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   Spark's Hotel, Naivasha - home of the Prince of Wales School from 17th June 1940 until the end of 1941

  
Photogallery
Spark's Hotel, Naivasha - 1940

Photos supplied by Cynthia McCrae (née Astley) and Alastair McCrae (Rhodes 1943-1946)
- originating from the photo albums of Bernard Astley (Headmaster 1937-1945)


Spark's Hotel, Naivasha - home of the Prince of Wales School from 17th June 1940 until the end of 1941
An extract from the feature article on Bernard Astley, OBE - the second Headmaster of the Prince of Wales School.

    Meanwhile, the school was passing through an unsettling period. As the metaphorically-gifted (but unnamed) chronicler in the 1952 Impala notes:

    So, it was upon the unfortunate Mr Lindahl, then Acting Headmaster, that the blow fell just after tea on 17th June 1940 when an army doctor and a bevy of nurses arrived demanding not less than fifty beds the same night for the wounded or convalescent soldiers. In spite of the shortness of notice half the boarding block was handed over that evening; ten convalescents arrived the flowing day. The military octopus having grasped the School in its tentacles then squeezed again and demanded the tuition block and so a stage in the life of the school came abruptly to an end. Within a week however the next chapter opened – a divided existence that was to last to the end of the following year (1941).

    Astley describes that “divided existence” as follows:

    The school had been split into two sections. Day boys were given accommodation in a large primary school in Nairobi (Nairobi Primary School, where the girls of the Kenya High were also accommodated) whose Headmaster (the Rev Gillett) had been for some years a master at the Prince of Wales School. For the boarders a small country hotel had been commandeered on the shores of Lake Naivasha. (This was Spark’s Hotel, later known as the Lake Hotel. There was a term's delay in getting the Naivasha section started, during which some boarders who lived near Nairobi became temporary 'stinkers').

    Amongst the boys, the general feeling, predictably, was that the ‘real men’ went to Naivasha while the ‘wets’ went to the Nairobi School. As Peter Pegrume (Grigg 1939-44) put it,

    PoW Day Scholars “Stinkers” went to the Kenya Girls High School then known as the “heifer boma” for a couple of years. This was a rather traumatic period for us as we had to take a lot of ribbing from the other part of the school which had been transferred to the Lake Hotel at Naivasha. The school life that us boys had grown used to at Kabete was all turned upside down and we had to adjust to women teachers and young “ladies” dominating the now mixed classes. This did not augur well for our academic future.