My grandmother Jean Cogle, who has died aged 97, was born in a mud-thatched cottage hospital in the settler town of Eldoret in western Kenya. She spent her childhood years travelling by ox wagon to the remote sawmills that her father managed, sometimes encountering lions and zebras along the way.
She was the eldest of six children of Jeannie (nee Cowan) and James Lang, and, after the family settled in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, in her early teens, she reluctantly abandoned her education to take up a job as a secretary to help support them.
Working at the industrial equipment suppliers Gailey and Roberts, she met Fred Cogle. They married in 1937. Fred had served in a South African regiment during the first world war and sustained a terrible shrapnel injury that resulted in the amputation of his leg. They lived a typical colonial outdoor life on the outskirts of Nairobi – full of picnics, safaris and golf. Jean was a crack shot and had been crowned a Kenyan rifle champion aged 18. They had their first child in 1938, and five more followed. Jean set up a nursery at home to supplement her husband’s income.
In 1965, facing uncertain prospects in an independent Kenya, the family moved to Canterbury, Kent. Jean threw herself into community life as an active member of the local church, helping serve lunches to elderly people and attending keep fit classes well into her 80s.
Never one to cause a fuss, she preferred to avoid the doctor’s surgery by following her own eccentric take on healthy living, inspired by the Scottish Nature Cure movement. She believed that ingesting more than a half glass of water a day would “overload the kidneys” and staunchly refused modern medical treatment wherever possible.
Jean’s grandchildren relished her tales of an exotic childhood: of wild beasts and soaring plains, of the jigger worms that could burrow into one’s feet, encounters with personalities such as Karen Blixen and the long boat journeys to Britain from Africa.
Fred died in 1982. Jean is survived by two sisters, five children, 11 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
