Hotel porter who saw a princess arrive and leave as British queen
Nahason Muriithi Nyaga who was working as a porter at the Treetops Hotel. PHOTO | JAMES KANYI | NATION MEDIA GROOUP
What you need to know:
- Security was extra-ordinarily tight. Though the number of police guarding the facility had been increased due to the ongoing war against Mau Mau, British forces poured in droves.
- When the princess finally arrived early evening, he said, she was accompanied by an entourage of less than a dozen, who seemed enchanted by their surroundings.
On February 5, 1952, Princess Elizabeth was having dinner with guests at Treetops Hotel when cable was delivered. Her father King George VI had died. The queen looked distressed. When news spread to other guests, they lost their appetite.
“Everybody retired to bed. The mood became solemn,” recalls Nahason Muriithi Nyaga, who was working as a porter at the Treetops Hotel. Back then, he was a 24 years old, freshly recruited by a fellow villager. His job description was simple; to receive guests, make their beds and cater to other needs that European managers could not attend to.
“We used to be paid Sh50 a month. It was good money then,” said Nyaga, who is now 87 and a farmer in Kamuyu sub-location of Nyeri County. His left hand shakes due to old age, as he speaks outside his one-bedroom timber house.
But his memory is still as sharp as a steel trap. And he remembers the day when the young princess arrived at the hotel with her husband.
Security was extra-ordinarily tight. Though the number of police guarding the facility had been increased due to the ongoing war against Mau Mau, British forces poured in droves.
When the princess finally arrived early evening, he said, she was accompanied by an entourage of less than a dozen, who seemed enchanted by their surroundings.
“They were visibly excited and you could see it as we picked their bags. The princess was especially inquisitive as she arrived when elephants and buffalos were drinking water near Treetop,” he said.
But after news broke of the king’s death, the princess and the duke retired to the guest house at the Treetops. And when she used the rickety ladder of the treetops to step down the morning of February 6, she touched the Arberdares ground as Queen.
“None of us knew that by then. We came to learn about her ascendancy after they left that morning,” he said. But two years after the queen left, Treetops was burnt down in an attack by the Mau Mau. Some of Nyaga’s colleagues were kidnapped in the raid that night and never seen again.
