In 1948 the Ngorongoro Crater with the surrounding highlands including Oldeani, Lemagrut and the Embagai Crater, together with the Serengeti plains, was gazetted a National Park, and in 1951, Ray Hewlett, the senior game ranger in Tanganyika, was appointed the first Park Warden (ref. Fosbrooke). There was a catch: being of retiring age, he was for some reason, obliged to commute his pension in the event of opting for (presumably) the additional 5 years of employment in the Civil Service.
The years at Ngorongoro, during which time I was a boarder at the Prince of Wales School in Nairobi, and for which I have the sharpest memories, were the happiest and then the saddest of my youth. My father had acquired a Leica camera, and took countless photographs, providing a prolific record of the times. We arrived in January 1952, and set up home in the southern group of log houses which made up the Crater camp. Wison Berg’s painting happens to include the cabin occupied by my sister and me (figs 16b-d) and captures the cool dark green mountain vegetation. Initially, my father was filled with enthusiasm and determination, setting up the warden’s office, store-rooms, fuel supplies, camp sites, etc, and doing endless reconnaissances over the Crater region, including walking to the top of Oldeani Mountain (fig 16k). There were frequent, unforgettable trips across the Serengeti to the Seronera, where his assistant, Peter Bramwell, was building the first permanent camp (figs 16t-u). At Banagi, we stayed with John Blower, the game ranger, in the house my parents had occupied, unchanged from 1935. By July of the following year, the Warden’s house was completed, standing entirely alone, looking across a valley towards Oldeani Mountain. Thia created a beautiful garden, and it was usual for them, often with visitors, sometimes with us children, to have tea on the verandah, watching buffalo emerge from the forest in the late afternoon to graze in the open (figs 16f-i). A dam was built in the valley below the house, which greatly attracted the animals, and which Ray stocked with trout (fig 16j).
My mother ran a household of suitably high standard (with 5 servants) and I specially recall the evenings in the Warden’s home as belonging to another world: tea at 4 pm, then a walk down to the dam (with dogs) for the ‘Major’ to cast a few lines for a trout, or a game-viewing drive, then drinks at 6 pm, when the African staff would light the paraffin lamps; then a bath and change into near formal clothes; and then a period of silence, when everyone would read. In the cold weather, a fire burned every night. At 8pm, Rashidi, the senior servant clad in a white kanzu with red cummerbund, would ring a small bell, and we would move to the dining table for supper by candle-light. After supper, more reading, and then my father would announce bed-time. Accommodating and entertaining important persons was part of the Warden’s life, and among the people I met, Lord Willingdon, General Sir Gerald Lathbury, and Sir Archibald Macindoe impressed me deeply with their presence and conversation. The Leakeys were occasional visitors on their way to the Olduvai, whilst Oliver Milton, an unforgettable (and favourite) character, then Game Ranger at Mtu wa Mbu, often appeared on Saturday afternoons, only ever clad in shorts and old takkies, regardless of the weather.
I cannot understand why Henry Fosbrooke did not seem to feature in my father’s activities at the time, nor why there is only a single reference to Ray Hewlett in his important book.
In those days, access to the crater floor required a long drive around the southern rim, over an exceptionally poor road first established by Henry Fosbrooke in 1940, to a Masai village called Nainokanoka, and thence into the crater, a journey which took some hours. In 1954, my father commenced work on a road down the western crater wall, using convict labour, for whom a serviced camp had to be set up, including accommodation for police guards (figs 16o-r). Excavation required blasting away a great deal of rock.
At about this time, I became increasingly aware of a state of anxiety affecting my father’s normally cheerful outlook, which, I gathered from occasional discussions overheard in the car, had to do with the presence of the Masai and their cattle ranging across the Crater highlands from Nainokanoka in the east to Ndulen in the west, and the Olbalbal to the north. Apart from the occasional killings of lion and rhino in defense of their livestock, what bothered the Warden most were fires, especially serious in the bamboo forest (fig 16n), together with the inexorable growth in numbers of cattle and people. He felt strongly that cattle ranching was incompatible with conservation, and although I do not know how he presented this problem in his reports, he himself told me that he was becoming unpopular with the head-office in Arusha, including the recently-appointed Chief Warden, a Col. Peter Molloy. I well recall him telling me that Molloy had no experience whatever, of wildlife management, his mandate being entirely political. School holidays, previously so happily spent on marvellous forays around the region (in the Park Land Rover) with my lifelong school friend John Capon (fig 16m), were by 1956 palpably subdued and sad, knowing that we would be leaving at the end of the year. I still see clearly in my mind’s eye, my last night at the Ngorongoro house, all our possessions packed and gone, watching a full moon over Oldeani mountain.