Jack Ensoll, pioneering editor passes on
Saturday, August 11, 2012 — updated on July
04, 2020
Courtesy of the Nation Nairobi.
Jack Ensoll, one-time editor of the Kenya Weekly News and later the Sunday Post.
I think this tribute is by the late Gerard Loughran, one of the finest journalists who blessed the Kenya media scene with his brilliance.:
I
learned with great sadness last week of the death of an old friend from bygone
Kenya – Jack Ensoll, one-time editor of the Kenya Weekly News and
later the Sunday Post. His name and the titles of those papers will
mean nothing to the vast majority of Kenyans today but, in the hectic years
preceding Uhuru, they were active combatants in the fiery debate about what
sort of country independent Kenya should be.
Jack
fought vigorously, if naively, for a rainbow-hued, multi-racial future, arguing
that significant power should be apportioned to Europeans in the new
constitution since they were so important to the economy. If not, what on earth
would happen? To which Dr Julius Kiano, minister for Industry in waiting,
responded coolly: “You will have to rely on African goodwill”.
That,
Jack, told me years later, was a big message. Quibbling about constitutional
powers was irrelevant; the right-wingers, the settlers and the liberals finally
realised that with Tom Mboya leading the charge, there was to be “none of this
multi-racial nonsense, it was going to be one-man, one-vote, African majority
rule”.
Jack,
Yorkshire-born but brought up in Devon, arrived in Kenya from England in 1952
and became Nairobi editor of the Nakuru-based Kenya Weekly News, then edited by
the formidable Mervyn F. Hill, author of Permanent Way, the classic 1950
account of the Kenya-Uganda railway. Wholly devoted to settlers’ interests (the
KWN’s first edition carried an article about the price of maize, and so did its
last), it was known as the “pea-green incorruptible” for the colour of its
cover and its staunchness in the farmers’ cause.
My
book about the Nation Media Group, Birth of a Nation (2010,
I.B. Tauris), sketches in the sociological outlines of Kenya in the early 1960s
as the country raced towards 1963. It was a society where everyone knew his
place on the ladder.
While
there was no official colour bar under colonial rule, there were invisible
barriers which Africans and Asians were expected to know and respect.
The
European community, too, was susceptible to minuscule gradations of class and
status more appropriate to the 18th century world of Jane Austen than to Africa
in the 1960s. The famous clubs, for instance. They may have been all-European
but some seemed more European than others.
In
Nakuru, the top people went to the Rift Valley Sports Club and lesser whites to
the Nakuru Athletics Club. In Nairobi, the Muthaiga Club was the settlers’
stronghold while Nairobi Club favoured government officials, bankers and
businessmen.
It
wasn’t all about colour, however. When Michael Curtis, the effective founder of
the Nation Group, a decorated soldier from WW2 and a Cambridge graduate, first
sought membership at Muthaiga, he was black-balled. The Nation had proclaimed
itself in favour of African majority rule, so there was no place for its
editor-in-chief at the bars of the Muthaiga Club.
The
clubs could not see eye to eye. The white-collar government men pictured
themselves as conscientious administrators of the law but the sunburnt settlers
saw them as short-term Johnnies, working a five-day week for a pension to spend
back in Britain.
There
is a popular story of a District Officer who seduced a settler’s daughter and
begot twins. Honourably, he offered marriage. Responded the settler: “I would
rather have two bastards in my family than one official.”
From
the KWN, Jack Ensoll moved to editorship of the Sunday Post, fighting a losing
battle to keep his ageing Cosser presses moving and a tiny staff competitive
with the energetic young arrivals from Britain who staffed the Aga Khan’s
papers in Government Road. He was never going to win this unequal battle and,
though Jack steered his charges admirably through the turmoil of independence,
eventually both the Post and the Kenya Weekly went to the wall.
Jack
Ensoll loved Kenya, but some time in the 1970s, he returned to Britain with his
family and joined the British Government information department.
There,
his bluff, easy-going charm won him a wide circle of friends, including, some
did say, the Prime Minister of the day, Mrs Margaret Thatcher.
Eventually
Jack retired to his beloved Devon, where he died last week, aged 87. His
funeral was arranged at the parish church, Saint Nectan’s, in Hartland, which
he attended. Saint Nectan was a man after Jack’s own heart.
A
fifth century Celtic hermit, he was attacked by robbers and beheaded. He then
picked up his head and walked home before collapsing. One of the robbers went
blind and the other died. Jack loved that story.
*
* *
I
do not recall Jack being a great Kiswahili speaker but he did enjoy that silly
game some Europeans played which involved figuring out the meaning of
ridiculous Swahili phrases:
1.
Maridadi simba.
2.
Maji baridi askari.
3.Wewe
kunu kuni wewe.
The
answers being (1) Dandelion (2) Coldstream Guard (3) You would, would you!
IN
Birth of a Nation, the story of a newspaper in Kenya, author Gerard Loughran included
this appreciation:
I want to thank also all those current and former Nation staffers,
and media people outside of the company, who gave generously of their time and
hospitality to recall and explain events of the past half-century, along with
those who responded with written recollections and in a variety of other ways.
Essentially, this is history as seen by contemporary eye-witnesses, and the
book could not have been written in this way without their memories. Gerry
Wilkinson was particularly generous not only with his time, encouragement and
suggestions over the lengthy period of writing and pre-publication, but
crucially for his moral support at times when the way ahead looked obscure. If
I have missed anyone who assisted me from the following list, please accept my apologies
and take my gratitude as read:
Mahmood Ahamed, Dennis Aluanga,
Violet Anyango, Allen Armstrong, Olive Armstrong, Robbie Armstrong, Frank
Barton, Dick Beeston, Gavin Bennett, Aziz Bhaloo, Peter Biddlecombe, John
Bierman, Brian Carter, Peter Chadwick, Alan Chester, Michael Chester, Nick
Chitty, Tom Clark, John Collier, Ivor Davis, Paddy Deacon, Stan Denman, Tony
Dunn, John Eames, John and Mary Edwards, Sean Egan, Albert A.A. Ekirapa,
Sarah Elderkin, Jack Ensoll, Cyprian Fernandes, Ian Fernandes, Aidan Flannery,
Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa), Dr B.M. Gecaga, Linus Gitahi, John Githongo, Michael
Griffin, Desmond Harney, Charles Hayes, Margaret Hayes, Dr Peter Hengel,
Richard Henry, Bob Hitchcock, Gloria Hitchcock, Mark Holden, Joe Kadhi, Paul
Kalemba, A.R. Kapila, Irene Karanja, Paddy Kearney, Charles Kimathi, James
Kinyua, Andrew Kuria, Tony Lavers, John Lawrence, Eric Marsden, Ros Marsden,
Joseph Mathenge, Alastair Matheson, Ian Matheson, Julius Mbaluto, Chege
Mbitiru, George Mbugguss, Helen Mbugua, Colin MacBeth, Peter McCardle, John
McHaffie, Mike Mills, Tom Mshindi, Njonjo Mue, Wamahiu Muya, Mburu Mwangi,
Cyrille Nabutollah, Mbatau wa Ngai, Dugal Nisbet-Smith, Mutegi Njau, Bernard K.
Njeru, Philip Ochieng, Charles Onyango-Obbo, Albert Odero, Joseph Odindo,
Blasto Ogindo, Patrick Orr, Malcolm Payne, John Platter, Ian Raitt, Arnold
Raphael, Paul Redfern, Cyrilla Rodrigues, Jim Rose, Nick Russell, Robert Shaw,
Mr Justice J.F. Shields, John Silvester, Peter Smith, Roger Steadman, Althea
Tebbutt-Berryman, Louise Tunbridge, Errol Trzebinski, Yussuf Wachira, Neema
Wamai, Mohammed Warsama, Frank Whalley, Ray Wilkinson, Ali Zaidi, Karl Ziegler.
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