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Nairobi’s Sarova Stanley Hotel was for ages known as The New Stanley. Why was it ‘new’ for over 100 years and who was this Stanley?
Well, the Sarova, Kenya’s second largest hotel chain, was acquired by the families of former Kirinyaga MP John Ngata Kariuki and the ‘Chani’ Vohra in 1978.
But in the beginning, it belonged to a dainty woman, a milliner named Mayence Bent who founded it in 1905 when Kenya was still a geographical expression.
In his 2002 effort, Malachite Lion: A Travel Adventure in Kenya, American ecologist Dr Richard Modlin informs us that the Stanley Hotel was “one of the newest corrugated metal shacks” established by Mayence who was employed by Tommy Wood, a Jack of all trades.
Wood ran a general shop and hardware along Victoria Street (today’s Tom Mboya Street) in a building bought from Armenian shopkeeper Mesrop MacJohn.
Besides the general shop, the future Mayor of Nairobi opened the Victoria Hotel under Mayence in 1901. Mayence operated a dressmaking business nearby and Tommy’s shop stocked her clothes.
Interestingly, Mayence’s hubby, William Stanley Bent, was a railway worker, farmer and an agent of The East African Standard who supplied produce to Wood’s hotel from his 42-acre shamba in Fort Smith (present day Kiambu).
But alas! Wood and Mayence had a bitter fallout in 1905 as Modlin notes. As an act of vengeance, Mayence opened a rival hotel with Sotik farmer Daniel Cooper and whose striking appearance saw customers changing loyalties to what she named Stanley Hotel - after explorer Henry Morton Stanley.
It was Lithuanian Jew, Abraham Block, the great grandpa of Kenyan Olympic swimmers David and Jason Dunford, who supplied Mayence with her first 23 grass-stuffed mattresses for her hotel.
But the Stanley Hotel was razed down by a fire and Mayence relocated it to an abandoned railway bungalow along Government Road (Moi Avenue), which they later sold to Dan Noble, the former postmaster of Nairobi in 1907.
Noble had made his money mining gold nuggets in the Kakamega gold rush. Mayence divorced her then bankrupt hubby, besides dissolving the partnership with Cooper.
The mother of one daughter married wealthy Fred Tate, her new business partner and “Nairobi’s stationmaster and a pianist at the Railway Institute” who was 15 years her junior.
She became Mayence Tate, but as Christine Nicholls writes in her 2005 book, Red Strangers: The White Tribe of Kenya, Bent was her stepbrother from her stepfather’s previous marriage!
The couple bought and built a 60-room hotel on a corner plot at the Junction of Delamere Avenue (Kenyatta Avenue) and opened it in 1913.
The old Stanley Hotel was sold to Noble and from the legal dispute on the use of the name, Mayence and Tate renamed theirs The New Stanley. Fred Tate died in 1937.
Ten years later, Mayence sold The New Stanley to Abraham of the famous Block Hotels chain. Quite a feat, considering Abraham had immigrated to Kenya in 1903 to escape the Boer War in South Africa, arriving in Nairobi with nothing more than “two Basuto ponies, sacks of potatoes, linseed, peas, beans, a gold watch, a change of clothes and 20 pounds,” as Errol Trzebinski informs us in her 1988 book, The Kenyan Pioneers.
Abraham died in 1965, but from wife Sarah, his children - Rita, Jack, Tubby and Ruth Block - expanded the empire to include East African Industries (today Unilever), Farmer’s Choice, Business Machines and Afro-Swiss Engineering, but the scope has gradually changed.
Abraham’s grandchildren did not disappoint: Jeremy Block owns Dorman’s Coffee, while Geraldine Dunford’s family run the Tamarind Group, of which Nairobi’s famous Carnivore Restaurant is the flagship brand.
But from that act of vengeance in 1905, the Sarova Stanley now comprises the Sarova Stanley and Sarova Panafric in Nairobi, Sarova Whitesands Beach Resort and Spa at the North Coast, Sarova Lion Hill in Nakuru, Sarova Taita Hills and Sarova Salt Lake Game Lodge in Taita Taveta, Sarova Mara in the Maasai Mara, England’s The Bull (dating back to 1688), The Abbey’s and The Rembrandt in the heart of London.
The Sarova Stanley, a member of Historic Hotels Worldwide, has suites bearing names of his famous patrons, including Ernest Hemingway, Elspeth Huxley, Windsor, Karen Blixen, Lord Delamere, Tate and Henry Morton Stanley.
