OUT OF AFRICA 2

by Terry Wright

In an earlier post (see OUT OF AFRICA at the bottom of the menu on the left), we wrote a little about Coopers in East Africa. More recently Mike Barnett has written to us from New Zealand about his stepfather Don Ward who had a sand mining and trucking business in Kenya and later moved to New Zealand. From Mike we acquired a small replica of the East Africa Motor Sports Club Alfred Vincent Trophy for 1953 plus a photo of Don being presented with the replica by the wife of the governor of Kenya, Lady Mary Baring (above). These being Mau Mau times, the club official next to Lady Mary has a holstered pistol on his belt.

Unfortunately there is no identification of the event or the location on the trophy or the photo but the family information is that Mike had been competing in a Cooper and there is a small number of surviving family photos of his car which was always numbered 45. Mike says that Don moved to Kenya, presumably from the UK, just before the Second World War. He was involved in the campaign after the Italian invasion of British Somaliland in 1940. After the war Don recovered damaged vehicles from Somalia and started a lucrative sand mining and trucking business in Kenya. In the 1970s he moved to Napier in New Zealand.

The trophy presentation photo has the photographer’s name on the back – Charles Trotter Nairobi – and so we looked him up on Google and found plenty of information with a substantial Wikipedia entry from which the next few paragraphs are drawn.

Charles Trotter was born in Scotland in 1923, but at the age of three months he and his mother Margaret returned home to Uganda, where his father James worked in the Land and Surveys Department. With a break for war service, James had been with the same department in Uganda since graduating from Cambridge in 1912. Margaret had gone out to Kenya as a Post Office clerk in 1918, and was later transferred to Entebbe, where she met James. They were married in 1921 and remained in Uganda for over a decade before moving to Nigeria in the 1930s.

For the first 6 years of his life, Charles accompanied his parents on a near-permanent safari owing to the itinerant nature of his father’s work. In 1929 he returned to the UK to attend boarding school, and after serving as a captain in the Royal Engineers during WW2 he joined the Guernsey Star in 1948 as a junior photographer. After studying for two years at the London School of Photo Engraving and Lithography, he obtained a first-class pass in the City and Guilds exam.

Charles returned to East Africa on the SS Kenya’s maiden voyage in 1951 at the age of 28, capturing life on board ship as the first assignment of this phase of his career. He made Nairobi his home for the following 11 years, during which he established himself as a leading commercial photographer. Although his income was derived chiefly from advertising and promotional work, he also captured images of British-Kenyan high society, royal and ceremonial events, industry, safari, sporting fixtures and landscapes, travelling extensively around East Africa.

One of Trotter’s great passions was said to be motorsport, and he was an official photographer of the East African Safari Rally. He also photographed numerous celebrities, as well as Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh on their tour of Kenya in 1952. The Trotter archive, which includes his parents’ photographs, is housed in the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection at Bristol Library and can be found online at https://becc.bristol.gov.uk/records/2001/090. Many thousands of his images have been scanned and are available to download with a creative-commons copyright.

A search of the Trotter archive has thrown up a number of Kenya motorsport events, although strangely not the one in question, but there are various events with Coopers to be seen. These include Langa Langa races in October 1952, Menengai hillclimb in July 1954 and Nakuru races in December 1958.

Originally built during WW2 to train lorry drivers, Langa Langa was closed in 1953 after a fatal accident to a Jaguar driver during the October 1952 meeting. Once the Mau Mau troubles had subsided a new track was opened not far away at Nakuru, north west of Nairobi in 1956. It is believed to have survived for the best part of 20 years.

The Ward family collection of photos always show Don’s Cooper as #45 in a variety of events which aren’t named and there is one of this car almost literally flattened in what must have been a horrendous accident. One might guess that a trailer rollover was the cause and it seems unlikely that the car would have survived although probably bits of it did.

The evidence in the above sources suggests there might have been the following distinct Coopers competing in Kenya at one time or another:

Below: Mk2/3/4, #70, dark-tone colour, driven by Chris Little at Menengai hillclimb on 4.7.54 (Trotter collection).

Above: Mk2/3/4, #49, light tone colour, seen with damaged suspension in the Nakuru circuit paddock on 21.12.58

Below: Mk5/6, mid-tone colour, driven by (no first name) King at Langa Langa races on 13.10.52 (Trotter collection). A Jaguar driver was killed at this meeting and the circuit was closed in 1953.

Above: Mk2/3/4, #45, mid-tone colour, Don Ward, at Menengai hillclimb on 4.7.54 (Trotter collection).

Below: #25 mid-tone colour, unknown driver in a match race at Nakuru circuit 21.12.58 (Trotter collection).

Above: Mk5/6/7, #nil, dark-tone colour, photographed with #45 above at (presumably) Nakuru (Ward photos). A dark-tone coloured car (Bob Gerrish #9) is shown in an earlier post (Out of Africa 8/05/2017) and may be this car on the left.

Somewhat to the writer’s surprise it seems that there were maybe no less than four or five Coopers competing in Kenya in the 1950s although probably not all at the same time. There are rumours of a JAP twin-engined car but no firm evidence yet.

Here are some more of Don Ward’s Cooper photos which show a little of colonial life with a Cooper in Kenya in the 1950s. The last of these suggest his car was wrecked.