Nairobi School is widely known by alumni and rivals as Patch. The nickname took shape in the 1930s, drawing equally from the land’s practical history and the school’s rugby culture. The Kabete campus rose on ground that had served as farmland and market gardens for early Nairobi; cabbages in particular were grown across the area.
In time, the school’s playing fields were jokingly called the Cabbage Patch. As students embraced the label, the phrase was shortened to the brisk, affectionate Patch. The quip carried a second echo: Twickenham, the home of English rugby, was itself built on a former market garden and had long been nicknamed the Cabbage Patch. Nairobi School boys borrowed the reference with pride, tying their own fields to rugby’s broader lore.
By the late 1930s and through the 1940s, the school had become a cradle of schoolboy rugby in Kenya, and match reports regularly spoke of games “played at the Patch.” The nickname endured because it balanced humour about humble fields with a fierce sense of belonging. Through the 1950s and 1960s it remained the common tongue of students and staff, and by the 1970s it intertwined with alumni culture— the era’s music and rivalries lending it fresh colour, from Clarence Carter’s Patchesto Lenana’s Changes.
Today, Patch is more than a nickname; it is a bridge across generations. It captures fields, friendship and a shared competitive spirit—an identity as rooted in Nairobi’s soil as it is connected to the wider tradition of rugby.