Obituary: Elspeth Huxley

Elspeth Huxley, the author and commentator on world affairs, was a witty, incisive and prolific writer whose oeuvre of 38 books, tapped out on two fingers on an ancient typewriter, covered events spanning the best part of this century.

She was a meticulous researcher, equally adept at drawing from her muse evocative biographies of David Livingstone, Florence Nightingale, Scott of the Antarctic and Lord Delamere, travel books, anthologies, crime novels and even drier treatises such as the methods of food production. Her last, and very vital work, a biography of Sir Peter Scott, the naturalist and writer, was written when she was 83.

Her sharp insights, there until the last, tenacity, compassion and dry sense of humour made her loved by her friends of all generations and nationalities as well as deeply respected by a network of colleagues with whom she kept in touch until her death.

Elspeth Huxley's life was guided by an unfettered and enquiring spirit in the tradition of her upper-class, unconventional family. Her mother Eleanor, immortalised in Huxley's Nellie: letters from Africa (1980), was the sixth and youngest child of Lord Richard de Aquila Grosvenor, who later became Baron Stalbridge. Her father was Major Josceline Grant, a romantic adventurer whose family came from Inverness.

The Grants were down-to-earth in their approach to life's problems long before they emigrated to Kenya as settlers in 1913. Even when she was three, Elspeth's fearless zest for life was evident. Her mother Nellie broke in 16 Welsh ponies at their farmhouse in Sussex by lunging each one on a rein with Elspeth strapped in a pannier to the pony's back for ballast. The little girl chuckled with delight as she careered round in a circle in this precarious position. When taken to her first party in a grand London house, she headed straight for the rocking horse and picked at its mane in search of lice.

At the age of six she began a pioneering life at Thika, where her father carved out a coffee plantation from the bush. Her warm retelling of her childhood is to be found in two of her best-loved books, The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) and The Mottled Lizard (1962). These autobiographies, rich in anecdotes and the dreams of childhood, were televised to great acclaim in 1981.

Elspeth, an only child, was brought up in a stone bungalow at Thika with most of the basics but none of the luxuries. She bathed in chocolate-coloured water drawn from the nearby river which had been heated in four-gallon petrol tins and was populated with tadpoles and frogs. Thika was a struggling outpost of the Empire which was a 30-mile trek in an oxcart from Nairobi. Occasionally an itinerant pastor arrived to conduct a service in the bar of the local hotel which she attended. However, from the age of six, most of her Sunday mornings were spent riding to hounds across a neighbour's sisal estate after jackal and steinbuck and sometimes a cheetah, cerval cat or warthog. It was a 16-mile ride home but, she later recalled, she never felt tired. She had an exceptionally fulfilling childhood despite the family's constant financial struggles. At times the farm truck had to be pulled by a team of oxen as there was no money to buy petrol.

When the First World War broke out, the Grant family returned temporarily to England and Elspeth was placed in a boarding school at Aldeburgh in Suffolk. After the freedom of Africa, it must have seemed like a prison. She was so hungry because of food rationing that she ate toothpaste. At one point, she secreted food in a tin box hidden in the garden with the aim of stowing away on a ship headed for Africa. After a night spent sleeping in the woods she was discovered by a policeman and carried back to her aunt's house where she was spending the school holiday. A self-confessed troublemaker, she developed a passion for horse racing at school and ran a book on the Derby, collecting the penny bets of her classmates.

On her return to Kenya in 1919, she was taught at home: history from her mother and how to play polo and shoot buck with a .22 rifle by her father. When the coffee farm had to be sold in the face of a mounting overdraft, the family moved to the highlands of Njoro to start a maize and pig farm. She was despatched to the Government European School in Nairobi to finish her secondary education.

Her journalistic career began at 14 when she wrote an article on polo for the East African Standard. It was considered good enough for her to become that newspaper's polo correspondent. At 17 she won the Empire Essay Competition.

She tried for Cambridge University but failed because of her non-existent Latin. Instead she read agriculture at Reading and, in her final year, at Cornell University in the United States. Precocious literary talent notwithstanding, it was hoped that she would eventually take over the running of the singularly unsuccessful family farm at Njoro.

Instead she secured a job in London as an assistant press officer in the Empire Marketing Board for what was then considered a handsome salary of five pounds a week. It was here in the board's dreary government offices that she met Gervas Huxley, a colleague who was to become her husband in 1931. It was a marriage of enduring love which lasted 40 years until Gervas, a cousin of the writer Aldous, died in their Wiltshire cottage in 1971.

Gervas was appointed to run the newly created and dubiously titled Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board. With a brief to encourage the world to drink more tea, he travelled the continents, often with Elspeth by his side. For the next five years she lived out of a suitcase, but a good part of this period was spent in Kenya researching a commission to write the biography of Lord Delamare, Kenya's most prominent settler. The two-volume White Man's Country (1935) became one of the definitive works on the colony of Kenya while Forks and Hope (1964) was a similarly brilliant description of Kenya's run-up to independence.

She espoused eclectic causes such as opposition to the erosion of the countryside and support for euthanasia. It was one of her hallmarks that she tackled everything she saw and did with a zest that produced results. On a 1938 safari through the Northern Frontier District, a wild part of Kenya inhabited only by tribespeople, she was appalled to discover that this area about the size of Britain was patrolled on a part-time basis by one game warden. She wrote a well devised protest with recommendations on how to improve the efficiency of the Kenyan game department which was passed on to the Kenyan authorities via the Colonial Office.

As a result, a permanent warden was appointed to the NFD. His name was George Adamson. She forged a lifetime friendship with George and his wife Joy who made her honorary godmother of their lioness Elsa. Joy Adamson asked her to write Elsa's story, but she refused saying Joy should do it herself.

During the Second World War she worked for the BBC's war propaganda department and later became the liaison officer between the BBC and the Colonial Office. From 1952 to 1959 she was on the BBC's General advisory council. In 1959 she served as an independet member on the Monckton Advisory Commission on Central Africa and travelled there often in the course of advising on the political future of that part of Africa. In 1962 she was appointed CBE for her services to Africa and her highly regarded career as an author.

Her light touch with words suffused her books which have memorable quotes on nearly every page. She wrote of a woman who had been a great adventuress before retiring to a quieter life in England, "She died answering the doorbell to an electrician in Surbiton".

For more than 20 years Elspeth Huxley lived and worked at her cottage in Wiltshire, where she spent much time in the garden, a source of relaxation and, so she said, torment because there was always something to be done. With her bronzed, sun-wrinkled face and distinctive pudding-bowl haircut, her proficiency at clear analysis and formidable memory, she reminded friends of a wise Aztec queen.

Elspeth Josceline Grant, writer: born London 23 July 1907; Assistant Press Officer, Empire Marketing Board 1929-32; Member, BBC General Advisory Council 1952-59; UK Independent Member, Monckton Advisory commission on Central Africa 1959; CBE 1962; author of White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the making of Kenya 1935, The Flame Trees of Thika 1959, The Mottled Lizard 1962, Forks and Hope 1964, Their Shining Eldorado: a journey through Australia 1967, Florence Nightingale 1975, Scott of the Antarctic 1977, Nellie: letters from Africa 1980, Peter Scott: painter and naturalist 1993; married 1931 Gervas Huxley (died 1971; one son); died Tetbury, Gloucestershire 10 January 1997.