Cholmondeley: Tallest aristocrat with long controversy dies

Tom Cholmondeley in his cell at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. He died on August 17, 2016 aged 48. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • As a rancher and Wildlife conservationist, he would be expected to carry guns, strapped over his shoulder or lying beside him under a tree. But he would later mistake humans for game.
  • Mr Cholmondeley’s love for human blood and subsequent acquittal may have been a hereditary luck. In the book White Mischief, his grandfather is said to have been charged with killing his lover. Even then, he was found innocent.

Your national television might describe him as a 6 footer 3. But he was probably taller than that. Tom Cholmondeley came from a family with a long pedigree and by the time his heart stopped beating, his name had been added to the annals of Kenya’s history several times over.

Thomas Patrick Cholmondeley (pronounced ‘Chomlee’) was born on June 19, 48 years ago. He was one the final breeds of British-cum white settler aristocrat, Lord Delamere. He lived to be known as Tom, the only son to his father.

His father was the fourth Baron Delamere, Hugh Delamere. His grandfather, long dead about three quarters of a century ago (1931), is regarded as one of the pioneers in plantation farming in Kenyan highlands.

While Tom is a descendant of purely British immigrants, he lived to adapt to the African way of life.

It was rumoured that he was a relative of Sir Robert Walpole, a one-time British Premier. But it is within Kenya’s tradition to link oneself to some political leader.

His background in agriculture, including working on Kenneth Matiba’s Wangu Embori farm as a manager, stood him a good stead in future life.

As a rancher and Wildlife conservationist, he would be expected to carry guns, strapped over his shoulder or lying beside him under a tree. But he would later mistake humans for game.

Tom could be given credit where he deserves. His family’s contribution to ordinary people’s lives is when they tucked a milk shop along the Nairobi-Nakuru highway.

Tired travellers could draw up sips on milk whenever they come from upcountry.

The roads leading to his home were rocky and rough but he managed to acquire a private pilot licence with which he could overfly the plain-lands of Naivasha. That’s where credits ended.

In April 2005, Tom shot a Kenya Wildlife service ranger by the name Samson Ole Sisina. He was arrested but a nolle prosequi (termination of case) was handed against his charges for murder by the then Attorney-General Amos Wako. The case was cancelled, much to the annoyance of the general public.

In May, a year later, Tom was rearrested after he shot a suspected poacher, Robert Njoya, on his Soy Sambu ranch. The murder trial begun on September 25, the same year.

The charge was however reduced to manslaughter of which he was found guilty and sentenced to 8 months in prison. He would be released in October of the same year.

Mr Cholmondeley, lawyers argued then, might have certainly profited from lack of a standard minimum penalty for manslaughter with the laws only providing for a maximum life sentence.

Judges had the freedom to hand down a verdict depending on the evidence at hand.

Justice Muga Apondi single-handedly handled the case, and flaring tempers surrounding the matter too. He argued that Mr Cholmondeley had already spent three years in jail.

The BBC called him, ‘the last man standing’. In any case, there had never been a Kenyan of British origin who had been executed for killing a native, with great exception of Peter Poole.

Poole’s dogs mauled Kamawe Musangi after the poor victim hurled a stone at them in self-defence. It was found that Poole drew his pistol and ended Musangi’s life. The courts ended his, too.

In April 1998, the Spectator Magazine , calling the Delamere family as ‘The Kennedy’s of Kenya’, described Cholmondeley as a man who treated people like game and shot them for sport, probably because the government had banned real game hunting 21 years earlier.

Even then, the same story worried that Cholmondeley’s family could be extinct before long. It turned out to be a wrong expectation, he would live through courts, clinging to his gun.

Mr Cholmondeley’s love for human blood and subsequent acquittal may have been a hereditary luck. In the book White Mischief, his grandfather is said to have been charged with killing his lover. Even then, he was found innocent.

Mark Seal noted in Vanity Fair, a British Magazine, that Tom was a man who “neither talked to the government officials, because they were corrupt nor the police, because they were crooked.” He also avoided neighbours “because they thought he stole their land.”

He is a man who was sought by many angry Kenyans but whom justice decided to save, and courts ensured he was at home for Christmas.

On Wednesday, doctors at MP Shah Hospital said he died of a cardiac arrest following a hip surgery. No more details were given on the nature of the injury on that hip. But it is obvious he didn’t shoot from it.

He leaves behind two sons, Hugh and Henry, to perpetuate the Lordship and the glut of a family who came to Kenya for plantation farming, but whose legacy left a bitter taste in families whose kin he fell.