Duluti

Hi David

Many thanks for your very interesting email.

To answer a couple of your questions yes I am related to Marion Langham. She is my first cousin. Do pass on my email to her if you are in contact.

Our grandparents were Raymond and Marjorie Ulyate (nee Rooken-Smith). Their families were part of the original settlers that landed in South Africa in 1820. My grandfather and his family then went on and became some of the first pioneers around Kajabe in Kenya.

Grandpa started taking people out on safari in the early 1900's. He worked for Newlands & Tarlton He even gets a mention in Theodore Roosevelts Book "frican Game Trails" That was on the safari in 1910 .

Grandpa bought Meru Estate near Lake Duluti after the first world war. When enemy property farms were being sold (German). They had that until a Mr K V Painter - an American persuaded him to sell the farm and take over the New Arusha Hotel (It was built opposite "'old man Blooms Arusha hotel" )

Reading from some of Mums notes she remembers that they had The Prince of Wales (first name in the visitors book) attended the opening ball in 1928. So I guess it was around this time the hotel opened.

See the article I am sending. I have heaps of other bit and pieces.

Following are a couple of photos of the hotel and an original postcard with the sign that my Grandpa wrote. I even have a Coloured letterhead of the hotel written to my mother 26 July 1930 .

Raymond and Marjorie had six children.

Jack,

Vivian (my mother who married Boris Borissow)

Thora (Marions Mother who married Oswald Barratt)

Ken,

Malham &

Ted (William)

I think Malham & Ted went to the school and most of the offspring went to Arusha School at some stage.(About 32 of us)

Ted's Wife - Kay Ulyate ran the Sanitorium for a long time. Many a day was spent there with measles, chicken pox or whatever.

Grandpa sold the New Arusha Hotel to their daughter Thora Barratt and also sold their other hotel the Lion Cub at Moshi to my mother Vivian Borissow.

I am sure Marion knows heaps more of the history than I do. I was one of the babies in the family!

Sorry the photos of the school are not too good. Colour has faded. Bryn Jones is the man sitting down, on mount Meru also in the fancy dress photo. Remember those! The 2 sitting at the top were one of the teachers. I wil try and track down my autograph book and then I will be able to tell you some of the names of the teachers at that time. Mrs Bennett was the art teacher I think.

I am glad to hear all your news about the school. What on earth took you back to Arusha and remind me again where you presently live.

I have just spent an hour hunting around. So time has got away.

Take care and please keep in touch and I dont mind you passing on my email to anyone who may remember me.

Marjorie Borissow

PS I caught up with a video made from old cine film taken of one of grandpas safaris. Rare footage.

Grandfather Ray Ulyate was to leave Elmenteita in Kenya in 1923 for Arusha with his young family. He was to purchase a Custodian of Enemy Property coffee farm, Meru Estate outside of Arusha at Lake Duluti. During the (1939-45) war a part of the farm was to become a Polish refugee camp [Tengeru?]. Today the farm is the Headquarters of the Tanzania Department of National Parks and Wild Life

Grandfather Ray was to farm at Meru Estate until 1928 when the coffee market prices and world recession made it virtually impossible for him to carry on farming.

About May of 1941 we had moved to another place nearer the coast, between the towns of Tanga and Mombasa. I enjoyed the sea very much. At that time I was getting old enough to attend the Greek school near Moshi, at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro. That was approximately a 2 day trip by train. I was quite upset in having to leave home and stay in school for a 3 month term. The school year was divided into 3 three month terms and 3 one month periods of home leave. Yep, they were boarding schools for most students. The school building apparently used to belong to some pre war German organisation; there was a huge black swastika painted on the back of one of the main buildings. Tanganyika used to be an important German colony before and during World War I. The school was surrounded by coffee and banana plantations. We lived in dormitories, about 120 boys on one side and 80 girls on the other side, separated by a large dining hall. It was grades 1 through 4, I think.The food was not much to my liking, especially when we had to eat eggplants, okra and turnips. YUK ! One evening as we were getting ready to go to sleep, there was a strong earth tremor and we thought it was a lot of fun as our beds on wheels were bumping into each other like bumper cars in an amusement park.

We sometimes went swimming in a nearby crater lake called Duluti. It was a scary lake and it had leeches in it that we had to scrape off our legs when we exited the murky water. Slimy little things they were. Another time while in school, there was a plague of locust swarms; millions of them landed on the playing fields and we would run through them. Some would fly up but most were too busy eating everything in sight and we stomped hundreds of them. The sky was almost dark when they finally decided to fly off and there were hundreds of birds feasting on them. What a strange experience that was!

One of our Saturday afternoon past times was getting our "home made" slingshots out and using some firm round yellow berries called "ndulele" as ammunition. We would exchange fire with some black kids across a hedge that marked the perimeter of our school grounds. Nobody got hurt much during these exchanges and both sides enjoyed the duels. It did sting a lot when a berry hit home however.

Six miles down the main tarmac road to Moshi - to the east behind the Natural Resources School at Tengeru - lay Mrs Gladys Rydon's fabulous garden overlooking Lake Duluti. It was the most beautiful garden I ever saw in East Africa.

(in jogging attire) surveying Central Meru (Lake Duluti in distance) from forest boundary at 6,000 feet where my father introduced Pyrethrum (daisies in forefround) as a cash crop for the Meru Co-operative Union

At Gladys Rydon's residence, with Lorraine Nelson

Just outside Arusha the delightful crater lake of Duluti offers good fishing and bird watching. More beautiful still, 20 miles away, is the Arusha National Park, a tranquil retreat established in 1960. Within its 46 sq. miles it has three distinct areas: the Mount Meru crater, the Ngurdoto Crater, and the five Momella lakes.

Stan Lawrence-Brown had his office in the Safari Hotel one hundred yards up the street from his rival, Russell Douglas. The Safari Hotel was newer, and probably fancier than the New Arusha, but it did not have the trout river frontage, lovely grounds, or the Old World charm of its rival. The Safari was a four-story rectangular box built of stone and concrete, and in its time the interior was comfortably appointed with lofty rooms. Even today, while the Safari has sunk into obscurity with the advent of newer hotels, one cannot help but notice that this large hotel has all its plumbing on the exterior of the structure, a result of an oversight by the contractors, who had forgotten to include plumbing. The hotel was owned by two aristocratic English sisters, Gladys and Margot Rydon. Both women owned prosperous coffee estates. Gladys lived in a magnificent mansion overlooking a mysterious crater lake called Duluti, seven miles east of Arusha. Margot's son, David, was killed by a buffalo near Arusha in 1964.

I am writing this book about Ngorongoro at my house at Duluti in Northern Tanzania. Volconoes are basic to our theme, and here, 200 feet below the narrow rim on which the house is perched, lies a small volcanic crater, half a mile across, and now full of water. This is Lake Duluti, a subsidiary vent to the massive extinct volcano Mount Meru, the peak of which towers nearly 11,00 feet above us (14,978 feet above sea level) and only ten miles distant. The fertile, well watered slopes are inhabited by the Meru people, allied to the Chagga of Kilimanjaro, and by the Arusha, an agricultural offshoot of the Masai.

At Duluti, about 9km. from Arusha on the Moshi Road, a very pleasant campsite on the shores of Lake Duluti provides fairly comprehensive facilities. These include a bar and restaurant where meals should be ordered in advance. ... The Duluti Mountain Lodge is a new luxurious lodge set in a coffee estate overlooking the lake. It provides horseback rides through the estates and boating and fishing on the lake.

My daughter Venetia Mayhew has discovered her great grandmother on the internet and we are all intrigued. I should love to get in touch with Alison Aitken and David.

I am the daughter of Gladys Rydon's daughter Pamela. She married my father Roddy Sword in Arusha Church in 1938. He was in Arusha with the 6 KAR. I spent the years 1956 - early 1958 out in that part of the world when I left school and spent a lot of time with my grandmother, living with her at lake Duluti and we travelled to South Africa together and a few years later back to Australia.

Her son Arthur Rydon is still alive living in Sussex. Fur would have flown if Gladys and Margot had known they were being described as sisters! I have some photos including one of the buffalo that killed David Rydon (in 1968 I think) - certainly not in 64. he was killed on his property near Ngurdoto Crater. it wasn't a national park I don't think then.

My grandmother's friend from Mars spelt his name Qel and he was from the 72nd Golden Planet Saturn flotilla. This came out in an interview she did when we were in South Africa. We travelled by sea on the Lloyd Trestino line and on reaching Durban on the return journey, some friends boarded with a newspaper like the Evening Standard and

the headlines were "SPACESHIPS FROM 600 PLANETS PATROLLING EARTH TO AVERT NEW WAR. Tanganyika woman claims dealings with Commander from Saturn ......"

I have no memories of my mother Pamela who disappeared out of my life when I was about two years old but knew David of course and Arthur well. Arthur has a son Godfrey and grand children and great children. Harold Rydon built

and owned the Safari House Hotel. His property was Ngare Sera at Usa River which is now a game lodge owned by Mike Leach. My husband and I stayed there on a recent visit in 2001 and visited Duluti also, the first time I had been back since my grandmother's death in 1964, exactly 40 years ago.

I hope to hear from you.

Sonia Mayhew (nee Sword)