Scottish Christian.com

Home > News > Scottish Christian News Monitor

The Reverend Robert Philp

The Reverend Robert Philp, who has died aged 95, was a Church of Scotland missionary in Kenya and acted as interpreter during the trial of Jomo Kenyatta in 1952.

Robert Anderson Philp was born on February 25 1913, the only child of a Scottish missionary doctor, the Rev Dr Horace Philp, founder of Tumutumu hospital near Nyeri, in the foothills of Mount Kenya. Robert was the first of the children born to the early Scottish missionaries in Kenya.

He was sent to George Watson's School in Edinburgh, and went on to read Divinity at Edinburgh University. His curiosity and taste for adventure led him to explore Europe by motorcycle. He spent a year studying at the Budapest College of the Reformed Church of Hungary, then, in 1937, returned to Kenya as a missionary.

Robert Philp died on March 1 [2008], and his ashes are to be buried in Kenya, amongst the Kikuyu people, because "after all, that is where I am from".

• The full obituary of this remarkable man, of which the above is an extract, can be read at the Daily Telegraph.