I

Tapp took his job as a company director seriously and showed great interest in Manbré’s operations. After all, he was – in economic status and ideological interest – a member of the propertied British middle classes and the web of fraternal associations called ‘club-land’.Footnote ²² His political leanings can best be described as anti-labour and were an important indicator of how he saw himself and his relationship to workers, in both England and Kenya. Over the course of nine days, from midnight on 26–7 September to 5 October 1919, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen and the National Union of Railwaymen launched a strike to maintain the rates of pay that they had enjoyed during the First World War. The strike was a success, ensuring the standardization of pay across the industry and a maximum eight-hour working day.Footnote ²³ Tapp, it appears, worked with the Middle Classes Union to oppose the strike.Footnote ²⁴

This union – founded in February 1919 to safeguard private property after the Reform Act of 1918 had expanded working-class suffrage, thereby spurring fears of ‘revolution’ and ‘extreme Labour demands’ – was an antisemitic and anti-immigrant organization of 11,000 members.Footnote ²⁵ During the strike, Tapp was ‘approached’ and filled out a ‘very elaborate form’ to drive a lorry. As he recalled to a friend, ‘I was hanging about more or less a week in Hyde Park at times being sent on various trips to the country; handling milk cans even when empty I found was a very tiring job.’Footnote ²⁶ He did not complain to his brother, Arthur, writing that he had been ‘called up to drive a motor’, but commuters felt ‘little effect’ from the railway strike because ‘everyone on the road who could gave them a lift’.Footnote ²⁷

Unfortunately, Manbré’s workers, whose employer had been struggling at that time, felt his ire too. Tapp revelled in having ‘closed’ the company factory, and

That purchase, as we shall see, led to Tapp’s involvement in Kenya and the establishment of Manbré Estates.Footnote ²⁸

The strike illuminates Tapp’s close connections to Cambridge, particularly Caius College, too. Having earned three degrees from Cambridge, he was a well-connected figure in the college’s wood-panelled meeting rooms, and apparently well-liked, especially given that his anti-union opinions were shared there. Sir William Ridgeway, the Disney Professor of Archaeology and an alumnus of both Peterhouse and Caius (and a fellow of the latter), congratulated Tapp on 8 October that his and other Britons’ efforts to facilitate anti-strike actions had ‘taken aback’ the striking workers and convinced the ‘public’ not to be ‘so nervous for the future in [the] face of threatened strikes, and this will be a great asset in fighting them’. The fellow Caians shared news about Cambridge as well. ‘Cambridge is simply bursting with undergraduates’, Ridgeway complained, and that had led to substantial difficulties for students in finding ‘rooms for them, and also secure a supply of coal’. He protested that the strikes had crippled Cambridge’s economy and had threatened to bring the venerable university to a ‘stand still’.Footnote ²⁹

Nevertheless, Tapp’s connections went further than a simple ideological affinity between him and elite Cambridge professors. He was a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club and the New University Club, which catered to ‘Oxbridge’ alumni.Footnote ³⁰ These memberships placed him at the centre of a powerful network that had connections to government and business, and he profited from these contacts. The future director of Manbré, Albert Eustace Berry, sent his son, Derbe Carlton Berry, to Caius; and Manbré’s production facilities and warehouses were situated on the Thames in Hammersmith with spectacular views of the Oxford–Cambridge boat race. Tapp advised prospective parents on whether their sons should attend Caius too. In October 1919, he wrote that ‘the Honor [sic] Degree in Law at Cambridge is a very high standard and I do not quite know why your son should not take this up, especially if he succeeds in getting an adequate scholarship’. He continued: ‘Is your son musical? If so, possibly at Caius he might get a Choral Scholarship in addition to any Law Scholarship going there.’Footnote ³¹ As a sign of his emotional attachment to his alma mater – emotive ties that would pay dividends for Caius upon the lawyer’s death – Tapp paid £250 to commission Arthur Hacker to produce a portrait of Ernest Stewart Roberts, who was the master of Caius from February 1903 until his death in June 1912.Footnote ³²

Amid his college activities, it appears that Tapp’s directorship of Manbré started less than a decade prior to the founding of Manbré Estates. In 1919, he had £1,000 in preferred shares in the company and received £62 10s. in directors’ fees for the fourth quarter of that year – one of many capital sums that he and other directors devised to hide from the government ‘should the Labour Party carry out some of their complicated projects’.Footnote ³³ The directors had much to hide, given that business had improved following Albert Eustace Berry’s rapid ascent to the company’s leadership. From a head chemist, Berry became a manager at the Stratford firm A. Boake, and in 1906 he acquired the Johnson Saccharine Company and formed Sugar & Malt Products Ltd. Berry, an exceptionally intelligent and hard-working manager, recognized that significant profits could be made from brewing sugars, as popular tastes were starting to shift in Britain from malted beers to lighter alcoholic beverages. Berry’s Sugar & Malt Products was a success and, following a loan of £350,000 from Barclays Bank, he purchased Manbré ‘lock, stock, and barrel’. In this new organization, named Manbré Sugar & Malt Ltd., A. Boake was the chairman and Berry was the managing director. Berry’s business empire soon expanded, with the purchase of Brewers Sugar Company of Greenock, the Liverpool Saccharine Company, and the Liverpool Malt Company, to name a few.Footnote ³⁴

With Manbré’s business in Britain secure, Berry and the other company directors, including Tapp, were attracted to Kenya’s cheap land, abundant labour, and large profits. Tapp was part of the influx of investors, businesspeople, planters, missionaries, and anti-imperialists who made up Kenya’s colonial society.Footnote ³⁵ These men worked hard and played hard, finding the time to enjoy squash and golf, or dine with friends and hold ‘eating contest[s]’.Footnote ³⁶ Tapp’s interests were more cerebral, and in Kenya he visited that ‘brilliant scholar [and archaeologist] L. S. B. Leakey and his small band of Cambridge Students’.Footnote ³⁷ It bears mentioning that East Africa’s white society included colonists who denounced Britain’s labour regime. Missionaries actively opposed the labour ordinances, with Frank Weston, the Anglican archbishop of Zanzibar, drafting a memorandum against these measures and publicizing its contents for signatories in England. He wrote in his 1920 work, The serfs of Great Britain, ‘We regard forced labour as in itself immoral; and we hold that forcing Africans to work in the interests of European civilization is a betrayal of the weaker to the financial interests of the stronger race.’Footnote ³⁸ The memorandum, however, came with qualifications and caveats: it accepted coerced labour for ‘public utility’ and acknowledged that Black idleness remained a concern. Tapp showed little evidence of even such limited criticisms of white imperialism.Footnote ³⁹

In fact, Tapp appears to have had high hopes about the Protectorate and its prospects for profiteering. In a newspaper clipping contained in his papers at Caius, he was mentioned as ‘the Vice Chairman of Manbré Sugar and Malt, Ltd., an important and flourishing British company’, who had travelled from Mombasa to Nairobi as there was ‘a possibility of his company going in for sugar and manioc production north of the Zambesi, and if the decision is made in that direction, it will involve a very large expenditure for machinery and plant’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Africa was certainly a risk, yet well worth the initial outlay of capital for future profits.

Tapp saved another newspaper article, from the Financial Times in October 1925, which again showed his interest in Kenyan business. The reporter, George A. Tyson, declared:

From a paper describing itself as the ‘Honest Financier’, such advice regarding the material benefits of East African colonization was welcome. Alongside these industrial improvements, the report pointed to the low costs of production and the high profits that one could make in starting a company in Kenya. In mentioning a £75 profit on a ton of coffee, Tyson noted that, with

These rates of return on investment compared favourably to other parts of the empire, such as in the Malayan rubber plantations, which hovered between 10 and 15 per cent in the same period.Footnote ⁴³ There, the businessmen who operated the tin mines and rubber estates were not a unified lobby and – as Manbré’s tensions with Danish investors attest – were instead fragmented into highly competitive groups that each tried to gain support from government officials. In their efforts to maintain their financial and commercial interests, these men inaugurated a ‘new imperialism’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Spurred by low costs and comparatively high rates of return, colonial businessmen like Tapp had similar hopes in East Africa.

II

Manbré’s incorporation papers, housed at The National Archives in Kew, London, illuminate Tapp’s involvement in the formation of its Kenyan operations. According to the company prospectus, ‘Manbré Estates [was formed] to acquire and develop an estate known as the Kamiti Ranch, Kahama, Nairobi, in the Crown Colony of Kenya on the East Coast of Africa.’ The prospectus outlined in detail how this expansion was brought about, with Berry, alongside William Henry Abbey (a Sussex landowner and brewer) and Tapp, named as directors of the estate. During the summer of 1924, Berry and Tapp, respectively the chairman and vice-chairman of Manbré Sugar & Malt Limited, decided to spread the company’s operations beyond its traditional involvement in the processing of sugar to growing the crop and becoming more involved in coffee planting. According to the prospectus, they sought to investigate ‘the character of certain raw cane sugars which were being grown in Kenya’ and the fact that ‘in certain districts of that Colony substantial yields of sugar cane were being secured, in some cases as much as 50 to 60 tons per acre and containing a high sugar content’. The region appeared ripe for profit and exploitation.Footnote ⁴⁵

Intrigued by these more productive strains of sugar cane, Tapp visited Kenya, Mozambique, and Portuguese East Africa, financed with the help of Barclays Bank Limited and funds from Abbey, Berry, and himself. His extensive collection of maps (now in the Caius archives) of Kenya (particularly its railway system and the Yatta Plateau), and the colonies of Mozambique and the Sudan, indicates his interest in the region. Excited by these new opportunities and with the help of funds that the initial investors pooled in the ‘Kenyan Sugar Syndicate’, Tapp ‘proceeded to East Africa, and, assisted by a gentleman who had some experience of sugar growing in Natal, inspected properties’ in all three colonies.Footnote ⁴⁶ As the duties were lower on Kenyan sugar and the produce from that region more likely to succeed, the syndicate chose that colony to conduct business.Footnote ⁴⁷

Situated on the Kenyan Highlands – known as the White Highlands for the vast number of colonists who monopolized land in the highly productive region – the Kamiti Ranch appeared destined for success.Footnote ⁴⁸ It certainly inspired Theodore Roosevelt, the former president of the United States of America, who visited the estate in 1910, a year into a safari in East and Central Africa, when it was owned by Hugh H. Heatley, a Cheshire-born farmer who later noted having ‘sold the ranch to a syndicate and returned to England’.Footnote ⁴⁹ ‘It is white man’s country’, Roosevelt opined, ‘a country which should be filled with white settlers; and no place could be more attractive for visitors’. Kenya was so congenial to his health that it seemed to be like an ‘ordinary trip’ to the French Riviera or Italy.Footnote ⁵⁰ The 24,760-acre estate, which lay 13 miles from Nairobi, had a supply of timber and, as the Manbré Estate prospectus noted, ‘an excellent homestead with all necessary farm buildings – a coffee factory with water power, a mill with similar power, Managers and two guest houses and certain machinery and plant’. Tapp was informed, too, about the significant amount of labour in the region, with one manager arguing that the ‘available labour supply for the estate has been satisfactory and the standard of health on the estate is good’.Footnote ⁵¹ This sentence was indicative of the perverse contrast, which will be discussed later, between the housing and treatment of white managers and Black Kenyans, the latter of whom were described as a mere ‘supply’ of workers for the estate and judged for their health (thereby indicating how much labour they could put into harvesting the sugar and coffee crops).

The plantation’s prospects met Tapp’s expectations. According to a vendor reporting to the syndicate, approximately 8,000 acres of land could be placed under sugar cane and another 1,000 acres was valuable swamp land that, when drained, promised significant yields. Holding the usual ninety-nine-year lease on their land, the estate had a homestead farm of 1,037 acres on freehold, and livestock valued at £1,169. In total, the land was valued at over £100,000 but Manbré purchased it for £51,000, with an additional £6,000 provided to the Sugar Syndicate for Tapp’s inspection of the property and the relevant costs of hiring lawyers in Nairobi to seal the purchase. These costs were negligible compared to the high profits that could be gained from Kamiti. The vendor noted that the gross income of the ranch was £12,000 and estimated that the net profits from such a large estate would be around £8,000 per annum as the raw sugar would be sent back to England to be processed at Manbré’s refining facilities in east London. These profits and the high rates of return on investment spurred Tapp to invest.Footnote ⁵²

After purchasing Kamiti, Tapp continued to be a hands-on operator at the estate when he visited from England. Arriving again in Kenya in October 1928, he sent a letter to Berry, noting that he was not ‘in Africa on pleasure bent, but on business which to a certain extent interests the Shareholders of Manbré & Garton and should in years to come prove a source of some additional income to that Company’.Footnote ⁵³ Not a man to tell tall tales, Tapp was involved in all aspects of plantation life: he helped to drain swamps and organized a joint swamp programme to open up land for cultivation; he helped to build canals; he mortgaged trucks, locomotives, sidings, and other much needed equipment; he negotiated deeds and titles for land and facilities on the Ruiru river for sugar cultivation and irrigation; he remunerated employees and maintained good relations with managers and overseers; he built bund walls to retain rainfall; and he showed clients around the estate.Footnote ⁵⁴ He even sent a letter to a local white colonist, claiming that they had parked a car on Manbré land. No colonial sojourner, Tapp was a diligent director who applied his knowledge of geology, finance, and the law to improve the position of the company in Kenya.Footnote ⁵⁵

Tapp had a direct role in the planting too. The plantation allowed him to implement his geological expertise, and he corresponded widely on soil fertility, irrigation schemes, and farming methods. Writing to Captain Williams, who helped to run Sukari’s sugar plantations, Tapp revealed himself to be a fastidious micromanager. In a December 1928 letter, he noted that ‘much valuable time is lost during the rainy season in moving our Cane which is used for planting, as it is well[-]nigh impossible to use our tractors owing to the state of the ground and road tracks’, advising that the estate construct a ‘system of light rails’. Once the rains had ‘ceased’, he was more forceful in his advice than before. He argued that the ‘prospects of fresh cane planted’ were high and that planning had to begin, or the ‘growth’ would be ‘retarded’. On the coffee harvest, he advised Williams to employ a tractor ‘to draw your coffee’ and move the crop downhill, and directed that oxen be used ‘to draw the coffee to the Factory’.Footnote ⁵⁶

While he took an active interest in the business, Tapp also controlled the purse strings and ensured that there were no cost overruns on the plantation. In organizing the Kamiti estate’s operations, he took a conservative approach to labour rights. On 26 December, he again wrote to Williams, arguing that Manbré’s employees must ‘contribute themselves’ to the ‘extra expense’ of housing their wives and children on the estate.Footnote ⁵⁷ Claiming that expenses should not exceed £1,000, Tapp declared that the ‘strictest economy is to be exercised’ on the plantation and that ‘any attempt to rush the work and to have an unwieldy gang of men would be suicidal’ to the security of the whole enterprise.Footnote ⁵⁸ His involvement shows someone committed and involved in Manbré’s operations – a business directly benefiting from underpaid and coerced labour. The estate’s workers found little protection in the International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions because, as the historians Sacha Hepburn and April Jackson have shown, Britain succeeded in carving exceptions to ILO regulations for Kenyan labourers, creating a ‘two-tier system of international labour law which rendered colonial children [and adults] less protected’ than Europeans.Footnote ⁵⁹

In time, Tapp’s extensive involvement in both Sukari’s and Manbré’s operations forced him to admit a conflict of interest. In November 1928, he wished his statement to be recorded on the company minutes that he ‘was in Kenya at the urgent request of the directors of Manbré Estates Lim. who were paying his expenses and in which Company he was interested and the primary object of his visit was to investigate and report generally on their interests out here’. Furthermore, he declared that despite his ‘conflicting interests he felt that with mutual goodwill nothing but good should result from his visit; in any discussions that took place no doubt the directors of Sukari would bear in mind his exact position’.Footnote ⁶⁰ That same year, he resigned from his directorship of Sukari Limited ‘at the urgent request of the Board of Manbré Estates Lim. and any attempt to serve two masters, with perhaps conflicting interests, has forced me to take the above decision’.Footnote ⁶¹

Aside from Sukari and Manbré, Tapp’s interests extended to another plantation business in Africa: Incomati Estates Limited.Footnote ⁶² He owned 500 shares in that enterprise, which was established in 1911 along Kenya’s Incomati river.Footnote ⁶³ Incomati, with the backing of Barclays Bank and the National Bank of South Africa, sold over 215,000 shares to British investors in 1920. The share proposal noted that production was ‘exceptionally favourable’ owing to ‘cheap working conditions’, and profits were estimated at £174,500. The press reports concerning Incomati, however, were damning, highlighting the low nutritional quality of the labourers’ food (the corn flour was equated to ‘bricks’), the absence of such food on the estates (workers received only one meal a day), poor medical care (‘sick black[s]’ were often left to die because doctors were rarely called, and those who died were discarded due to cemeteries being ‘whites only’), draconian punishments (the local police killed a man who stole cane), and long working hours (with workers being paid through tasks and forced to work the land from dawn to dusk).Footnote ⁶⁴ The extreme labour conditions imposed at plantations like Incomati led to high rates of starvation, poverty, and mortality.Footnote ⁶⁵

As for Tapp, he gave little indication of his scientific views on race, but his comments echoed the paternalistic planter vision: that colonial industry transformed otherwise idle Black Kenyan ‘boys’ into industrious labourers. He often distinguished between the estate’s ‘staff’ – the white men and their families, who had defined schemes for their remuneration and had homes and the privilege of using motor vehicles on the plantation – and ‘natives’, who did much of the hard labour on the coffee and sugar plantations. In an undated letter, he recounts how he would get up on the plantation soon after 6 a.m. and that ‘the drums roll out about that time summoning our cheery natives to parade for work’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The reference to ‘cheery natives’ and a ‘parade’ was consistent with the militarization and regulation of work on these estates. According to one labour contractor, he had the right of ‘treating his labour in the way that an officer treated his soldiers’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Given that the white colonists wanted to impose military discipline in Kenya, it should be no surprise that multiple figures at the Manbré Estate, including its manager, were former army captains. In another letter, Tapp wrote with some awe of ‘our 750 acres of coffee plantations and the miles and miles of sugar ditto; the former dotted with natives who are busy getting in the coffee berries, cherries they are called and which the fruit much resembles’.Footnote ⁶⁸ If he mentioned Black Kenyans, it was generally to insult them, deriding the many servants who were forced to work for little pay serving, feeding, and assisting their white rulers.Footnote ⁶⁹ In one diary entry, Tapp notes the ‘queer stories of Kenya’s native servants’ and how the ‘food up to a certain point, looks rather unreliable when a dinner party, with its attendant many dishes, requires attention’ – mocking how Black Kenyans would, according to him, top a fruit salad with a boiled egg.Footnote ⁷⁰

Though Tapp did not espouse scientific racism in his writings, William Ridgeway, one of his correspondents, certainly did. In the Kenyan colonial service, eugenicists were split between those favouring environmental factors for racial inferiority and officials who argued that African development was hampered by heredity.Footnote ⁷¹ Ridgeway, who was in the former camp, had argued that it was essential for colonial officials to learn ‘ethnology and primitive religion’, an issue that he believed had ‘bearing on the interests of our national trade in its competition with that of foreign countries’.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, he claimed that ‘the effects of the environment’ changed ‘racial types’, with one example being the ‘change in the type of the American of New England from that of his English ancestor and his approximation to the hatchet face and thin scraggy beard of the Red Indian’.Footnote ⁷³ A. C. Haddon, who helped to establish Cambridge’s School of Anthropology, was more qualified in his argument that environment and climate shaped racial characteristics, but his The races of man and their distribution, published in 1909, utilized a classification system to determine race. On facial features, he wrote that ‘A flat and retreating forehead is also a “low” feature, but a somewhat bulbous forehead such as is characteristic of Negroes does not necessarily imply high intellectual ability.’Footnote ⁷⁴ The preponderance of such views in Cambridge, and Tapp’s personal interest in natural history and friendship with Ridgeway, mean that they may have provided a possible insight into his worldview.

Notwithstanding the derogatory comments aimed at the company’s ‘servants’, Manbré was complicit in British efforts to expropriate African land. By 1930, six years before Tapp’s death, 3 million acres of land had been provided to 2,000 colonists, but another 3 million were afforded to 1.7 million Black Kenyans.Footnote ⁷⁵ These acquisition programmes, along with direct taxes, restricted the ability of Black Kenyans to improve their lot and created a labour surplus – a reserve army of labour – that constantly put a downward pressure on wages in the Protectorate. In effect (and in part by design), expropriation drove exploitation – creating a vicious cycle of poverty that harmed economic development in Kenya.Footnote ⁷⁶

The Kenyan Land Commission of 1930, instituted to investigate African land claims and the bundle of grievances that arose because of the inequalities in land ownership, mentioned Manbré. The land in question in the Thika area belonged to the Anjiru and Ambui clans, who had occupied territory, now alienated for European settlement, stretching from the Chania river to the Ruiru. The commission reported that the land claimed was ‘about 12 miles long and 2½ miles wide, and comprises the whole or part of the estates known as Kibazi, Kiora, Dunmottar, Gulmac, Kiu River Farm, Kahawa, Kamiti Downs, Liara, Mayfield, and part of Manbré, also Kahawa Station and the estate of Mr. J. W. Lennon’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This process of land alienation, in which Manbré Estates, Sukari, and Tapp were involved, sowed the seeds of poverty and ensured that Black Kenyan producers became squatters on white land, forced to work under the colony’s coercive master-and-servant regulations.Footnote ⁷⁸ Tapp may have resigned his position as director due to ill health in March 1930, but the legacy of his decisions continued to reverberate in the Protectorate.

III

Despite Tapp’s efforts, Manbré Group historians have dismissed the Kenyan operation as a failure, ‘owing to drought and to the attentions of plagues of locusts, attracted like any sensible creature to something sweet, but a confounded nuisance’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet investors saw Kenya’s plantations as a place to reap financial windfalls. The initial offering of £100,000 in ordinary stock on 21 December 1925 was completely subscribed at £1 each, providing these investors a vote at the company’s shareholder meetings and the estate with capital to begin operations.Footnote ⁸⁰ The directors owned a significant number of these shares: Henry Abbey held £9,800 of stock, Berry £11,001, and Tapp £10,000. Manbré Estates benefited, too, from the investment of several British brewers, such as Abbey – thereby highlighting the liquor industry’s role in African colonization. Hoping to take a slice of the profits from trading in sweeter forms of liquor, Captain John R. Abbey (£2,000), a manager of Kempt Town Brewery along with his brother, A. Russell Smith of Griffin Brewery (£82,348), and James H. Stephens, the chairman of Menx’s Brewery, all invested in Manbré Estates.Footnote ⁸¹ If we expand our definition of white Kenyan colonists, then it is necessary to reinterpret who could be a colonial investor, whether colleges or brewers.

Closer to Tapp’s friends in Cambridge, King’s College had £450 stock in Manbré Estates’s parent company from June 1924 until October 1926, while the firm was moving into Kenya. At the time, John Maynard Keynes was the first bursar at King’s, transforming its portfolio from long-term fixed-income assets into equities, many of them in colonial enterprises, ranging from Malaya to the Sudan. By June 1925, King’s had £4,050 collectively held in five Malayan rubber plantations: United Sua Betong estates (£500), Sunger Buaya Rubber in Sumatra (£150), Selaba Rubber Estates (£400), Central Sumatra Rubber Company (£2,000), and Telogoredjo United Plantations Limited (£1,000). The college also held investments in Africa, including Sudan bonds (£33,500), shares in Tanganyika Concessions Limited (£1,000), a mining and railway company established to extract minerals from Rhodesia and the Congo Free State, and the Sudan Plantations Syndicate (£941), an organization founded to expand cotton growing and irrigation with the assistance of Sir Frederick Eckstein, a South African gold miner. Plantation and colonial investments therefore remained a significant part of college balance sheets.Footnote ⁸²

Aside from brewers, financiers, and college fellows, men and women from multiple backgrounds and social classes invested in Manbré Estates, from both Britain and Kenya. In 1925, 1931, and 1937 – the three years when most investors provided money to the company – the largest proportion of the 455 unique investors in Manbré were so-called ‘gentlemen’: men who lived off the wealth of their fixed capital (often landed estates), members of the professional class (particularly solicitors, financiers, and accountants), and mercantile men who traded and bartered on the stock market. But other individuals were involved, from coffee and sugar planters to advertising contractors, to directors of companies, to ministers in the Church of England, to retired members of the armed forces. The Rt Hon. Thomas Henry Noel-Hill; Baron Berwick of Attingham Park; Lawrence Dundas, 2nd marquess of Zetland and earl of Ronaldshay and later the secretary of state for India; and George Osborne, 10th duke of Leeds all contributed funds to the enterprise, thereby cementing the aristocracy’s interest in the Kenyan Protectorate.Footnote ⁸³

Furthermore, a significant number of women – forty-three when the first round of shares was offered in 1925, eight in 1931, and sixty-five in 1937 – bought stock in Manbré Estates. These women, some of whom were personally related or married to the directors, were listed in the records as ‘unmarried’, ‘married’, or ‘widowed’. One, Mary Greenwood from Todmorden, Lancashire, a ‘housekeeper’, had £80 in stock. Their investments crossed lines of class and profession: Adelaide Boddam-Whetham, an archer at the 1908 Olympic Games, had £100 in ordinary shares; Dr Adeline Mary Roberts, an Irish surgeon and feminist activist, held the same amount of stock.Footnote ⁸⁴ As the historians Josephine Maltby and Janette Rutterford argue, women’s investing has attracted ‘very little attention’ from scholars, thereby meaning that the power of ‘gentlewomanly capitalism’ in driving imperial expansion has been underestimated.Footnote ⁸⁵ Given the wide range of investors, both men and women, Manbré’s operations were considered a viable prospect and should not be so easily dismissed.

The estate’s balance sheets from 1925 until 1938, around the time of Tapp’s death, show significant growth, despite the difficulties in the global sugar and coffee markets (see Figure 1).Footnote ⁸⁶ The enormous expansion of sugar production by one-third between 1920 and 1925 – the ‘crisis of overproduction’ – because of significant price increases after 1923 then resulted in a price collapse for more than a decade, with only some respite in 1926–7. Compounding this issue, sugar-producing colonies increased production, with Indonesia expanding from 1.5 million tonnes in 1920 to 3 million tonnes in 1929.Footnote ⁸⁷ In parliament in 1930, one member highlighted the fact that the ‘depression in [sugar] prices and the underselling to which our British Colonial producers are exposed is far greater than practically any other industry that I have been able to investigate’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Environmental factors are therefore too readily used by Manbré Company historians to dismiss the Kenyan operations, which both Tapp and Berry believed to be a vital part of the company’s present and future success.

Figure 1. Company assets (top) and sales of produce (bottom). The data for the fiscal year 1930–1 are not extant. Source: London, The National Archives, BT/31/36939/210113, Manbré Estates Limited vol. I.

It appears that neither the global economy nor the environment precipitated Manbré Estates’ demise. In 1927, the sales of produce declined because, as Manbré admitted, ‘the Estate suffered from drought, and in consequence the Coffee crop has been restricted, and the profits will probably not justify the payment of a dividend’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Despite these issues (and belying the failure narrative popular within Manbré), the estate made a net profit of £6,202 18s., paid a dividend of 4 per cent to its investors, finished work on irrigating the sugar cane, and erected a factory to produce coffee. As Figure 1 shows, the value of the company’s assets increased until Tapp’s death in 1936. During this time, the estate managed to improve sales of produce from £13,093 3s. 8d. in 1926 to a peak of £38,249 10s. 1d. in 1932. Tapp and his fellow investors had made a viable investment in Manbré; the problem was that they had made their move into Kamiti at the wrong time. In fact, the company was not wound up by liquidators – a voluntary liquidation – until 2 April 1952, with the assets for the estate (after deductions to secured creditors) totalling £359,508.Footnote ⁹⁰ The last annual general meeting was on 14 June 1956.Footnote ⁹¹

Manbré had larger concerns than locusts, with the company having to contend with a complex arrangement of international and imperial sugar agreements. Kenyan sugar producers were anxious at the time about the world sugar market. These concerns were to be addressed at the World Sugar Conference of 1937, which imposed export and production quotas based largely on imperial preferences in Europe.Footnote ⁹² Nevertheless, Berry wondered whether double standards were at work. In an April 1936 letter to Sir Sidney Caine, the secretary to the West India and UK Sugar Industry commissions, he wrote that in Uganda there had been ‘big efforts’ to ‘increase the production in Central Africa, and from all information to hand I feel that the attitude is in direct conflict with the one that will be adopted at the Sugar Conference’. He further protested that, although ‘the Governor placed a prohibition upon the importation of machinery for milling with the object of restricting the production of sugar’, he had ‘been advised that Uganda has withdrawn that restriction and allowed machinery to be imported for increased production: there is further talk now of new mills being built, which I submit is entirely contrary to the attitude I think the British Government will take in the forthcoming Conference’. These entreaties fell on deaf ears, but Berry was able to access the upper echelons of colonial authority.Footnote ⁹³

Finding evidence to support his claims of overproduction, Berry sent another letter to Caine two days later concerning Danish estates in Tanganyika to the south-west, which Britain held as a League of Nations mandate until the end of the Second World War.Footnote ⁹⁴ He was referring to the Tanganyika Planting Company, a Danish enterprise that had operated in East Africa for six years.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Manbré director complained that they had established a sugar factory in Arusha. To add insult to injury, Berry had ‘been approached to help in the development of that factory with the object of increasing its capacity to 15,000 tons of sugar cane per annum: the local consumption of sugar in Tanganyika is about 3,500 tons – probably it does not exceed 4,000 tons per annum’. He believed that, with the assistance of Danish finance capital, foreign investors were unduly benefiting from British preference arrangements in exporting sugar to Britain. The Danes had ‘brought machinery from Java and erected it in Tanganyika to enjoy the British preference, and I understand that this attitude is going to be increased’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The flight to British preference arrangements from Java made sense for the Danish company, given that the Dutch colony had no established home market for sugar, and the region had fallen ‘victim to growing protectionism’ and imperial preferences in the Indian subcontinent, Japan, and China.Footnote ⁹⁷ Java had suffered under the transnational influence of what the historian Roger Knight calls ‘exogenous colonialism’.Footnote ⁹⁸

Searching for higher profits, Berry claimed that the government had provided support to the Danish sugar producers. In essence, the letters exposed an enduring tension between a supposed ‘free market’ for sugar, as debated and proposed at the Sugar Conference in 1937, and the importance of protectionism to Kenyan producers seeking shelter from foreign competition. ‘My Company and our British interests’, he continued in his communication of 18 April,

Arguing that Manbré had been disadvantaged by locusts and drought, forcing the cane fields to be replanted, Berry wrote that these issues had resulted in a ‘small quota, although we have the finest and most up-to-date mill in any of the territories’. The quota for Kenya and Uganda stood at 30,000 tons and the Tanganyika Planting Company would be allotted 6,451 tons – well beyond the total agreed by the East African governors.Footnote ⁹⁹

If Berry was looking for swift action against the ‘new project in Tanganyika entirely controlled by Danish capital’, he would have been disappointed.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ British officials were dismissive of his arguments against competition. One official, waiting until 5 May to respond, noted that ‘no special assistance has been given to this Tanganyika factory’. The Danish enterprise had been ‘allowed to develop land for sugar, the Government not having thought fit to prevent such development in the absence of any agreement for the regulation of sugar production either internationally or in East Africa’. Referring to Tanganyika’s status as a mandated territory, the official noted that ‘therefore, the Government cannot discriminate in any way between British and foreign enterprise’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Even as sugar dropped to a low of 10 cents per pound, Caine wrote in marginalia on the official documents: ‘If the Danes can make sugar pay why can’t Mr Berry? No one is going to stop him!’Footnote ¹⁰² Berry was a victim of diplomatic tension between territorial governments. From 1924, white colonists and businessmen in East Africa had pushed for a union between Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika – a project that fell apart because Donald Cameron, Tanganyika’s governor, maintained that the mandate’s status made such a project impossible.Footnote ¹⁰³

British officials saw no reason to afford either Manbré or Sukari Limited preferential treatment. More than a year later, in May 1937, another observer mocked Sukari’s operations. On the question of relaxing the export quota, he observed that Kenya would get into ‘local difficulties because of the peculiar position of Sukari Limited, who have a very expensive mill in the wrong place, around which there is simply not enough cane land to feed it’. Sympathizing with investors, like Tapp, the official saw ‘little chance of getting it [their money] back, but it is naturally asking too much of the people who have got mills in the right place surrounded by unlimited acres of cane land to agree that they should make sacrifices on behalf of the Sukari people’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Manbré and Sukari were caught between poor decisions, local environmental factors, fluctuating global sugar prices, and complicated regional administrative frameworks concerning the mandate and preference system. Though Manbré failed to turn a profit, the Tanganyika Territory Gazette noted in September that ‘the Tanganyika Planting Company may export from their mill at Arusha 1,612 tons of sugar between the above-mentioned dates’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Belying the decline and fall narrative, Manbré’s African adventure did not end in failure. Reinforcing the Kamiti Ranch’s value, the company chose to continue business on the continent three years before the estate’s closure. In effect, Berry and the other directors expanded their business in Africa rather than renounce their failure in Kenya. In 1935, Manbré became affiliated with the African Products Manufacturing Co. Ltd (APMC) in South Africa. Built on a 14-acre estate near the Transvaal maize triangle – a rich agricultural region stretching across Transvaal, the former eastern Orange Free State, and colonial Basutoland – the APMC holding provided starch, glucose, cornflour, and maize for cornflour and laundry starch brands such as ‘African Maid’ and ‘Maizeko’, which became household names in the region.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Tapp did not live to enjoy this success, but Manbré had finally gained a financial foothold in Africa.

Tapp’s bequest was extensive and included other stock and property investments besides Manbré, including in Africa. His papers document a natalite syndicate in Kenya, of which he owned a one-third share, along with his business partners Arthur Berry and E. J. Boake.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Given coverage at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924, natalite was a compound made from molasses which could act as a substitute for petroleum; it was therefore a valuable product for the plantations to export at a time of high fuel prices.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Joining other joint-stock firms, such as the British East Africa Natalite Company and Natalite Motor Spirit Company in South Africa, Tapp, Berry, and Boake made a move on the agricultural fuel market, where the price for petroleum was of ‘vital concern’, given that the colony, as one politician put it, depended ‘entirely on the products of the soil’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This syndicate was a substantial enterprise, with each member contributing £1,400, to create an initial capital of £4,200.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The syndicate hoped to obtain a 5-acre parcel of land in the district of Kiambu, near Sukari Limited’s sugar factory and land belonging to Manbré Estates.Footnote ¹¹¹

Alongside his interests in East Africa, Tapp’s holdings included 330 shares in the Central Provinces Manganese Ore Mining Company, which was a British-owned company established in 1896.Footnote ¹¹² Manganese was a necessary component in arms production, and India was one of its greatest producers, particularly in Madhya Pradesh.Footnote ¹¹³ Yet this industry also depended on land expropriation, driving more than 10 million ‘Adivasis’ – a collective term for the tribes indigenous to the Indian subcontinent – away from their traditional lands to make room for mining, dam operations, and road-building.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Forced to work for limited pay and at the mercy of labour contractors and money lenders, the Adivasis in India shared a similar fate to the Black Kenyans on the Manbré, Sukari, and Incomati sugar and coffee plantations who laboured for the European colonists.

On 23 January 1936, Tapp died at his home in Queen Anne’s Mansions, London. His will and codicil, which were proved more than three months later, on 7 May, left the college the ‘largest bequest’ that they had ever received.Footnote ¹¹⁵ To make Caius’s rights to Tapp’s estate clearer, John Forbes Cameron, the master, and Ernest Powell Weller, the bursar, were appointed as the executors and the college as trustees. Having established an income for his wife, Kate Garrett Tapp, and provided items from his estate to his sister, Catherine Alway, and various stipends to other friends, Tapp gave Caius ‘all my real and leasehold estate whatsoever and wheresoever of or to which I shall at my decease be seised [sic] possessed or entitled or over which I may have a general power of appointment or disposition by Will’. He further directed that half of his trust should fund the ‘encouragement of the study or teaching of law and jurisprudence’, providing up to £80 per candidate for a period of seven years, and the other half should be provided to the college general fund for Caius’s use.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In time, Tapp’s funds may have provided a boon for the college’s finances as it completed Harvey Court (designed by Sir Leslie Martin and Colin St John Wilson) in 1960–2.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Given the significant expansion in student numbers after the Second World War due to returning servicemen, Caius could not provide undergraduates with two years’ accommodation in college. Projects such as Harvey Court may have benefited from Tapp’s injection of funds, thereby securing Caius for the future, and establishing the benefactor in their esteem.

Tapp’s shareholdings in Sukari, Manbré, Incomati, and the Manganese Ore Mining Company were substantial and formed part of the trust he established following his death. Still, the efforts he made over several years and numerous visits to attain riches from the Sukari and Manbré estates amounted to little relative to the significant capital that he had vested in railway, breweries, and water company stock.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In Kenya, Tapp played the colonial lottery and lost – but his failure was not for want of trying. Price Waterhouse valued his estate, and the auditors mentioned his involvement in Manbré. In considering whether estate duty was owed from these assets, they wrote: ‘Your Solicitors have communicated with Manbré Estates Ltd.’ and found that there was an arrangement among the partners to not pay rent when the company was unprofitable but that this rent charge would ‘remain a debt due to the Company’. After his death, Tapp’s estate had to resolve the failures of Manbré in Africa, including its rents. The Natalite Syndicate turned out to be one of Tapp’s least successful ventures and it was wound up soon afterwards. The stocks he owned that related to East Africa at his death included the aforementioned 500 shares in Incomati Estates (with a book value of £500 and a market value of £87 10d.), 10,200 shares in Manbré Estates (with a book value of £10,200 and a market value of £127 10d.), and 1,000 shares in Sukari Limited (ordinary shares with ‘nil’ sale value). These shares featured in subsequent editions of the Tapp Trust ledger books, and the Sukari stock remained on these ledgers until 1958.Footnote ¹¹⁹

As a direct result of Tapp’s will, both the college bursar, Ernest P. Weller, and the master and former vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, John F. Cameron, became shareholders in Manbré Estates in 1937, owning around £600 worth of preferred stock on behalf of the college.Footnote ¹²⁰ Weller’s letter books contain extensive correspondence relating to the Manbré and Sukari investments, but there was no discussion of the ethics of these colonial activities – an archival silence that was not particularly surprising given that Caius, for one, had taken benefactions from individuals who had investments in British imperial enterprises from the eighteenth century onwards.Footnote ¹²¹ On 19 November 1937, Weller informed Sukari of Tapp’s death and that ‘in due course his residuary estate will be vested in this College as trustees. [Forthcoming] communications, therefore, should be addressed to me.’Footnote ¹²² The bursar continued to be abreast of developments into the new year. In December 1938, he contacted Tapp’s widow to let her know that he would not be attending Sukari’s Annual General Meeting in Nairobi on account of it being ‘too late to get there in time for the meeting even if I intended to go’. He concluded: ‘The accounts are not very encouraging.’Footnote ¹²³ In time, the bursar intended to use the Tapp investments and other incomes to purchase ‘low nominal yield’ stocks, particularly Consols (essentially redeemable government bonds), to support the legal scholarship programme and general fund into the future.Footnote ¹²⁴

Stocks, shares, and bonds constituted the largest part of the Tapp bequest, which was valued at £96,581 13s. 9d., including his African securities. Tapp’s estate papers show that he had a laundry list of investments that were not related to African colonization and profiteering.Footnote ¹²⁵ One might conclude, therefore, that Tapp’s African investments were insignificant. But Tapp, like many colonial capitalists, was a smart investor, diversifying his portfolio to include land, stocks, and bonds. Holding his capital in the Kenyan venture would have been reckless and, given the fate of Manbré Estates, a sure road to financial ruin. He also earned significant funds from Manbré directors’ fees, which perhaps helped to finance his other investments. Like Caius College and most Britons following a stable and profitable investment strategy, Tapp held bonds in domestic and international railway companies, particularly the London Passenger Transport Board, the Midi Railway Company, and the Northern Railway of France. He held interests in breweries and distilleries, such as Bullard & Sons in Norfolk, Bushell, Watkins & Smith in Kent, and Hodgson’s Kingston Brewery in Kingston-on-Thames. From seaside resorts to water companies to coal enterprises, Tapp was a sophisticated agent in the London stock exchange. Furthermore, alongside his stockholdings, he held war loans from the First World War, and conversion loans, which provided the Treasury with funds to purchase mature securities.Footnote ¹²⁶

Aside from railway stocks, bonds, and the Kenyan investments, Tapp’s bequest was significant in personal property. The college still possesses an inventory of the effects that were left to Caius. Tapp was generous, providing rugs, mahogany chairs, a sang de boeuf ceramic vase, a Louis XV clock, a wardrobe, Korean vases (some of which went to the Fitzwilliam Museum and are still on display), lamps, decanters, curtains, and a doctor of laws academic gown. His silver collection – including two whalebone ladles, Birmingham kettles, and silver watches – went to the master’s lodge. (The one item from Kenya was a mounted monkey skin.)Footnote ¹²⁷ His book collection, housed in the college library, illuminates his interests in ornithology, architecture, poetry, furniture, pottery, genealogy, and Charles Dickens. The value of these items, drawn from Tapp’s two homes, Abbey House and Queen Anne’s Mansions, amounted to £434 11s. Tapp bequeathed physical property, too, in Tottenham Court, Westcliff-on-Sea, Twickenham, Chelsea, Hampstead, Sutton, and Suffolk, valued at £27,215 in freehold properties and £47,700 in leasehold estates.Footnote ¹²⁸ His properties may not have benefited from his Kenyan activities, but his colonial investments demonstrate how such speculations – though beset with failure – were a regular and important part of the investment strategies pursued by middling Britons, as well as the institutions that they endowed.

Caius did not shy away from similar plantation operations. Though not publicized widely in the college’s official records, the Cadbury family donated £700 in January 1937 to ‘pay the cost of substituting Colley Weston slates for blue slates on the roofs on the south-west side of Tree Court and the east side of the Master’s garden’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Coincidentally, Laurence J. Cadbury and Cadbury Brothers were investors in Manbré.Footnote ¹³⁰ That had not been their first colonial venture: in 1908, the activities of Cadbury Brothers Ltd in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe came to light after the English chocolatier sued the Standard News for libel. The newspaper had claimed that the company had knowingly used slave-produced cocoa. Cadbury’s won the case and thereby maintained their popular reputation for abolitionism, earned by the Quaker family during the nineteenth century, but Henry Nevinson and other journalists exposed how companies in Africa, including the famed chocolatier, had abandoned principles for profit.Footnote ¹³¹ The donation hints at the kind of reputational whitewashing that institutions such as Caius played for benefactors. These institutions sat at the heart of an imperial economic system that brought together old and new elites who governed the empire in their interest and returned the favour through donations that enabled the cycle to continue. While the direct monetary benefits and incentives to pursue imperial expansion can seem obscure, piecing together the system as a network of favours helps to show how elites, even men as minor as Tapp, could turn empire to their benefit and have a profound effect on institutions such as the University of Cambridge.

IV

Given the discrepancy between the efforts that Tapp expended on these enterprises versus the amount he accrued from his time and investment, how does one evaluate the linkages between the Tapp trust and the legacies of colonialism? The simple fact is that the trust itself gained little from his involvement in Kenya – the Natalite Syndicate, the crown jewel of the lawyer’s investment in East Africa, turned out to be a failure. The issue here is with Tapp himself and his involvement in Sukari’s and Manbré’s enterprises in Kenya. He was no interloper in these operations: the documents held at the Caius and National archives – perhaps a small fraction of the correspondence he shared regarding his activities in East Africa – reveal someone who was deeply committed to the plantation enterprise in that region, a business deeply enmeshed in systems of land exploitation and expropriation – a colonial world that a comparable coffee planter condemned as ‘slavery’. Caius and the Tapp Trust did not significantly benefit from these operations, but the small sums that Tapp accrued from his efforts on behalf of Sukari and Manbré Estates were not from want of trying to achieve success in Kenya, and the directors’ fees he earned from those operations provide an unquantifiable connection (given the lack of available source material) to colonialism.

If hard-headed cost–benefit calculations helped to direct the flows of profits from colonialism, then it was also true that deep emotional ties to institutions – the sort that Tapp had to Caius and its fellowship, particularly Professor Ridgeway – channelled benefactions to prominent institutions. The college, in turn, showed its gratitude. On 19 February 1926, the council minutes recorded ‘the grateful appreciation of the College of Dr Tapp’s…generous intentions towards the College as communicated by him to the Bursar’. A year later, he donated a silver dove to the boat club (where he had rowed in the third boat).Footnote ¹³² Such bequests, whether scholarships or silver trinkets, were a particular boon for schools, colleges, and universities which nurtured emotional bonds with alumni through old student networks and clubs. Still, aside from the education sector, there is scope to consider whether funds from individuals involved in nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial enterprises went to charities, municipal areas, clubs, societies, or businesses as a result of these attachments. A renewed emphasis on the personal dimensions of investments requires further research in institutional archival collections, and for such bodies to consider their connections to both enslavement and modern colonialism in Africa and Asia.

Rhodes looms large over the links between colonization and the modern university, but Tapp’s papers prove that these connections run deeper and involve unknown, yet locally significant, figures in the history of African colonization and its legacies. Like many colonists and British politicians, Tapp believed in the significant potential for wealth and profit in Kenya, particularly the Highlands. Though he did not see himself as colonial businessman, he was certainly one of their number, and his interest in and involvement in East Africa needs mentioning when discussing the most important benefactor in Caius College’s history, and when examining the nature of the benefits that universities accrued from African colonization. Not every colonial venture was a success for its investors. Yet these failures still make up an important part of the exploitation, land appropriation, and trauma of imperial rule for the many Kenyans who lived and worked on these estates. Tapp’s story is a reminder to both scholars and the global university community that Rhodes may be the important tip of an iceberg of imperial networks, colonial investment, and exploitation that helped make British universities great.