Mombasa had been founded in 1896, the year work on the railway began and the first recorded reference to a Nairobi Club seems to be an item on the minutes of Mombasa Club’s Annual General Meeting in 1900. It mentioned that a proposal was afoot to amalgamate with a Club ‘to be started in Nairobi on similar lines’.
Nairobi’s first real social Club was probably the Railway institute, forebear of today’s Railway Club. It was built at the ‘hill’ end of Third (Haille Selassie) Avenue. The Institute was founded in 1900 and the present Clubhouse complex was built in 1912.
A copy of the first rules of Nairobi Club show that it was founded on 3rd March 1901. Those eligible for membership were all ‘English [sic] subjects resident in East Africa’. There was a Committee of seven which ‘must include Senior Officers of the Civil, Military and Railway Administrations’. The other Committee posts were filled by election and the Committee controlled the election of the members.
The rules were a regular Committee agenda item for the next several decades. They grew from 27 in 1903 to the 79 in force today.
By 1912, Nairobi’s development was plain for all to see. To quote from The Handbook of British East Africa 1912: ‘The Nairobi Club is the premier social Club…with its affiliated Gymkhana Club – the parent of sport in Nairobi – the owner of spacious grounds situated on the hill, comprising some fourteen acres of land…’ In 1920, a reform of the currency took place, which changed the Rupee, then valued at 3/-, into a florin coin valued at 2/-, which was replaced by the shilling in 1921. It was a disastrous change for many people: anyone with an overdraft found it had increased overnight by nearly 50 percent. Disaster didn’t end there; income tax was introduced, bitterly opposed by the European community.

Nairobi, ‘the water which is cold’

The name Nairobi comes from the Maasai description of the river, enk-are na-irobi, literally ‘the water which is cold’. Before the Railway arrived, the Nairobi River was a clear running stream, with plenty of cool water much favored by the Maasai herdsmen. The proper Maasai name for what is now urban Nairobi, as opposed to the Nairobi River, is na-kuso-in-telon, literally ‘the river which is adorned because of the treetops’, said to describe the glow of the evening sun lighting up the tops of yellow acacias which grew along the banks of the upper reaches of the river, giving them a golden sheen.