Herbert's – The Myth?

Henry Arthur Herbert (1872 – 1951) was the son of Northampton’s most successful coffee merchant. In 1890, at the age of 18, he was sent by his father to work for the British East Africa Company in Zanzibar, which had become a British Protectorate in the same year. The following year, the neighbouring mainland Tanganyika was colonised by Imperial Germany who renamed it German East Africa.

From 1890 to 1914 Henry Herbert worked closely with local farmers in helping them develop their coffee growing businesses and soon started as a trader in coffee, working with some of the leading coffee houses in Europe. He became somewhat of a “cause celebre” among fellow expats for his skills on the Sousaphone, the newly invented tuba-like instrument created in 1893 in the USA for the American Bandmaster John Phillip Sousa (he of the Stars & Stripes and Liberty Bell marches). He was regularly in demand to provide a bit of bass-line support for local musical soirées held by members of the expatriate community.

Herbert volunteered to join up in October 1914. He had received a copy of The Times Newspaper of 21st September in which a new poem “For The Fallen” by Lawrence Binyon had been published. It was written to honour the dead from the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, some seven weeks after the outbreak of war. The poem, which includes the well known words “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old” etc etc, moved him sufficiently to leave Zanzibar immediately and travel up the full length of the Nile from Lake Victoria, to join the Northamptonshire Regiment, stationed at that time in Egypt. The Regiment was repatriated to Britain and then to Flanders, where it remained for the duration of the War.

We don’t know whether there was a strong yearning to get back to the coffee business or just the fact that that he had left behind his beloved Sousaphone, but in December 1919 he returned to Zanzibar which had, by then, been amalgamated with the Tanganyika Territory (the Germans having lost the territory under the Treaty of Versailles). On the journey back he met Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of Dr Frederick Watson, who was working on soil cultivation projects for the new Tanganyikan Government.

The two married in 1920 and bought a plantation and farm that had previously been owned by German expatriates. It was on the veranda of the farmhouse, one hot summer’s evening that Henry Herbert struck upon the idea of drinking coffee as an ice-cold beverage to help get some relief from the heat. After a week of trial and error he developed a recipe with which he was satisfied: one that preserved the bitterness of the coffee but delivered a soft creamy mouth-feel to the palate.

Herbert’s Iced Coffee soon became something of a cult drink among British expatriates in East Africa and it wasn’t long before it became popular among the über-wealthy aristocratic expats of Kenya that were later to become known as the Happy Valley Set. But after the upheaval in Africa post 1945, the recipe and its legacy were lost. Henry and Elizabeth had returned to England in 1940 and retired to Northampton.

Herbert’s Iced Coffee, once the “must have” afternoon drink for the fashionable expatriate, had been forgotten.

Until now.