The Spectator’s Notes | 9 March 2017

After he left the Blues and Royals in 1981, the young Tristan Voorspuy drove a motorbike from London to Cape Town. Thus began his love of Africa. He also learnt to fly, and arranged to travel alone to Kenya from England in a single-engine aeroplane, using only a schoolboy atlas. Luckily, his brother Morvern, a professional pilot, heard of this plan and prevented it. But Tristan reached Kenya by other means, and became a Kenyan citizen. For 30 years, he was a leading conservationist there and set up and ran the accurately named firm Offbeat Safaris, which allows guests to ride among the great beasts of Africa. Recently, armed hordes and their cattle invaded the land on Sosian, the Kenyan ranch he jointly owned, and whose land and wildlife he had rescued after the environmental degradation they had suffered from overgrazing in the 1990s. In an email he sent last month, before the Sosian invasion, Tristan warned of the effects on wildlife he had seen in recent attacks on other estates. He said that the invaders were reviving the status rituals of the Pokot tribe, which involve the killing and mutilation of elephant, giraffe etc. Last weekend, they burnt out the house of one of Tristan’s business partners. He got on his little white stallion Loita and rode off alone to investigate. The horse was found injured. Tristan was later found dead. He had been shot.

It would be wrong to call such a shocking death ‘fitting’, but its drama did reflect Tristan’s life and character. Whether illicitly growing cannabis in his parents’ garden as a teenager, riding in the Grand Military at Sandown, or out in the bush, he was always bold — never bolder than when trying to defend the land, fauna and flora of Africa.