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The Wilson Airport in Nairobi is named after millionaire settler-farmer, Florence Kerr Wilson.
It was previously called Nairobi West Aerodrome, but the Kenyan government saw it fit to rename it after her in 1962. After all, she owned it before the colonial government snatched and made it part of the Royal Air Force during World War II that lasted six years to 1945.
Did you know that Wilson Airport stands as a monument to love?
Well, it so happened that Florence, scion of loaded ship owners, was coming from London to Kenya in 1928. The pilot of the Fokker Universal aircraft in which she was a passenger and nicknamed ‘Miss Africa,’ was Captain Thomas Campbell Black. The four-day journey to Kenya was enough to spark feelings, seeing as it is, Captain Black had a penchant for jazzing up chicks with flying skills.
Florence Wilson, then widowed and with an inheritance worthy of her name, took flying lessons from Captain Black, and to make him stick around, pumped 50,000 pounds (Sh7 million at current exchange rates) into founding Wilson Airways for Captain Black to run in 1929.
It was situated at the present-day The Junction mall on Ngong Road, which was then an expansive arid plain where Maasai cows had to be driven off for planes to land on the murram runways.
With a single De Havilland plane, Wilson Airways took off with Florence’s lover, Captain Black as head pilot and MD who oversaw mail deliveries all over British East Africa while transporting passengers to Kisumu, Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania.
Indeed, Captain Black became the first pilot down these shores to fly from Nairobi to Mombasa and back on the same day, with Captain Hugo Dunkerley, a correspondent for The East African Standard.
But the love affair ended when Captain Black, a law school dropout, began having side mattresses, beginning with his steamy love affair with city socialite Beryl Markham, as Kenyan author Errol Trzebinski informs us in The Lives of Beryl Markham, published in 1993.
The thrice-married Beryl was a six-foot, svelte, tall, glamorous, vain and nervy tomboy pilot, whose scandalous life story we’ll tell another day.
Suffice it to say that Captain Black left Nairobi for London in 1933 and married English actress Florence Desmond in 1936 before his death in an aircrash in September that same year.
By then, Florence Wilson had moved to Lang’ata, where her fleet of 17 planes served the royal family and other wealthy customer. But when the World War II began in 1939, the woman who lived in Karen saw her company become part of the Royal Air Force as her pilots got swallowed into the Kenya Auxiliary Air Unit.
Florence Kerr Wilson, who gave East Africa its first chartered flights, first air ambulance and first aviation college, died in Karen in 1968.
