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Gill House is a famous building at the tail end of Tom Mboya Street and Moi Avenue in Nairobi.
It is surrounded by numerous bus stops from where Nairobians pick their transport to Buruburu, Harambee, Jericho and Kariobangi South estates.
Hustlers aspiring to be proper businesspersons also start from matchbox-size offices at Gill House, a major landmark and reference point where it has stood since it was finished after two years of construction in 1950.
Did you know that at the time, the five-storey affair was Nairobi’s tallest building? It was so prestigious, the colonial government rented offices there housing the ministry of Education.
Did you also know that the building was named after its owner, Inder Singh Gill?
Well, this Kalasinga came to Kenya from Punjab in 1922 when the powerful Sir Robert Coryndon was the Governor of Kenya.
Sir Coryndon was instrumental in the establishment of the National Museum of Kenya, at one time named the Coryndon Museum, after the man who died in Nairobi in 1925.
At the time of his death, Gill was just 25 years and then working with the East African Railway and Harbours after a short stint at the Railway Training School.
He was earning Sh20 a month as a telegraphist when teachers earned Sh13 Rupees. Gill worked for the railways corporation for almost 40 years, both in Kenya and Uganda, where he had saved enough money.
In the late 1950s, he pioneered the plywood industry in East Africa, with factories in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
At the inauguration of one of his plywood factories, the invitation cards were made out of refined pieces of pressed wood embossed with gold lettering.
Besides Gill House in Nairobi, he also built Gill’s Opera House in Uganda, which he rented out to the East African Income Tax. It cost £40,000 (Sh800,000) which was a princely sum in 1946.
‘Bwana Kubwa’, as Indar Singh was called, then lived in Jinja, Uganda, where he built a beautiful house overlooking Ripon Falls, the point at which the River Nile exits Lake Victoria on its 4,000-mile journey through the Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.
The humorous man known for long daily walks and swimming retired from the railways company in 1963 and nine years later, returned to Kenya when Ugandan madcap dictator Idi Amin expelled Asians there in 1972.
It was here that Inder Singh Gill concentrated on expanding his plywood factory in Moiben near Eldoret.
The father of four daughters died in 1992 aged 92.
