How can you describe someone who after thirty years you regard as one of the greatest friends you have ever had? I’ll do my best. Jørgen had originally arrived in Kenya with two words of English – ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ – and ten shillings11 in his pocket. On the recommendation of a friend he had obtained a job in the Trans Nzoia before leaving Denmark. His lack of English and Swahili got him the sack, and he arrived by way of another job at the Rundgrens where he became involved in growing wheat. The district was swarming with Danes, Charles used to call it ‘the last of the Norse Sagas’.
Jørgen quickly became a friend and was delighted to be at Naro Moru. He was one of six children, the youngest of whom was Gudrun, who had gone blind at the age of thirteen but this had not prevented her from becoming a famous organist in Denmark. To obtain a farming diploma, Jørgen had worked in a plastics factory to earn the money to pay for the course. His sport was rowing and he had formerly been an inter-Scandinavian competitor. He also loved horses and riding and had owned a beautiful hunter in Denmark.
He was essentially very easy to get on with, ‘gemütlich’ to a degree (there is no English word for this quality). Always full of laughter, we all loved him. Very shortly after he came to the farm, Charles offered him a full partnership. Jørgen had already saved a little money and this he put into the farm, with the remainder of the risk covered by Charles, and the farm was then registered as Norman and Thrane Ltd. He quickly became devoted to Charles whom he treated as a mixture of father and elder brother. He is intuitive and shrewd rather than clever, but he will work very hard to acquire any knowledge necessary to the success of a new project. To look at he is very tall and slim, very fair and with blue eyes crinkled round the edges. Jørgen and Beryl quickly developed a close relationship. Somehow he managed to provide the strength and support that Beryl always needed, and from the time he arrived at the farm, she was able to pick up the threads of her life and go on.
The oddest thing about Beryl was that although she could ride any horse, anywhere, fly the Atlantic, and was unafraid during activities such as game-spotting, over mundane things she was indecisive and needed to have her hand held, metaphorically speaking, all the time.
Doreen Bathurst Norman thought that after Clutterbuck left for Peru in the early 1920s, Ruta had filled this role, followed by Denys Finch Hatton (whom Doreen always regarded as the greatest love in Beryl’s life), possibly because his detachment made him somehow unattainable. When Beryl had a ‘supporter’ – and this person did not have to be a lover, but just someone on whom she could trust and rely, and whom she respected absolutely – then ‘her insecurity took time off’. Jørgen was following in the footsteps of Clutterbuck, Ruta, Finch Hatton, Campbell Black and Schumacher, who were the major figures in Beryl’s life; between them came shorter periods of supportive help from Lord Delamere, and numerous others.
Although Beryl’s behaviour improved after Jørgen’s arrival at Naro Moru, she was still restive. The secretarial work gave her an interest, but what she really wanted was to get back to horses. During her convalescence a friend gave her a broken-down racehorse to use as a hack. The animal ‘looked like a coat hanger when it arrived. It had been overdosed with worm tablets and quite ruined for racing – or for anything else really.’ It was the best thing that could possibly have happened. Beryl decided to work on the animal and in time it was not only fit but was able to race. ‘It never won, but I think it managed to get itself placed a couple of times,’ Doreen recalled. This episode was a turning point in Beryl’s life and set her on the track of her next great triumph. She decided to start training again and there was some talk of her training for Tom Delamere whose stable was not doing too well at the time. Beryl went to Soysambu to discuss the proposal but it came to nothing and she eventually decided, with Jørgen’s enthusiasm to bolster her resolve, to train publicly.
The problems were immense. Firstly Beryl had no money to buy horses and nowhere to train from. Secondly she had been out of training for thirty years, and had no current reputation or contacts. She was already approaching her mid fifties, an age when most women would not contemplate taking on a new and stressful career particularly after major surgery. Predictably, none of these difficulties occurred to Beryl – or if they did she paid no heed to them. She managed to raise £1500, the most likely sources being Mansfield, who helped her financially on a number of occasions, and Clutterbuck. Probably it was a combination of both.
At the bottom end of the Bathurst Norman property was a small piece of land consisting of a small house and twenty-five acres, which providentially came on to the market. Originally it had been part of Forest Farm but it had been sold separately, some years before the Bathurst Normans arrived. Beryl put up her capital, the Bathurst Normans underwrote a bank loan and the small farm – heavily mortgaged – became Beryl’s. Twenty-five acres could never in normal circumstances have provided an adequate basis for the establishment she had in mind, but fortunately the Normans were happy for her to use some of their land, and their farm machinery and labour were at her disposal for gallops and the maintenance of paddocks. Equally important, she had the personal support of Charles, Doreen and Jørgen:
Jørgen was tremendously excited and keen about the whole thing. She could never have got started again if it hadn’t been for his enthusiasm and hard work, he was an enormous help to her. He was detailed by the local ‘security committee’ to live at Beryl’s farm. The Mau Mau troubles were at their height and they would not countenance Beryl living there alone. Just before Beryl left we had an African visitor to the farm. He showed me a card which stated that he was a communicant of the Church of Scotland and that he could hold services on farms. I replied that I should make inquiries as to whether any of the farm workers would like him to do so, as several were skulking around looking at our visitor and appeared frightened. I got a lot of flak…Surely I would not prevent the workers from hearing God’s word, and so forth. I asked around and got the distinct impression that he wasn’t wanted but as it was nearly dark I grudgingly allowed him to stay the night. He did, and held a very different kind of ceremony – a Mau Mau oathing ceremony.
We lived in a very vulnerable position, and deliberately did not have Kikuyu house servants. One night all our cattle were driven off. Having checked that Beryl was all right, Charles sent Jørgen off to the police at Naro Moru. Believe it or not we had no telephone until just near the end of the emergency! The result was that they caught the gang sitting around a fire drying their clothes and cutting up the meat from one of our cows. The police shot at them, killing one and wounding another but the rest vanished into the night. All the cattle broke back except about seven and we got one that wandered in from goodness knows where – possibly as the result of another farm raid.
We heard later that it was considered that Charles, whom they referred to as Mzee (a mark of respect as well as of age), was considered to know all about them and they were reluctant to touch us as they believed they would certainly be caught. They never tried anything again. We all carried revolvers or automatics all the time…
Beryl had arap Ruta to help her on her farm. She had tracked Ruta down when she visited Kenya after the war, and she never subsequently lost touch with him. Soon after arriving at Naro Moru, she suggested to the Normans that they should give him a job. He’d be very good, she told them. ‘In fact he was quite good, though by then he’d started to drink a lot and at times was rather a nuisance because of it,’ Doreen recalled. During her illness Beryl had also begun to drink quite heavily, but she managed to ease up after her recovery and disapproved of other people drinking to excess.
Not long after her move to her own farm, Beryl was visited by her son Gervase and his heavily pregnant wife Viviane. They were en route to Europe after spending the first year of their marriage in India. The couple had met when they were lunch guests of a mutual friend at the Cavalry Club in London in 1951. Viviane, who was on holiday from her home in France, was instantly attracted to Gervase
and the feeling was mutual, but by a strange quirk of fate Gervase was leaving on the following day for a holiday in France. He was not due to return until Viviane herself left for France. ‘A case of ships that pass in the night you might say,’ chuckled Viviane. However Gervase managed to return earlier than planned, and the pair had a day together before Viviane went home.
They wrote to each other constantly. ‘We more or less fell in love by letter. After our marriage, shortly after he came down from Oxford, Gervase had the opportunity to work in India – a country that I had passionately wanted to visit all my life. Our time there was a great happiness to us both, but it was almost a spiritual home-coming for me.’ On their way home to Europe they stopped over in Kenya to visit Gervase’s grandmother, Lady Markham, who had virtually raised Gervase, and who had remarried and moved to the colony. However, hearing that they were in Nairobi, Beryl telephoned and asked the young people to stay with her at Naro Moru.
‘Beryl was very sweet to us,’ Viviane recalled. ‘She was not at all what I expected – she seemed very quiet and ordinary, not the sort of person who had lived the adventurous life that I knew she had.’ The couple liked Thrane and enjoyed the happy atmosphere that prevailed on the farm. Indeed the entire visit was a very successful one. Beryl did not behave ‘like a mother’, but then she never had. Her relationship with her son is an intriguing one, for she undoubtedly cared for him in her own way, but she had no strong maternal need to see him or have him around her. She talked of Gervase occasionally to close friends but somehow did not feel it necessary to make any contact with him, or indeed his family when he later had two daughters. Interviewed in 1986 for this biography she spoke of ‘my little kid’ in a way that would have suggested to a stranger that she had enjoyed the most intimate maternal relationship. But in fact that brief visit in 1955 was the last time that Beryl ever saw her son, and she never met her two granddaughters.
Interestingly Gervase never spoke of his mother to anyone but his wife. ‘He was extremely proud of her achievements but of course he had never really known her as a mother.’ His two daughters, Fleur and Valery, grew up with a very hazy and confused picture of their maternal grandmother.12
In the mid 1950s Beryl suffered two bereavements. Firstly her half-brother Sir James ‘Alex’ Kirkpatrick was killed in a shooting accident. Beryl had liked him, though her affection for him was always tinged with reflected dislike of their mother and she disapproved of his drinking. Doreen Bathurst Norman recalled that between the two there had been ‘the mutually critical attitude that is very common between brother and sister’.
Then, in 1957 Clutterbuck died in South Africa. It was a deep and lasting sadness for though she had not seen much of her father during the previous twenty years, Beryl still retained her hero-worship of him.13 Clutterbuck was still successfully training horses until shortly before his death and told his daughter that although he would leave his estate to Emma Orchardson he would leave Beryl his ‘best horse’. He did so, and Beryl would have loved to have taken the horse, but South African horses could not be imported to Kenya and Beryl hadn’t the resources to cope with the problem. So she had to let the opportunity go by.
With Beryl’s drive and ideas, and Jørgen’s herculean assistance, the establishment started to take shape. There were horse-boxes, feed stores, tack stores, exercise yard and gallops to be built, and in 1956 Beryl took delivery of her first crop of horses, all from Kay Spiers’ Lolchorai Stud. Mrs Spiers is remembered as one of the greatest horse-breeders in Kenya, and until her death in 1977 she produced consistently good racehorses. Title Deed was initially owned by Kay Spiers and trained by Beryl. Ulysses, whom Beryl ‘bought’, was her first good horse. However, she had little or no money with which to pay for the horse, ‘so Kay supplied her more or less on HP terms’, Doreen Bathurst Norman recalled.
Ulysses was a particularly good-looking horse and Beryl loved him. He was not only a racehorse but had won prizes in the show ring – the perfect, and rarely found, all-rounder. Title Deed, a two-year-old, was a marvellous little bay horse with a big heart, who flicked his ears forward as he passed the winning post. He was particularly good over middle distance, and gave her her first win, a two-year-old plate in September 1958. He was a sound, honest and consistent horse who in six seasons won thirteen races, and was placed nineteen times.
Beryl’s own colours of blue and gold had long since been reallocated when she started training again, so she re-adopted the old Clutterbuck colours of black and yellow. Soon they were seen in pole positions at race meetings.
One day Beryl went to look at a horse called Little Dancer. She immediately recognized the horse’s potential but this gave her a problem, which she took to Charles Bathurst Norman. Look, I’ve bought this horse but I can’t afford to pay for it,’ she told him. The Bathurst Normans characteristically bought the horse for her. On New Year’s Day 1959, thirty-three years after she had won the same race with Wise Child, Beryl’s second brilliant career in training took off when Little Dancer won the Kenya St Leger.14
Her next horses were Niagara and Snow Goose, both bought as yearlings. Once again Kay Spiers sold them to her on hire-purchase terms. Something about Niagara particularly attracted Beryl, and she had to have the little filly. Curious to see this horse about which Beryl seemed so anxious, the Bathurst Normans went down to see her. ‘She was an extraordinary little grey thing, still with her fluffy foal coat – she didn’t look anything out of the ordinary,’ Doreen remembered. They were perhaps understandably doubtful about Beryl’s confident prediction that ‘this horse is going to win the Derby for me…Niagara was by a horse called Toronto out of Propaganda, and as Beryl started to train the youngster, she knew she’d made the right decision. Niagara was very fast indeed.
The 1959–60 racing season belonged to Beryl. She was selective about her horses and the races in which they ran. The leading trainer and owners are positioned not by the number of races won but by the value of stakes. With her small stable she took on the big trainers and Niagara obliged by winning the Kenya Guineas, the first race in the Kenya Triple Crown series. The East African Derby was Beryl’s next goal.
There was a great deal of rivalry between the syces in Beryl’s stable and those of the then leading trainer Gladys Graham, whose farm and training establishment marched with the Bathurst Normans’ land. At times, as Beryl’s success grew, the rivalry sparked into open confrontation. ‘You can imagine how popular Beryl’s success was, can’t you?’ Doreen asked with a smile. Beryl’s employees were absolutely convinced that Mrs Graham’s syces would be out to sabotage Niagara, who was entered for the Derby, and they took no chances. The horse was never left alone for a single minute.
‘Of course Gladys would never have allowed anything like that but the boys were convinced and nothing would dissuade them. A few days before the Derby, Niagara travelled down to Nairobi by train accompanied by Beryl’s childhood playmate Arthur Orchardson who packed a revolver just in case, and insisted on sleeping with the horse in its box,’ Doreen recalled. The syces’ anxiety was catching! Arthur rode for Beryl on a number of occasions and although he was then getting towards the end of a brilliant racing career (which included riding countless winners including – in 1936 – the winner of the Last African Derby), he was extremely fit. After Niagara had been loaded up and sent on her way, Doreen casually asked Beryl, ‘You are insured I suppose?’ and was shocked when Beryl replied: ‘Well actually no…’ Doreen immediately telephoned the insurance company.
This inattention to administrative detail was typical of Beryl. In later years nearly all her problems were caused by her lack of concern for the form-filling which is an essential task of the trainer, but while she had Jørgen to take care of this side of things for her everything ran smoothly. Like Ruta, Jørgen smoothed all the rough edges and left her free to concentrate on the horses. Beryl was even reluctant to make the commitment of declaring a horse for a race. She always procrastinated, and usually would not even name
the rider until the very last minute.15
On the eve of the Derby, Beryl and Doreen travelled down to Nairobi and went to the racecourse. ‘We found everyone in a fearful flap. Niagara had cast one of her racing plates and had worked herself into such a highly-strung state that she would not let anyone near her to replace it,’ Doreen told me. Beryl listened with mingled disbelief and exasperation to the complaints poured into her ears. Without a word she stumped into the box and picked up the horse’s leg. Turning around she said to the suddenly silent little crowd, ‘Well! What are you waiting for? Get on with it!’ Beryl had the knack of making even a highly excited horse quiet simply by touch.
On 3 August 1959 the East African Standard racing correspondent declared, ‘The Miller will stay when others have had enough,’ covering himself by adding: ‘The only three-year-old that has proved herself to be in any way outstanding is Niagara, winner of the Kenya Guineas over a mile. I am not sure that she will stay the extra half mile, although there are very few…that I would choose to beat her.’
Riding Niagara was Tony Thomas, a jockey recently brought into the country by Beryl. ‘He was a gentle and totally unsophisticated man, much at a disadvantage with the tougher Kenya jockeys, whom he feared. The week before the Derby he had made a mess of a race and Beryl had told him that if he made a mess of the Derby he would be sent home on the next aeroplane,’ Doreen Bathurst Norman said. ‘He therefore took Niagara right round the outside, going yards further than anyone else, and then let her go. She needed no urging – in fact she stopped if hit – and went like an arrow. Tony was a gentle rider with beautiful hands, and all problem horses went well for him.’
Straight on Till Morning Page 34
