Colonial Kenya
In 1899, the young Lord Delamere married Lady Florence Anne Cole, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat from a prominent Ulster family. She was the daughter of The 4th Earl of Enniskillen, a peer whose ancestral seat was Florence Court in south-west County Fermanagh in the north of Ireland. The couple soon sought to relocate to what became known as 'the White Highlands' in Kenya.
Lord Delamere originally applied for a land grant from the British Crown in May 1903, but was denied because the Governor of the Protectorate, Sir Charles Eliot, thought the land was too far from any population centre. His next request for 100,000 acres (400 km2), near what is now Naivasha, was denied because the government felt that settlement by a colonising farmer might ignite conflicts with the Maasai tribesman who lived on the land. Delamere's third attempt at land acquisition was successful. He received a 99-year lease on 100,000 acres (400 km2) of land that would be named 'Equator Ranch', requiring him to pay a £200 annual rent and to spend £5,000 on the land over the first five years of occupancy. In 1906, he acquired a large farm in Gilgil division, which would eventually include more than 50,000 acres (210 km2), located between Elementeita Railway Station, Elmenteita Badlands and Mbaruk Railway Station. This ranch he named Soysambu. Together, these vast possessions made Delamere one of Kenya's 'largemen'; the local name for the handful of colonists with the greatest land holdings.
Among Kenya's white settlers, Lord Delamere was famous for his devotion to developing Kenyan agriculture. For many years, his only homes in Kenya were native-style mud and grass huts, which his wife (who was Ulster Anglo-Irish) decorated with their English and Irish furnishings. For twenty years, Delamere farmed his land by trial and error, and dedicated hard work, experimenting extensively with crops and livestock, and accruing a stockpile of knowledge that would later serve as the foundation for the agricultural economy of the colony.
By 1905, Delamere was a pioneer of the East African dairy industry. He was also a pioneer at crossbreeding animals, beginning with sheep and chicken, then moving to cattle; most of his imported animals, however, succumbed to diseases such as foot and mouth and red water disease. Delamere purchased Ryeland Rams from England to mate with 11,000 Maasai ewes, and in 1904, imported 500 pure-bred merino ewes from New Zealand. Four-fifths of the merino ewes quickly died, and the remaining stock were moved to Delamere's Soysambu Ranch, as well as the remaining stock of 1,500 imported cattle that suffered from pleuro-pneumonia.
Eventually, Lord Delamere decided to grow wheat. This, too, was plagued by disease, specifically rust (fungus). By 1909, Delamere was out of money, resting his last hopes on a 1,200-acre (4.9 km2) wheat crop that eventually failed. He was quoted by author Elspeth Huxley as commenting drily, 'I started to grow wheat in East Africa to prove that though I lived on the equator, I was not in an equatorial country.' Delamere eventually created a 'wheat laboratory' on his farm, employing scientists to manufacture hardy wheat varieties for the Kenyan highlands. To supplement his income, he even tried raising ostriches for their feathers, importing incubators from Europe; this venture also failed with the advent of the motor car and the decline in fashion of feathered hats. Delamere was the first European to start a maize farm, Florida Farm, in the Rongai Valley, and established the first flour mill in Kenya. By 1914, his efforts finally began to generate a profit. In the same year, his wife Florence died from heart-failure.
