Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, KCMG (/ˈtʃʌmli/ CHUM-lee; 28 April 1870 – 13 November 1931), styled The Honourable from birth until 1887, was a British peer.

He was as famous for his tireless labours to establish a working agricultural economy in East Africa as he was for childish antics among his European friends when he was at his leisure.

[5] The young baron inherited a sizeable estate in the North of England, including land that had been in the Cholmondeley family since 1615:[6] 7,000 acres (28 km2) and the ancestral seat at Vale Royal in the county of Cheshire.

[10] On an expedition in 1896, Delamere, with a retinue including a doctor, taxidermist, photographer, and 200 camels, set out to cross the deserts of southern Somaliland, intending to enter British East Africa from the north.

[9] In 1899, the young Lord Delamere married Lady Florence Anne Cole, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat from a prominent Ulster family.

[12] His next request for 100,000 acres (400 km2), near what is now Naivasha, was denied because the government felt that settlement by a colonising farmer might ignite conflicts with the Maasai tribesman who lived on the land.

For many years his only homes in Kenya were native-style mud and grass huts, which his wife (who was Ulster Anglo-Irish) decorated with their fine English and Irish furnishings.

[13] For twenty years, Delamere farmed his colossal land by trial, error and dogged effort, experimenting endlessly with crops and livestock, and accruing an invaluable stockpile of knowledge that would later serve as the foundation for the agricultural economy of the colony.

[14] He was quoted by author Elspeth Huxley as commenting drily, 'I started to grow wheat in East Africa to prove that though I lived on the equator, I was not in an equatorial country.'

Delamere eventually created a 'wheat laboratory' on his farm, employing scientists to manufacture hardy wheat varieties for the Kenyan highlands.

[22] Lord Delamere was active in recruiting settlers to East Africa, promising new colonists 640 acres (2.6 km2), with 200 people eventually responding.

[citation needed] He was also known to knock golf balls onto the roof of the Muthaiga Country Club, the pink stucco gathering-place for Nairobi's white elite, and then climb up to retrieve them.

He was personally fond of many Africans, and particularly enjoyed the company of the Maasai (even gently tolerating their habit of pilfering his cattle for their own herds),[27] but fought fiercely to maintain white supremacy in the colony.

Writing in 1927, Delamere claimed that the "extension of European civilization was in itself a desirable thing", and white people were "superior to heterogeneous African races only now emerging from centuries of relative barbarism... the opening up of new areas by means of genuine colonisation was to the advantage to the world.

"[28] Richard Meinertzhagen (himself a complex figure of Africa's colonial days) quoted Delamere as proclaiming, "I am going to prove to you all that this is a white man's country".

"[33] Delamere's efforts to steer Kenyan economic and racial policy, which often contravened the more pro-African intentions of the Colonial Office, were assisted by his powerful friends at home in Great Britain.

She was portrayed by actress Susan Fleetwood in the 1941-set film White Mischief (1987) as "Gwladys Delamere", one of Lord Erroll's Happy Valley friends.