Family
The Powell-Cotton family and their ancestors have owned Quex from the late 18th century.
More information on family members and their contribution to the history of Quex and the Museum will be forthcoming, but as 2008 marks the centenary of the birth of Major Percy Powell-Cotton's eldest child, Diana, the following tribute has been chosen as the starting point -
Dr.Diana Powell-Cotton 12 April 1908 – 20 February 1986
Diana was born on 12 April 1908 and brought up at Quex, the first child of Major Percy and Hannah Powell-Cotton.
On the outbreak of the Great War, with her two sisters, a Governess and Nurse, Diana was evacuated to Leamington Spa as there was widespread concern that Thanet might be invaded. After a few months, the party returned to Quex and lived in a cottage on the Estate, as the main house had been converted to a Red Cross auxiliary hospital for wounded soldiers.
After the War, the two older girls went to schools locally and later to Wycombe Abbey, a well known girls’ public school. Later Diana graduated from the Royal College of Art in London but decided that she was unsuited to teaching and lacked the talent necessary to establish herself as an artist.
Diana accepted with alacrity the opportunity to accompany her father on a trip to the Red Sea Hills in the Sudan and to Italian Somaliland (Somalia) in 1933. She greatly enjoyed life in the bush and did some shooting to collect zoological specimens, including a wild ass which proved to be a new sub species and was named after her. When her father returned home, she elected to stay on in Somaliland to continue her collection of artefacts and a study of the Somali people.
Once home, Diana spent several months listing, labelling and sorting the material which she had collected and dividing the items between the Museum at Quex, the Ethnographical Department of the British Museum and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
However, soon she and her younger sister ‘Tony’, who had in the meantime been with their father to Zululand in southern Africa, began to plan a joint trip to southern Angola to collect and to study in the area of the Ovambo tribes, on the border with South West Africa (Namibia). This enterprise took some months to set up but eventually they sailed with all the necessary permits, provisions and requisites for a 7 to 8 months trip in the winter of 1935.
They landed at Lobito, bought a second hand lorry and set off for the south. The roads were atrocious; the most southerly Portuguese stations were normally isolated from the north for some months during and after the rains by flooding. After sundry mishaps they reached Njeva and were able to begin their study of the Kwanyama.
The two sisters collected several hundred objects, took thousands of photographs and perhaps most importantly for anthropological understanding, made some significant films of life amongst the people of the region, remarkable as few travellers, let alone women, were able to film in these regions during this period.
They returned to England in the autumn of 1936 and despite the opposition of the Foreign Office who considered them lacking in the experience necessary to travel in such “savage” lands, they repeated the journey and resumed their work in the following year.
Once back in England again, Diana put into operation her ambition to qualify as a doctor and to practise in Africa. She was then 29 and since she had studied little science at school, she had to start from scratch but she was eventually accepted as a medical student at the Royal Free Hospital. By the end of the Second World War she had qualified and was doing the necessary junior hospital jobs to complete her training. She took also the Diploma in Child Health in order to practise as a paediatrician. In 1950, she went out to Uganda to stay with her brother Christopher who was working in Kampala as an administrative officer. She was fortunate in obtaining an appointment in the principal Government African Hospital, and later in a Catholic Mission hospital before deciding to move on to private practice in Kenya, at first in partnership at Kipkarren and later on her own at Mau Narok. Her last medical appointment was as the doctor at the agricultural college at Njoro.
On retirement she went to live above Lake Elmentita in the Rift Valley and spent much of her time filming and photographing birds on the lake and both animals and birds in the Kenya National Parks whenever opportunity offered. She made useful photographic records of the flamingo and pelican, particularly when breeding on the Rift Valley lakes.
As her health began to deteriorate and having had two operations for cancer in mid-1969 she decided that the time had come for her to return to England. She settled in Norfolk at first between Swaffham and Fakenham and later in Swaffham, before spending the last few months of her life in a nursing home near Canterbury.
The Museum is indebted to Diana for outstanding ethnographical collections from Somalia and southern Angola supported by exhaustive field notes, some good ethnographic films and photographic records of crafts and customs and the later attractive films and photographs of Kenyan and Ugandan birds and wildlife. Finally she bequeathed to the Museum the residue of her estate, a very welcome and valuable legacy.
