Fiery Furness

Lions are occasionally seen on the Nairobi, British East Africa golf course. There is also a cinema theatre, but apart from these diversions life in Nairobi can be excessively dull. The Hon. Averill Furness, 23-year-old daughter of Viscount Furness, shipbuilding tycoon, and Andrew Rattray, her father's so-year-old professional hunter, found it so one evening last month as they finished dinner. Next morning, with a maid and a typist as the only witnesses, they were secretly married. Lord Furness was out in the bush hunting lions. To break the news to her father, Mrs. Rattray dispatched an airplane to his safari. Last week Lord Furness's wrathful roar resounded through the veldt.

The romance of Hunter Rattray and the Hon. Averill began in London last year when he arrived with two live zebras that Lord Furness wanted.* But Lord Furness was too busy with large affairs to notice a surreptitious courtship.

When news of Hon. Averill's elopement reached Lord Furness by plane he loudly swore that he would disown any daughter of his who married a zebra trainer. Back flew the plane to Nairobi with a notice which last week appeared in the East African Standard:

"To Whom it May Concern: Mr. A. Rattray has ceased to be the hunter to my safari and from this date has no authority to order anything to my account. (Signed) FURNESS."

Lady Furness, who before her marriage was an American, the well-known Mrs. Thelma Morgan Converse of New York, had no such harsh feelings about her step daughter's marriage. In London last week she took issue with her fiery husband, cabled congratulations to Zebraist Rat-trav & bride.

*In Nairobi grey-haired convivial Hunter Rattray is best known for his work in domesticating zebras. The Tanganyika government gave him an experimental farm, where he has succeeded in breaking the larger and more modestly patterned Grevy's zebra to harness. The work is of great interest to African settlers for, though zebras lack the stamina of horses, asses, or mules, they are immune to the deadly tsetse fly.

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