Denys Finch Hatton

The life and legacy of a legendary big-game hunter, passionate conservationist and champion of Africa. By Sir Johnny Scott.

On the morning of 14 May 1931 a yellow Gipsy Moth biplane took off from the little dirt airstrip at the foot of Mbolo Hill near Voi, on the edge of the Taru Desert in Kenya. The pilot circled the airstrip twice in a flamboyant gesture to the friends who had come to see him off. Then, to their horror, the engine cut out and the plane nosedived, crashing in a ball of flames and killing the big-game hunter and conservationist the Hon Denys Finch Hatton.

Denys Finch Hatton was born in 1887, the younger son of the 13th Earl of Winchilsea, and grew up at Haverholme Priory in Lincolnshire. After Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford, he followed many of his contemporaries out to Kenya and investigated farming opportunities promoted by the pioneer settler Lord Delamere, arriving in 1910. Although only there for a month, he was immediately drawn to Africa and purchased land in Dorobo and Nandi country, north of the nascent settlement on the Uasin Gishu plateau above the Rift Valley, before heading back to England. On his return in 1911 he bought a house in Nairobi and over the next three years acquired more land, including a substantial estate at Navaisha in the Rift Valley basin where he hoped to raise cattle. He joined the board of a consortium prospecting for minerals and bought a chain of small stores across Kenya. In 1913 he embarked on a six-month trip through northern Kenya to buy native cattle in Italian Somaliland, hunting game for the pot along the way. He drove the herd south to Kekopey Ranch, on Lake Elementaita, which belonged to the Hon Galbraith Cole, Lord Delamere’s brother-in-law.

When war was declared in 1914, settlers rushed to defend the long border between Kenya and German East Africa, forming irregular units. Finch Hatton joined one put together by Cole’s brother, Berkeley, patrolling the 150-mile section of the Mombasa- to-Nairobi railway. Reinforced in 1915 by 100 regular soldiers from the Loyal North Lancashire regiment and a company of Gurkhas, the new unit was involved in fierce bush fighting to push the Germans back over the border. More troops arrived to pursue the elusive commander, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, and in 1916 Finch Hatton was appointed aide-de-camp to General Hoskins, being awarded the Military Cross for saving his life when the car they were travelling in was ambushed.

With the war over, Finch Hatton began rebuilding his farming operations, neglected for the previous four years, and looked for other means of making money. His reputation as an expert on Africa secured him a position as an executive of a London-based Abyssinian trading syndicate, spending two years exploring mining prospects in the remote Entoto hills and living off the land before returning to London to report to the syndicate. Back in Kenya in 1921 he formed a land speculation company, Kiptiget, with various friends. Tours of Kenya to assess opportunities for the firm were interspersed with hunting trips.

About this time Finch Hatton renewed his acquaintance with Karen von Blixen, wife of Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke. He first met her in 1918 and later, when her marriage broke down, she became his lover, immortalising him in her 1937 book, Out of Africa. The von Blixens owned a coffee plantation on the edge of the Ngong Hills but the Baron was a philanderer and, as one of Kenya’s leading professional hunters, frequently away on safari. Increasingly, Finch Hatton, who shared with Karen von Blixen a love of Africa and its wildlife, classical music, poetry and literature, came to use the Ngong farm as his second home and a base for his travels around Kenya.

During his time in Africa, Finch Hatton had become an experienced hunter. Now, at the age of 37, he decided to make use of his extensive knowledge professionally and become a safari guide, joining the ranks of other ‘white hunters’ of that era, such as Alan Black, Philip Percival, JA Hunter and Bunny Allen. He signed up with the agent Safariland, which specialised in African safaris, taking out his first client in 1925, and soon had a busy schedule of assignments. One of the biggest was a five-month photographic safari with the American manufacturing tycoon Frederick Patterson, and then in 1928 he was commissioned to take both the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) and Prince Henry on safari.

Where regulated trophy hunting was accepted as beneficial to wildlife, conservation and the economy, Finch Hatton was among the first to recognise that more needed to be done to protect game from indiscriminate shooting. Appointed an honorary game warden by the game department, he was working with others to balance the conflicting interests of hunters, conservationists and farmers, and was engaged in gathering data on game migration patterns. Of particular concern was the haven of game just over the border on the vast Tanganyikan Serengeti plains, where unregulated parties of tourists had been shooting from vehicles and competing on the number of species killed in a day. Finch Hatton remonstrated repeatedly with the Tanganyikan authorities and, when the slaughter continued, wrote a long article in The Times suggesting photography as an alternative to shooting.

A second article, this time supported by the Prince of Wales condemning the practice, led to the chief secretary to the Tanganyikan government becoming involved. The topic was even debated in Parliament, with the Secretary of State for the Colonies requesting a report on the situation. Shortly afterwards, The Times’ representative in Dar es Salaam reported that a game warden had now been appointed to the Serengeti plains and that ‘Mr Finch Hatton’s crusade has already begun to produce its effect’.

Had Finch Hatton lived a few more years he would have seen the Tanganyikan government establish a system of National Parks compliant with the Convention Relative to the Preservation of Fauna and Flora in their Natural State, becoming the Serengeti National Park in 1940.