The Golden Years of Hughes Ltd: Koos Engelbrecht of Soy Remembers

An overview of "Die goue jare van die firma Hughes Ltd" (The golden years of Hughes Ltd), by Koos Engelbrecht of Soy, published in Habari 1998, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa. The original is in Afrikaans. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not a translation.

Hughes Ltd was the Ford dealer that, in the writer's words, slowly made "the blue might of Ford" take over the Uasin Gishu. Koos Engelbrecht, son of Faantjie and Gertie Engelbrecht of Mimosa Farm at Soy, worked there from the end of 1954 and was still in the motor trade 42 years later. In South Africa, he says, people still call him "Koos Hughes".

Recruited from school

The firm had branches in Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret and Kitale, led by J.J. Hughes and his wife Dorothy, who was also a member of the Legislative Council, with their son Peter, a well known rally driver, and their daughter Zelda. In December 1954, at the end of his last term at the Prince of Wales School, Koos was called to the headmaster's office and told to send his trunk home by train, because a Mr Leonard would fetch him by car. Leo Leonard, general manager of the Eldoret branch and later a director in Nairobi, questioned him all the way from Nairobi to Eldoret. Koos and his parents agreed he should get business experience before helping on the farm.

When Koos said he wanted to be a mechanic, Leonard disagreed and set him a test: assemble a huge Meccano set without a single screw left over. Koos did it overnight, but Leonard had other plans and put him in the parts department, on a salary of 150 shillings a month. His father banked 100 and Koos used the rest as a deposit on an accordion at Bhogal Brothers. His parents thought town life might lead him astray, so they bought a second hand black Ford Prefect and hired a driver to take him the fourteen miles to work each day.

The people of Hughes

He remembers Leonard as a devoted churchman who served customers day and night, and his wife Ursula, who taught the young staff bookkeeping. Gertie Engelbrecht of Moiben, eldest daughter of Dirk and Sannie Engelbrecht, was Leonard's right hand and knew everything that happened in the firm, and Dirk Coetzee later became branch manager at Kitale. The service department was run by the Italian Carlo Machelli and his brother George, who could overhaul a Fordson tractor with their eyes closed, and the parts department by Mr Bhatt, who knew every part number and price by heart. Their competitors were Motor Mart for General Motors, Cooper Motor Corporation for Volkswagen and Land Rover, Marshalls for Peugeot, and Gailey and Roberts for Nuffield tractors.

Every morning the staff met in Leonard's glass corner office to plan the day. Farmers who saw them through the window accused them of holding prayers and plotting to cheat them. Then they drove out in Anglias, Consuls, Zephyrs and Zodiacs fitted with mud grips and chains to meet customers across the muddy Uasin Gishu. He lists some of them: the Steyns, Emslies, Viljoens, the sons of Ernst Kruger still farming against Sergoit Kop, Nigel Taylor, Dirk Engelbrecht and the Vorsters around Moiben, Boet Fouché, the Randalls and Van Rensburgs on the Moiben road, the Rooken Smiths of Soy, Willem von Maltitz of Plateau, the Woodleys, and Soon Steenkamp and Adam van Rensburg of Burnt Forest, as well as farmers at Nandi Hills and Kipkarren.

Milk cans and a shotgun of salt

The Prefect's boot could hold four gallon milk cans, and each morning Leonard gave Koos half an hour to deliver milk from Mimosa Farm to his house, to a doctor, to the parsonage of Ds Daantjie van Staden and to the missionary Edgar Bryson. This grew into a delivery business with two milk trucks. Once a can tipped over and the car smelled for days, but the magistrate's daughter, whom he took to the cinema, only said, "Oh, what a lovely farm smell!" He had no licence at first, and swapped seats with the driver out of sight of the farm, until a policeman caught him at the sharp bend by the Hervormde church and fined him 20 shillings.

In all those years, he says, Hughes only once had to repossess a vehicle, from an old man on the Wheeler's Drift road. When Koos, Machelli and the driver came to load the tractor, the man appeared with a shotgun loaded with coarse salt and fired at their Ford as they fled round a stone wall. The next day he paid 10,000 shillings in cash.

Anna Boshoff

In December 1960 he met Anna Boshoff, the only daughter of Kosie and Bonnie Boshoff of the Plateau, though he says her father was not easy to win over. They were married on 22 December 1962 by Ds Piet Grobler.

Source: Koos Engelbrecht, "Die goue jare van die firma Hughes Ltd", Habari 1998, pages 5 to 7 of the PDF, Friends of East Africa. Read the original issue (Afrikaans). See also the archive's posts JJ Hughes and the Model T and A Young Minister in Eldoret, and the guide to settler stories in Habari.