Galbraith Lowry Egerton Cole (1881–1929) was an Anglo-Irish pioneer settler and farmer (1905) of the East Africa Protectorate. Part of his Kekopey Ranch on Lake Elementaita, Kenya, where he is buried, is preserved today as the Lake Elementaita Lodge.
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Biography
Cole was born into the Ascendancy, Ireland's old Anglo-Irish aristocracy. From a prominent Ulster family, he was the third son of The 4th Earl of Enniskillen (1845-1924) and his wealthy Scottish wife, Charlotte Marion Baird. His younger brother was Reginald Berkeley Cole.
Galbraith Cole was commissioned into the 10th Royal Hussars as a second lieutenant on 7 March 1900, at age 19, and went to South Africa for service in the Second Boer War. He was promoted to lieutenant on 18 September 1901. Following the end of the war in 1902 his regiment went to India, while Cole is reported to have returned home on the SS Saxon which left Cape Town for the United Kingdom in early October 1902.
Resigning from the army due to an injury from the Boer war, he made his way to Kenya where his sister Florence had married the prominent settler Lord Delamere. Cole first tried farming in the area beyond Thomson's Falls in 1905, but he eventually moved to the Lake Elementaita area where his wealthy brother-in-law gave him 30,000 acres (120 km2). This parcel adjoined Delamere's own 100,000-acre (400 km2) farm, Soysambu, on the western side of the lake, between Lakes Naivasha and Nakuru. Cole named his farm "Kekopey Ranch"; the name is supposed to be from a Masaai word meaning "place where green turns white" (a reference to the soda (sodium salts) and diatomite around the hot springs near the lake).