User:Deunanknute/sandbox

History pt 1
The Stanley Hotel was originally opened in 1902 as the "Victoria Hotel", four sparsely appointed rooms above Tommy Wood's general store, where Mayence Bent (nee Woodbury) ran the store and it's post office, and worked as a dressmaker and milliner. Mayence had originally taken the job in 1898 after moving to Nairobi with her husband (and secretly brother-in-law ) William Stanley Bent and their daughter Gladys. Mayence would bring fresh butter and vegetables from her husband's 40 acre farm in Kikuyu for the hotel's guests. In 1904, after a disagreement with Wood, Mayence entered into a business arrangement with a farmer from Sotik, Daniel Ernest Cooper, and opened the first Stanley Hotel.

That first Stanley Hotel was a two-story wooden building with 15 beds. In 1905 a liquor license was granted to DE Cooper for the hotel. Later that year a fire destroyed much of Victoria Street (now Tom Mboya Street), where the both hotels were located. Mayence quickly moved her tenants to an unused rail-road building on Government Road.

WS Bent declared insolvency in 1908 (and again in 1913 ). Soon after, Mayence married Frederick Francis Tate, brother of James William Tate and Dame Maggie Teyte. DE Cooper moved back to Sotik in 1909, dissolving his partnership with Mayence. In 1912 Fred Tate purchased two plots of land and had a new hotel built on Delamere Avenue (where the current Sarova Stanley sits) by architects Robertson, Gow & Davidson. This building had 60 rooms in three stories. In 1913, with the new hotel's completion, the original site was sold to ex-postmaster Daniel William Noble. The Tates had originally planned to transfer the notable "Stanley Hotel" name to the new location, but Noble sued and won the use of "Old Stanley Hotel". Thus the "New Stanley Hotel" was born.

During the first World War, Fred Tate served as a lieutenant with the local forces. Soon after he returned, he was struck with blindness are general paralysis. In 1926, he and Mayence returned to London, having both been born in England, leaving the hotel to be run by Albert Ernest Waterman and his wife Florence Annie, and their daughter Ruby. In 1932, after six years in London, the Tates returned to Nairobi for the opening of the renowned New Stanley Long Bar. Fred Tate kept busy with the constant appraisal of the hotel's guests, and the minutiae of things such as the daily menu. After Fred's death in 1937, Mayence's interest in managing the hotels affairs waned. She eventually sold the hotel to Abraham Lazarus Block, a Jewish Lithuanian entrepreneur, in 1947, although she still maintained a financial interest. Mayence later moved to Hove, Sussex where she died in 1968 at the age of 99.

Abraham Block's involvement with the Stanley Hotel did not start in 1947, but in 1903. One of Block's earliest business transactions in Nairobi was a deal with Mayence Bent involving having new mattresses sewn for the soon to open Victoria Hotel. Block had originally fled from his homeland of Lithuania to England to escape religious persecution. Seeing that living in London "was taking him nowhere", he soon followed his father who had fled to South Africa, and later fought in the Second Boer War. Block, convinced that Kenya was a "New Zion" for Jews, travelled to Nairobi via the Post steamer Feldmarschall and overland by train. Soon after arriving Block met Mayence, who informed him of her need of mattresses. He hired RA de Souza to sew covers, hired labourers who were loitering around Tommy Wood's general store to stuff them with residual grass which had been previously cut for rail-road clearing, and, when stronger needles were needed to sew the heavy cloth, he constructed them from bicycle spokes.