Bertie and Elizabeth's East African Adventure

As Charles III and Camilla made their first state visit to Kenya as King and Queen, some insights into his grandparents' life-changing journey to Africa nearly a century ago

King Charles III and Queen Camilla with President William Ruto of Kenya and his wife, Rachel, on the first day of the British monarch’s state visit

In his speech at the State House in Nairobi this week, King Charles III emphasized that Kenya has long had “special meaning” for the royal family. “My dear mother,” he said, came to Kenya in February 1952 “as a princess and left as a queen” at age 25 when her father, King George VI, died in his sleep at his Sandringham estate in England. Charles expressed his thanks “for the support Kenya gave her through that difficult time.”

He also recalled that in 2010 “it was here, in sight of Mount Kenya, that my son, the Prince of Wales, proposed to his wife, now my beloved daughter-in-law.”

But there was another equally consequential visit to Kenya (as well as Uganda and the Sudan) in 1925 by the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. As the recently married Duke and Duchess of York, they had enthusiastically taken up a suggestion from Winston Churchill to Elizabeth at a London dinner party in June 1924. Seated next to the duchess, Churchill regaled her with his travels in Africa seventeen years earlier. “He said, ‘Now look here, you’re a young couple,’” Elizabeth recalled when she was in her nineties and popularly known as the Queen Mum. “You ought to go out and have a look at the world. I should go to East Africa. It’s got a great future, that country.”

The Duke and Duchess of York departing from Dover for the first leg of their journey to East Africa

Best bit of one’s life

With a mixture of apprehensiveness and excitement, 28-year-old Bertie and 24-year-old Elizabeth set out on December 5, 1924, for a two-week sail to Mombasa, Kenya, the first stop on their four-month tour.  At the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle, I immersed myself in the descriptions of a series of safaris that unfolded in their diaries and letters. “Best bit of one’s life,” Elizabeth called their African adventure in 1995, after she had experienced numerous points of comparison over seven subsequent decades.

In George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy I devoted most of a chapter to the East African trip. Now I’d like to share a selection of glimpses and insights—some of which didn’t fit the published narrative—with long overlooked photographs that I discovered.

The Duke and Duchess of York relaxing on safari in East Africa