Card of the Day: The Gathering of Chiefs at Nairobi, Kenya Colony

After the Great War, the King and Queen wanted to make sure that areas of the Commonwealth that had received little attention during the war were looked after properly. However, King George V’s declining health prevented him from making extended journeys abroad. He often sent his sons to stand in for him.

The thirty-second card in the 1935 Silver Jubilee series by Wills’s Cigarette Co. depicts a scene of the Prince of Wales (later, briefly, King Edward VIII, subsequently the Duke of Windsor) and his younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester on such a journey to British East Africa.

The reverse of the card reads:

THE GATHERING OF CHIEFS AT NAIROBI, KENYA COLONY


The autumn of 1928, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Gloucester spent in East Africa, and October 2nd, a great gathering of Chiefs was held at Nairobi to enable the head men and counselors of the tribes in British East Africa to express their common loyalty. The chiefs of twenty-seven tribes approached the dais on which the two Princes stood, and after saluting—some in military fashion, some bowing, some touching their foreheads—shook hands with the Prince of Wales. He presented each one with a sheathed hunting knife attached to a leather belt, the Chiefs returning their thanks and swearing fealty to the King-Emperor.