The man with the inside story on Tiny Rowland

Kenya

  At his house on Kenya’s coast our neighbour Paul Spicer kept a photograph of himself as quite a young man stepping out with his boss Tiny Rowland, our founding President Jomo Kenyatta and 1970s MI6 chief Sir John Ogilvy Rennie (known as ‘C’). In the image they are all sharply dressed — by perhaps the same Savile Row tailor Tiny acquired to pamper his friends — and they look like the kings of the world. Edward Heath called Tiny the unacceptable face of capitalism — but I always admired the Lonrho boss and Paul was for many years his right-hand man. Naturally when you have been so successful you’re going to make a few enemies, but as Tiny so wisely said, ‘I don’t know why he hates me so much — I never did him a favour.’ Paul was retired and quite elderly when we got to know him and June his wife, who had grown up on an upcountry tea farm in Kenya and was one of the kindest people I ever met. Large in girth and sporting shorts as huge as white spinnakers, Paul would sail down the beach towards us during our evening walks and invite us up to their house for cocktails while our children took swims in their pool. Out would come the gin and on went the loud jazz music as the sun went down over the Indian Ocean through the coconut palms. June’s mother had bought all the beach land here in the 1940s when it was wild jungle, and at the end of the war she had erected an old RAF Nissen hut full of asbestos and aluminium on the sand. In 1965, she sold my parents a bit of the beach next door and we are still there. At some point Paul knocked the Nissen hut down and built a magnificent yet simple home.