The view in Kenya was that Englishman Peter Poole would never hang because he had only killed a black man. That didnt go down too well in England, so his defence team changed tactics, claiming that his National Service in the struggle against the Mau Mau had impaired his mental state.
The governments in Kenya and London remained unmoved, and the 28-year-old engineer from Essex, who had emigrated to Kenya some years earlier, was hanged on Thursday, August 18th, 1960, in Nairobi. He had been found guilty of shooting one of his servants who was throwing stones at his dog, and became the first white man to be hanged in Kenya for the murder of a black person.