Ewart Grogan was one of the most
swashbuckling and controversial figures of
African colonial history. A gentleman
adventurer in the Elizabethan tradition, it
was once said of him that he belonged to a
type who either ended up buried in
Westminster Abbey-or hanging from a
yard-arm.
As one of twenty-one children of Queen
Victoria's Surveyor-General, Grogan had to
confront the question of whether to
sink or swim early in life. He chose to
follow the example of his headstrong Irish
forebears, and swim. By the age of
twenty-one he had: already been elected the
youngest ever member of the Alpine Club;
been sent down from Cambridge for his predilection for practical jokes;
walked out of the Slade School of Art; and
had become a veteran of the 1896
Matabele War, during which he served in
Cecil Rhodes' personal escort.
In order to recover from his experiences as
a "bloody trooper", Grogan took a sea voyage
to New Zealand, where he fell
in love with Gertrude Watt. But Gertrude's
stepfather was not impressed by Grogan's
credentials and told him that if he
wanted her hand in marriage he had better
prove himself. Grogan responded to this
challenge with characteristic
flamboyance, declaring that he intended to
be the first man totrek from Cape Town to
Cairo.
Having already completed the first leg of
the trek (from Cape Town to Beira) during
the Matabele War Grogan returned
to Beira in February 1898 to start the
4,000-mile second leg to Cairo.
It was an expedition which called for the
greatest powers of endurance, bravery and
resourcefulness. Grogan
was bedeviled by ill-luck and the continual
threat to their well-being posed by wild
animals, successive bouts of
malaria and dysentery, over-attentive Baleka
cannibals, and the theft of vital pieces of
equipment.
In early 1900 Grogan returned to London a
hero. He became the youngest man ever to
address the Royal
Geographical Society, and later in the year
published the best-selling account of his
trek, From The Cape to Cairo, before
embarking on a lecture tour of America. In
October, having proved his mettle, Grogan
married Gertrude.
After serving in Lord Milner's elite
"Kindergarten", the body charged with the
post-war reconstruction of South Africa,
Grogan became one of the pioneer white
settlers in Kenya. There he and Lord
DeIamere vied with each other as to who
could do the most to further colonization.
Grogan's contribution was colossal. It
included founding the country's timber
and building materials industries, stocking
its first trout, building its first
deep-water port, and being one of its
largest sisal
growers. His foresight was so great that it
was widely said of him that he was fifty
years ahead of his time. In politics he
was always to the fore as a public speaker
and economist, and he served with
distinction in World War I, earning the DSO.
After more than 60 years of usually
controversial prominence in Kenyan public
life, Grogan died unnoticed in Cape Town
in 1967, aged 92. Asked in later life to
reveal the secret of his longevity, Grogan
replied, "to smoke very heavily, drink and
eat very little, and not take anything in
life too seriously".