Thanks to his shrewdness, his ability to entertain not only beautiful ladies but also his knowledge of the savannah, Finch Hatton became friends with almost all the most important people in the British Colony and personally accompanied the Prince of Wales, and later King for only 326 days before abdicating, Edward VIII, on safari. It was a trip to South Africa that made him fall in love with the Dark Continent and hunting.īefore returning home, he decided to stay in Kenya and bought an estate in the Rift Valley and moved there to pursue his favourite sport. He attended two of the most important schools in the Kingdom, Eton Grammar School and Oxford College. In addition to the writer Isak Dinesen, Baroness Von Blixen, there was also the intellectual and first female airline pilot to fly across the Atlantic, Beryl Marckham.įinch Hatton was born in 1887 into a noble family in Great Britain, his father Henry being the Earl of Winchilsea. In reality, Finch Hatton was not so charming, but his aura of womanizer and eternal dreamer, a bit rough like all hunters but unusually elegant and refined, in eating and drinking as well as in his appreciation of opera music, for example, certainly made him a unique character who, not by chance, made two brilliant, albeit problematic, women fall in love with him.
His name was Denys Finch Hatton and, made famous by Karen Blixen's famous novel 'My Africa', he looks like the actor Robert Redford in the collective imagination. Ninety years ago, the most famous dandy in the history of British Africa died in Kenya when his plane crashed with his loyal servant Kamau.
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