ROBERT HARDMAN: My return to the treehouse where Elizabeth came down a Queen

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Of all the places on Earth that can boast ‘Queen Elizabeth Slept Here’, none comes anywhere close to the epic significance of this one.

Even when we are all long gone, school children will still be learning the story of the young woman who went up a tree as a princess and came down a queen.

And it all happened exactly 70 years ago tonight, on the very spot where I am standing now.

It was here, overlooking this same muddy watering hole, that Princess Elizabeth was in a treehouse in the branches of a giant mgumu fig tree, when King George VI died in his sleep in the early hours of February 6, 1952.

Entranced by elephants, baboons, duelling rhino and much else besides, the 25-year-old mother-of-two had no idea that she had just become Queen of much of the planet. Yet it was here — at the very heart of the Commonwealth to which she has devoted her life — that the longest reign in our history began.

This, then, really is ground zero for the modern monarchy.

Seven decades on, there is still a dramatic, eerie grandeur about this corner of Kenya’s vast Aberdare National Park, where thick forest meets open bush next to a murky pool — a place forever after known as Treetops.

Yet it has a melancholy aura these days. The original tree, along with the treehouse where the Queen was staying that night, has long gone. It was torched by anti-British Mau Mau guerrillas soon after her visit. Even the commemorative tree which she planted on her return three decades later has gone, too, bulldozed by disrespectful elephants, along with the commemorative plaque. A mess of mangled fence is all that remains.

The replacement for that original treehouse, a wooden hotel-on-stilts, was erected on the other side of the watering hole in 1957 and soon became a world-famous safari lodge. 

For the past two years, however, Treetops Mk II has stood empty, a monument to Covid-19, closed off to the outside world behind miles of electric fencing and padlocked steel gates.

However, the management have agreed to give me an exclusive tour of the place. I look around the hotel and find it all clean and tidy. The 36 rooms, including the snug ‘Princess Elizabeth Suite’, have been mothballed, with a view to reopening at some point. From here it is a short walk around the watering hole to the site of the original treehouse, but I still have to be accompanied by an armed ranger looking out for big beasts.

The only possible threat is a huge buffalo slurping at the water’s edge. It gives us a beady eye but nothing more. Between us and it is the macabre sight of a pair of horns resting on a patch of thick mud. It’s all that remains of another buffalo which let itself get bogged down in the mire last week. Once its legs became stuck, the poor thing was jumped on by a pack of hyenas which ate it alive. The hotel caretaker was the only witness.

At least the animals are still here, even if the humans have gone. Indeed, the wildlife is almost a parable for this reign.

For so much has changed since Elizabeth II became Queen on this spot. Whole empires have fallen while technology has transformed our lives. Every single world leader in 1952 is no more — except, that is, for one.

Like the elephant and the buffalo, Elizabeth II remains reassuringly the same.

It is why I have come here to retrace her footsteps; to find out what has happened to the place where it all started and to see how this part of Kenya will be marking its moment in the history books. For, as I soon discover, they cherish the royal links in these parts — from the roll of Coronation carpet still preserved in the local church to the nearby forest clearing still called ‘Prince Charles Campsite’ (where he grew his first beard while on his first safari).

It was on February 1, 1952 that Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh landed in Nairobi on the first leg of a round-the-world tour on behalf of the ailing King.

Before their planned onward voyage, by sea, to Australia, they travelled 100 miles north of the Kenyan capital to spend a few days at Sagana Lodge, a bungalow which had been a wedding present from the Kenyan government. From there, they travelled to the town of Nyeri for a spot of polo, followed by lunch at the Outspan Hotel and then a night in the jungle.

‘Our whole school came out to welcome the Princess and the Duke on their way to Treetops,’ says Jas Singh, now 84, who has lived in Nyeri all his life. 

‘She drove past in this Humber with all the windows down. She was going very slowly so as not to create a cloud of dust. There she was, waving in the back.’

He proudly shows me the ‘E II R’ medals and pencil box which every child in his school received the following year after the new Queen’s Coronation.

In later life, Mr Singh worked as an accountant for the Princess’s host that day, Eric Sherbrooke Walker. A colourful ex-British Army officer married to an earl’s daughter, Walker had opened the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri in 1928.

He then built a two-storey treehouse in the nearby national park as a wildlife-viewing platform for his guests and called it Treetops. It was not for the fainthearted. Visitors faced a steep, uphill 600-yard walk through the forest from the nearest vehicle track before they reached the 30ft ladder up to the treehouse. Wooden slats were hammered into trees along the way, offering a means of escape from dangerous animals.

They only offered limited protection, however. Not only could a leopard climb them faster than a human but, just two days after the Princess’s visit, four ‘escape’ trees were uprooted by elephants.

Walker was taking no chances with his royal guests when they arrived 70 years ago this very day. He had asked the famous big game hunter, Jim Corbett, to act as royal escort. Corbett was something of a colonial era celebrity, famous for tracking down some of the most prolific man-eating big cats ever recorded. He was looking out for anything which might endanger the Princess, be it animals or Mau Mau insurgents.

He was not alone. ‘Sherbrooke Walker also recruited his neighbours to help out, too,’ recalls Mike Prettejohn, 89, a retired cattle rancher, still chuckling at what happened next. ‘My friend, Robin Camm, farmed near Treetops. He was on guard duty in the forest and had been waiting for hours and was relieving himself when the Princess suddenly appeared. He found himself trying to hold up his trousers and bow at the same time!’

Shortly before his death in 1955, Corbett published a short account of the visit which he called ‘Treetops’. In it, he described his alarm as several bull elephants came charging through the forest just as the royal party turned up. One was a mere ten yards from the Princess as she reached the ladder but she held her nerve.

Once in the treehouse, she was gripped by all the animals below — including an elephant blowing dust at a flock of doves. When tea was served inside the treehouse, the Princess replied: ‘Oh, please may I have it here. I don’t want to miss a moment of this.’ Corbett later wrote that she was filming it all with a cine camera. He also remembered her touching confidence in her father’s recovery.

‘I have heard it said that when the Princess waved goodbye to His Majesty at London airport, she knew she would never see him again,’ he wrote. ‘This I do not believe. I am convinced that the young Princess who spoke of her father that night with such great affection and pride . . . never had the least suspicion that she would not see him again.’

The following morning, she was up at first light, still filming everything that moved. A page from the visitors’ book now hangs in a frame on the wall of the new Treetops. Signed ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘Philip’, it lists ‘animals seen’, including ‘Rhinos all night (eight at a time) — in the morning two bulls fighting.’ After a late breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, the Princess climbed back down the ladder, bound for Sagana Lodge and the coast.

Except she had already been Queen for hours. However, the coded alert to the Kenyan authorities had gone astray and communications were dreadful. Word finally reached the press corps at the Outspan Hotel who, in turn, alerted her private secretary, Martin Charteris, who called the Duke’s equerry, who told the Duke, who took his young wife into the garden of Sagana Lodge. There, he gently broke the news.

Famously, Charteris’s first duty was to ask his boss by which name she would reign. ‘My own name, of course,’ she replied. Within hours, she was on her way home where a tearful Winston Churchill was waiting on the runway.

Back in Kenya, all these moments remain etched in the collective memory. My escort at Treetops is Amos Ndegwa, 67, the guide here for 30 years. He was not even born in 1952 but learned all the stories from his grandfather, a carpenter, who built the original treehouse. Amos’s father was the Outspan Hotel chef who prepared the Queen’s last lunch as a princess: ‘He told me that she was very jovial,’ says Amos.

When the Earl and Countess of Wessex came to visit during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, it was Amos who escorted them through the bush to see the Queen’s tree. They also planted a new one, though it, too, has fallen prey to the elephants.

Once Treetops closed down in 2020, staff stopped maintaining the fence around the royal trees and the elephants had a field day. At least someone managed to retrieve the old commemorative plaque, which is now in storage.

For many years, Treetops was a magnet for British and American tourists (and other members of the Royal Family). Recently, however, the majority of tourists have been from Asia and, thanks to Covid, that market has vanished.

The company which owns Treetops also owns the Outspan and has now instructed Knight Frank to put that hotel up for sale, with an asking price of £3.6 million. It remains a handsome reminder of yesteryear.

It includes the cottage where Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement, spent his final years.

The future for Treetops, however, remains unclear while owners, Aberdare Safari Hotels, asure me that they hope ‘to resume operations as soon as possible’.

Driving through the surrounding national park, I see the decline everywhere. Roads and tracks are in disrepair. The undergrowth is growing back at ‘Prince Charles Campsite’ which hasn’t seen a camper in ages. There are reports of a spike in poaching. The rhinos which enthralled Princess Elizabeth have now all but disappeared.

Visitors now gravitate towards private reserves such as the pretty nearby Sangare Conservancy and Solio Ranch, which maintain rigorous security and conserva-tion programmes.

It is why so many locals look back wistfully to the time, 70 years ago, when a wide-eyed princess put Treetops on the map. Certainly, St Philip’s Church in Naromoru will be honouring the Queen and her family tomorrow. Princess Elizabeth attended morning service here in February 1952 — her last formal act of worship before she became Defender of the Faith. Mike Prettejohn was among the congregation.

The Queen never forgot this Norman-style stone church. Following her Coronation in June 1953, a lot of new blue carpet was left over in Westminster Abbey, so the new Queen sent a roll of it to St Philip’s. To this day, it lines the aisle.

‘We love our royal history,’ says Pastor Samuel Kanyango, 45. ‘And, of course, we will be saying special prayers for the Queen.’

He adds that, thanks to the royal connection, Kenyan politicians flock here. ‘There is a belief that any politician who kneels here gets elected,’ the pastor laughs. ‘And this is an election year.’

He shows me the Jubilee gift which church members have chosen for the Queen — a beautiful multi-coloured basket-bag called a ‘kiondo’. He is now working out how to get it to Britain.

Local residents including my safari guide, wildlife expert Henry Henley, will be praying for something else, too. Everyone just wants to see visitors returning so that places including Treetops can reopen. All would be thrilled, too, to see another member of the Royal Family come back, plant a new tree and re-hang the old commemorative plaque.

Until then, however, it is going to be a rather sad and lonely Platinum Jubilee here at royal ground zero.