I might easily have consigned to the trash heap as the sender’s name (Maggie) meant nothing to me. The subject line was the kicker. It simply said Nanyuki Sports Club. This was the social centre of European life for the best part of forty years before Kenyan independence in 1963. My mother managed the club during WWII when the men were away at war and twenty-five years later my new wife and I held our wedding reception there.

There is another link and this is where my email correspondent came in. She was searching, from her computer in Plymouth, England for information about a painting of the club made by her partner’s late brother. Somehow she navigated her way to my web site and the Amazon site about my first book Wrestling With Rhinos: The Adventures of a Glasgow Vet in Kenya.

She ended up there because one of the illustrations in the book shows a painting done by one Ronald Snoaden, about whom I knew nothing, that was done in 1944 and shows a view from one of the lawns around the main club building. Snoaden gave it to my mother at some point. The painting now sits on the wall of our home in Saskatoon, Canada.

The club remains the social centre of the business and professional people of Nanyuki, but these days has a real rainbow mix of races and people as members. We have retained our overseas membership and stayed there in March of this year. We not only stayed there, but also were assigned the very cottage (banda in KiSwahili), where Jo changed out of her wedding dress into beautiful cream-coloured Benares silk sari that she had chosen as a going-way dress. The champagne was also stored there before the event, but by the time Jo changed it was almost all gone!

A small part of the banda is visible at the very edge of Snoaden’s painting. What is less obvious is that Snoaden was standing with his back to one of Kenya’s most spectacular views, that of Mount Kenya. Here is a wide-angle shot of the mountain taken from just outside the clubhouse in front of the children’s playground.

Nanyuki Sports Club- again

There are other memories of the Nanyuki Sports Club. This is where we played rugby for many years.In case you do not recognize the image, that is me with the pale shirt, missing tooth and thinning hair on the right. Not very flattering!



This morning we watched the glossy starlings running about on the grass outside the dining room and were treated to the wonderful sight of a lilac-breasted roller perched on the stump by the 9th green.

Nanyuki Sports Club

Back at the Nanyuki Sports Club, with which we have a long history. My mother managed the place in the mid-forties when the men were away at war. Jo & I held our wedding reception here, and we have been members for a long time, although only absentee members for the last 34 years!

This picture shows some of the wedding crowd, but the interesting thing is the building in the background (1969). It is the banda in which we are staying, and it was also there in 1944 when an artist painted a club scene that included it. We have that painting on the wall of our home in Canada.

One of the wonderful things about the club is the early morning view of Mount Kenya – shown here. Of course there are other views of the mountain, this one taken from what is now the Sweetwaters Conservancy – a cattle ranch when I practiced here in the 1970s, now an important wildlife reserve, and particularly a rhino sanctuary, and this one of Nelion, taken at dawn from the Lewis Glacier.