North - Taken to EA by Rev. A. Steggall on his return from leave in April 1894; Freretown 14/4/1894; Taveta; Missionary in Local Connection authorized 4/6/1895; dep. Taveta on leave 14/11/1898; Home Connection appt. dated 6/6/1899; dep. Marseille with wife for Zanzibar & Mombasa 10/1/1900;

Drumkey 1909 - CMS Taita Hills (Wusi) - Mr & Mrs V.V. Verbi

Tanganyika Notes & Records - No. 42, p. 19 - ….. At Taveta there was one European called Verbi but he was not a teacher; his job was to build houses for the Europeans who were shortly expected. I was told to travel with Mr Verbi who had come to the coast to take his building material upcountry. This was in the year 1894.

Gazette - 11/8/1915 - Appt. - EA Pioneer Company - To be Lieutenant - Rev. V.V. Verbi

CMS 1895 - Age 21. Of Shoumla, Bulgaria. Robert Coll. Constantinople. Taken to E. Africa Mission by A.R. Steggall on his return from furlough, April 1894. 1895 June 4 Accepted in Local Connexion authorised. Stationed at Taveta. 1898 Nov 23 to England. 1899 June 6 received into Home Connexion; Livingstone Coll. 1900 Jan 10 to Taveta. 1903 Dec 16 to England. 1904 Sept 19 to Kaya

Nicholls - Vladimir Verbi, a Hungarian and ex-ship's captain, now a CMS missionary, took to himself a new wife, an Australian younger than two of his sons by his first wife. She was invited to a dance in Voi, and to stay the night with friends. Verbi refused to let her go and locked her in her bedroom. Her mother found her daughter imprisoned, helped her get ready for the dance and sent her off in the car. Verbi returned to the house to find his wife gone, argued with her mother and fired 2 shots. He maintained to the police that he had been in the garden, his mother-in-law had called out, he turned and both barrels of his gun went off accidentally, shooting her dead. Verbi escaped the hangman when he was acquitted on appeal, but the whole episode did little to endear missionaries to the settlers, though a nurse at Wesu African Hospital in the Taita Hills remarked, 'I don't consider it murder as it happened in the Taita Hills.'

Mombasa Mbaraki cemetery - Rev. Valdmir Vassil Verbi, died 7 Jul 1956 age 83, European Hospital, Cancer of Lung

Red Book 1912 - V.V. Verbi - Voi

Web - Mr. Vladimir Vassil Verbi, a Bulgarian by birth, but now in English orders, with his wife and her sister (who went out in 1896-7 as the Misses Mayor)

London Gazette - 7 February 1919 - OBE for valuable services rendered in connection with military operations in East Africa - Capt. Vladimir Vassil Verbi, Unattached List, attd. Mil. Labour Corps (East Africa)

Tucker - at Taveta in March 1895.

EAHB 1905 - at Taveta with Mrs Verbi.

Hut - shot M-I-L

Old Africa - 26-2-13 by Christine Nicholls:  Vladimir Vassil Verbi was born in Shoumla, Bulgaria, in 1873. He was taken to Mombasa in April 1894 by the Revd A Steggall, and he went to work as a missionary in Taveta. In 1899 he married Dinah Mayor, a fellow missionary in Taveta, and they worked together in the CMS missionary station at Wusi. Verbi was a man with a violent temper – he once shot his son in the buttocks. His wife died in 1927. He married again, an Australian lady younger than his two sons. Not so keen on the missionary life, she accepted an invitation from friends to go to a dance at Voi. Verbi refused to let her go and locked her in a bedroom. Her mother found her daughter imprisoned, helped her get ready for the dance and sent her off in a car. Verbi returned to the house to find his wife gone. He argued with his mother-in-law and two shots were fired, fatally wounding the older woman.

Verbi reported the incident to the police in Voi, saying that he had been in the garden when his mother-in-law called out. He turned and his gun went off accidentally. Verbi was charged with murder when the police discovered that the house staff had heard hysterical arguments and two shots. A verdict of murder was returned by the jury, and Verbi was sentenced to hang. An appeal was lodged. At the appeal hearing defending counsel stressed that the judge had seriously erred in his summing up and had prejudiced Verbi’s case by not giving the jury a full account of the defence. The Court of Appeal acquitted Verbi. He died on 9 July 1956 at Mombasa hospital, of lung cancer.

Old Africa - 18-12-13 - Christine Nicholls - Verbi spent his early years in Shumla, Shumen, Bulgaria, where his father was a merchant. Originally Shumen was an Ottoman fortress linking areas with Istanbul. Vladimir was sent to a synagogue school for his education where he learnt Hebrew. When he was eleven Vladimir was taken to Istanbul by his father Vasil, whose brother had a textile business there. Also prominent in the Istanbul business world was J W Whittall, who persuaded Vladimir’s father to send him to school in England. The boy already had an uncle in England, his father’s brother Demetrius. Vladimir spent seven years at school in Manchester, becoming completely anglicised before he returned to Bulgaria at the age of seventeen. He then attended Robert College, an American high school in Istanbul.

At college Vladimir was influenced by the Nihilists, student agitators involved in anti-church activities. When they went to disrupt a meeting held by some missionaries recently returned from Uganda, Vladimir was so impressed that he joined a Christian group and offered himself as a missionary. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa made a great impression on him. In 1894 he somehow obtained a letter of introduction to Reverend A R Steggall, a missionary at Taveta, and travelled from the Red Sea to Zanzibar on a dhow. At Zanzibar Steggall, having just returned from leave, was collecting stores and porters to return to his mission at Taveta some 150 miles inland on the border of German East Africa and British East Africa. Steggall and Verbi went inland together, to Taveta.

At Taveta the language had to be learned, meat had to be shot, and crops had to be cultivated. Verbi was put in charge of the mission lads who were digging sweet potatoes, to see that none were stolen. His other activities were teaching in the school and helping to print the mission newspaper, the Taveta Chronicle.  In about 1896 information was brought to the mission that a party of slave traders with slaves was in the vicinity. Armed with a rifle, Verbi with the help of a few Baluchi (Indian) soldiers raided the encampment, setting most of the slaves free. Some of the slaves were accommodated at the mission until they could be repatriated. Most were youths and maidens, and one youth was the chief’s son from Mpare. His father came to claim him, and as a token of esteem, Verbi was presented with a Colobus monkey skin and a long staff, both the insignia of a chief. The handsome black and white monkey skin is still in his daughter’s possession.  

Verbi initially received no payment for the work he was doing, but a small stipend was arranged. In 1896, two unmarried sisters Daisy and Lizzie Mayor joined the little community. Verbi wooed and won the lovely Daisy (Dinah Mayor), four years younger than himself, and they were married while on leave in England on 27 September 1899. Daisy was the daughter of Joseph Mayor, a master spinner in a cotton mill. Verbi attended a crash course in tropical diseases at the Royal School of Tropical Medicine in London. He was taught to vaccinate, to deliver babies and to draw teeth. He bought a microscope and made himself proficient at taking blood slides to diagnose diseases. Armed with his new knowledge and a trunk full of drugs and smallpox vaccine, he was ready to return to Africa. While all this was going on, Verbi studied for the priesthood and was ordained deacon. He was immediately attached to a parish in Whitechapel, a notorious slum where even the priests went about in pairs.

Verbi was very masculine, blue-eyed and good looking, with heavy black eyebrows and large feet and hands. He had used his mother’s sewing machine in Bulgaria, so in England he made ladies’ blouses which were sold for mission funds. He and his wife returned to Africa in 1900, and had two sons, Albert Basil and Joseph Boris. The health of the family degenerated. Through the successive bouts of malaria and blackwater fever, the family was so ill that the mission decided to send them back to England to recuperate in 1904. Daisy had another son while there, Vladimir Charles. Verbi returned to his beloved Africa alone. It was to be about two years before he was to see his wife and new baby again, and much longer before he saw his two older sons, who stayed in England for their schooling. He busied himself opening a new mission in the Taita hills.

There was already a CMS station at Mbale run by Richard Maynard. Verbi chose a site about five miles away, at Wusi on the other side of the hills. He had first to ensure a fine water supply and he built a stone house on a spur, with a charming aspect, where water was obtainable by gravity. His Aunt Amelia in Manchester had died and left him a small legacy, and this enabled him to be independent to the point where he paid both the owners and the Government Land Office for the land and had it registered in his own name. This was the origin of the mission at Wusi.

After Verbi’s shooting of his mother-in-law, described in my previous Verbi blogs, Verbi was acquitted and he returned to his mission. His wife and daughters stayed with him until his wife was left some money and bought an up-country farm. Thereafter the children stayed with either parent.

Old Africa - 19-10-15 Verbi was having trouble with his second wife, Lascelles, and forbade her going to a party in Voi. When she disobeyed, he angrily took his gun into the garden, because he was trying to deter crows from eating his strawberries. There is no doubt that Verbi was very proud of the non-indigenous crops he had introduced in his terraced garden at Ngerenyi – he pioneered strawberries, oranges and other fruit – and it was vital to keep birds off them. Verbi had retired as a missionary, having been in the Taita Hills since 1894. He had originally been at Wusi where he built a house (inhabited by Peter Bostock and his family in 1941, the year of the killing) and began a church, and later he constructed a road up the hill to Ngerenyi, where he built a house to live in when he retired in 1929. He had instructed the African labour he employed in the techniques of erecting houses in stone – indeed, he had started a Vocational School in Wusi. He lived in his retirement home for a couple of years (his first wife had died in 1928), and then again in 1933-4. He subsequently travelled and visited his native Bulgaria, but as war clouds gathered he returned again to Ngerenyi in 1939 with his new wife.

While Verbi was in the garden, he shot dead his mother-in-law, sitting on the veranda. She was on a visit from New Zealand to see her newborn grandchild, and was due to return home in a few days. After the shooting, which Verbi said was an accident, he was accused of murder and incarcerated in prison in Mombasa. There he was visited by Peter Bostock, who had been called by the District Commissioner to sit with Verbi and support him immediately after the shooting. Upon appeal, Verbi was freed on a technicality – apparently his wife’s comments when she initially thought her husband had killed her mother were erroneously used in the original trial. Verbi went back to Ngerenyi where he lived until his death in Mombasa hospital in 1956.

Verbi’s second wife, Lascelles Leary Corrigan, had been born in New Zealand in 1911 and was taken to Lewes in England when she was five, arriving in London in December 1916. We know that she was taken from Liverpool to Canada in December 1918 on the ship Grampian, possibly on the way back to New Zealand, with her mother, who had been visiting her son Leonard, wounded in World War 1. Mother and daughter had spent the summer of 1917 on the Isle of Wight (Evening Post, 16 January 1918). Lascelles was a feisty person, with spirited views, not always easy to get along with. She sailed from Wellington, NZ, to London in April 1937 and it was on this voyage that she met Verbi. The missionary’s good looks, bushy eyebrows and jolly manner must have impressed her, and they married in Farnham on 3 June 1937 when Verbi was 63 and she 36. The age gap of 27 years could have posed a problem.

Lascelles did not abandon Verbi after the trial, for by then she must have believed that the shooting had been an accident. The pair had one small daughter, Mary, born in 1938, and they subsequently had another daughter, Florence, named for the deceased mother-in-law. From his first marriage Verbi already had three sons, now grown up. Who was Lascelles’ mother, whom Verbi shot? She was Florence Lucy, née Giesen, born in New Zealand in 1869, one of the eleven children of Edward Giesen (1842-1906) and his wife Margaret Austin. Edward was a hosier and draper in Wellington, and not an entirely successful one because he was bankrupt in 1868. Florence married Richard Leary, a chemist with a shop in The Square, Palmerston North, in 1887. He had been born of an Irish family in Australia in 1846 and went to New Zealand in 1863. Richard Leary and Florence, who lived above the shop, had four sons, two of whom died at the age of three. One of the sons, Ernest, was killed in World War 1, leaving only Leonard, born in 1891. Another blow to Florence was the death of her husband Richard in 1901. She struggled on for nine years raising her two remaining sons, and then she married again, in 1910, in Dunedin. Her new husband was Dominic Hareward Lascelles Corrigan (1874-1962). They lived at Sea View, Remuera, Auckland, NZ, and later at Tauranga, Bay of Plenty. Their daughter Lascelles was born a year after the marriage, when her mother was 47.

I have tried to tell the story of the woman who died in this unfortunate affair, lest she be forgotten. She had two successful marriages, six children, two of whom survived, and a pleasant home in New Zealand. Her sudden death must have been a shock to her husband Dominic and her son Leonard. Her son, Leonard Poulter Leary, CMG (1891-1990) became a well-known lawyer in New Zealand, and wrote three books, one of them the story of his life – L.P. Leary, Not Entirely Legal, 1977. He was a QC and great raconteur. The jury, he said, ‘must be converted in small, simple steps to the point of view a lawyer desires them to adopt.’ Florence’s daughter Lascelles remained in Kenya after Vladimir Verbi died, farming at Thomson’s Falls. She died in 2007, at the age of ninety-six.

Gazette 8 May 1962 probate