Chronicle No. 74 · Incidents

She Climbed Up a Princess and Came Down a Queen

Treetops was three rooms in a fig tree above a Kenyan waterhole. On the night of 5 February 1952 it became the place where a monarch acceded, hours before she knew it.

Treetops opened in 1932 as three rooms built into the branches of a giant fig tree in what is now Aberdare National Park, Kenya. Eric Sherbrooke Walker, who ran the Outspan Hotel at Nyeri, put it there so guests could sit up all night and watch elephant and rhino come to the waterhole below.

On the night of 5–6 February 1952, Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh stayed in it, on the Kenyan leg of a Commonwealth tour.

Some six thousand kilometres away at Sandringham, her father King George VI died in his sleep.

She became Queen in a treehouse, and did not learn of it for hours. The hunter Jim Corbett, who spent that night on the stairs with a rifle, wrote the sentence in the visitors' book that the place has lived on ever since — that a girl climbed up a princess and climbed down a queen.

Two years later, in 1954, Mau Mau fighters burned Treetops to the ground. It was rebuilt in 1957 on the other side of the same waterhole, larger, with the same name and the same purpose: a room where nothing is scheduled and you watch whatever comes to drink.

“For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess and climbed down from the tree next day a Queen.”

Lesson: A hotel’s defining night is often one it had no part in arranging. The job is to be the kind of house where the guest is properly looked after when it arrives.