On the following day the racing correspondent of the East African Standard reported the race under the headline ‘Niagara wins Derby by eight lengths’.
…ridden by Tony Thomas who, a newcomer, took the Derby in his first season…It was a very easy victory gained in record time. Mrs Beryl Markham had got the horse into splendid condition, not surprising in view of the fact that she is the daughter of the late C.B. Clutterbuck, Kenya’s outstanding trainer of former years…Half a mile from home Thomas took Niagara to the front and the filly made the rest of the field look as though they were standing still as she drew away and, never challenged, won by eight lengths with the greatest of ease…in the record time of 2-minutes 38.6 seconds.
The race was the most valuable ever in Kenya to that date with a stake of £835 going to the winning owner. Beryl was ecstatic. There had never been any doubt in her mind, and she was well aware that when Niagara shot past the winning post she wasn’t even being hard pushed.
On this performance Niagara started favourite for the Kenya St Leger, which – if she won it – would earn Beryl the coveted Silver Plate awarded annually to the leading trainer. The horse’s winning performance in the classic race was afterwards described as ‘a walkover’. It was the filly’s fifth successive win and she was the first horse to take Kenya’s Triple Crown consisting of the Derby, St Leger and Guineas.16
The East African Standard reported in January 1960:
Continuing her winning career in Kenya, Mrs Beryl Markham’s grey filly Niagara won the Kenya St Leger yesterday with the greatest of ease to give her owner a classic double. This owner also duplicated, some quarter of a century later, the feat of her father the late C.B. Clutterbuck, by winning two St Legers in successive years. Niagara, odds-on favourite, won on a tight rein far more easily than the official verdict of two-and-a-half lengths indicates, making most of her rivals look little better than hacks.
A month later Niagara also walked away with the Delamere Gold Vase, and Beryl achieved her ambition to top the leading trainers’ list. It had taken her only two seasons and she held the position for a further six, until she chose to abdicate by leaving Kenya. She subsequently said that Niagara’s victories that year had given her the greatest thrill in her career.17
Niagara had an inherent weakness in one knee and was not easy to keep sound. As a four-year-old, she ran only twice and on one of these occasions won the Civil Service Gold Cup. If she had been able to run more often, her career would have been even more outstanding, but her easy victories meant that she carried successively heavy weights as penalties and the gallant little mare was eventually ‘weighted-out’.
Success breeds success. Owners now beat a path to Beryl’s door, and she had her pick of the best horses and the wealthiest owners in Kenya. Through determination, hard work and talent she was back at the top. She was never satisfied with anything less than perfection. A perfectionist herself, ‘she had no time at all for second-raters and was hyper-critical of anything of which she did not approve,’ a friend said.18
As her establishment grew she built her team around her – arap Ruta and Arthur Orchardson were an integral part of it. Jørgen was her mainstay. He played a heroic part for he took all Beryl’s imperiousness with laughter, and her commands with grave respect. ‘Her gallops were kept in immaculate order,’ one of Beryl’s former jockeys told me, ‘and when Beryl said, “I’d like a gallop just along here,” it was like one of the ten commandments. The next day there’d be machinery in place and within days a new gallop would emerge, picked clean of stones by a mini force of Africans. If Beryl said, “Paint that door blue will you?” it was painted blue, although shortly afterwards she might say, “Oh God! Not that shade of blue – can’t you see it’s wrong, you fool?”’ Jørgen could take this tyranny with amusement, and he was the perfect foil for Beryl’s brilliance. Charles and Doreen Norman also remained tremendous supporters, and jockeys Tony Thomas, George Price, Alec McAleer and Derek Stansfield all contributed over the years to Beryl’s legend.19
In July 1960, Jørgen went home to Scandinavia for a holiday. While there, he watched the Irish jockey Ryan Parnell – known to all as Buster – riding at Copenhagen. At the age of twenty-six Buster had already ridden 280 winners and had been champion Jockey of Denmark in 1957, and of Scandinavia in 1959. On Wednesday afternoon in the last week in July, Jørgen telephoned Buster to ask if he would fly to Nairobi and ride for Beryl the following weekend. ‘It’s a bit difficult,’ explained Buster. ‘I’m supposed to be getting married on Saturday…’
‘Sunday will do!’ said Jørgen obligingly.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1960–1964
When Buster Parnell arrived in Kenya before that August Bank Holiday weekend, he could hardly have suspected that he was at the beginning of a partnership which was later to be called ‘invincible!’1 Leaving his bride of one day to follow him in a few weeks, Buster was still unsure of whether or not he had acted wisely in leaving Copenhagen, where his career and reputation were well established.
‘I’ll never forget the first time we met,’ Buster said. ‘Beryl came into the room and her presence was overwhelming. There was about her a waft of scent – a freshness like going into a field of new-mown hay.’ After the usual preliminaries she said, ‘I’ve got eight horses running at the meeting over the weekend. I’ll put you on two of them.’
Taken aback, Buster said firmly: ‘I ride the eight or I go back to Denmark tonight!’
Her eyes did not flicker as she replied, ‘Yes sweetie…that’s what I said. You ride the eight.’ Buster rode the eight horses, won six races and was second twice.2
After the races Beryl took Buster to the Muthaiga Club. On their arrival she explained: ‘You’ll have to stay on the veranda – professional sportsmen are not allowed into the club.’ In another piece of straight talking Buster told her that ‘just this once’ he would wait for her, but she was never to bring him there again. She never did. Afterwards they drove up to Naro Moru.
‘It was a very isolated place up in the bundu – the back-of-beyond wasn’t in it – there was nothing there, absolutely nothing, but Beryl’s place. I remember thinking, I left my bride of twenty-four hours for this?’ Buster told me.
‘We dress for dinner,’ Beryl warned as she left him in one of the guest cottages. Buster showered, changed into a smart suit and sober tie, and went up to the house. When Beryl swept into the room he knew he’d made a mistake. He had never heard of the old Kenya custom of dressing in pyjamas and dressing gown for dinner – a relic from the pioneer days.3 Beryl was dressed in white silk pyjamas and dressing gown. ‘Oh sweetie,’ she said apologetically. ‘You look so uncomfortable…’ Buster hastily acquired expensive pyjamas and a dressing gown which satisfied the requirement for correct evening clothes.
The following weekend was the East African Derby meeting. Buster rode nine horses for Beryl, winning eight races (four winners on each day of the two-day meeting), and creating a racing record in Kenya. On his other ride he managed only a third place!4
Beryl had no runner in the Derby that year, but with this single exception she monopolized the race from 1959 until she left Kenya, to train in South Africa, in the mid 1960s. Her winning horses were, in 1959: Niagara; 1961: Speed Trial; 1962: Cutlass; 1963: Lone Eagle; 1964: Athi.5
Beryl herself always rode on the dawn workouts. Buster recalled how each day she would appear in the yard, looking as if she’d stepped off the front cover of Vogue. Silk shirt, perfectly cut jodhpurs, shining leather boots, little kid leather gloves. A broad-rimmed hat and a leather whip tucked under her arm completed the ensemble. Buster dressed correctly too – glistening boots, shirt and tie, cap, whip – ‘exactly as if we were at Newmarket, there were no blue jeans and dusty boots at Naro Moru, it was first class all the way with Beryl. That was all she knew,’ he said.
‘Tell them to bring the horses around, will you sweetie?’ she would say when she was ready.
The strings of thoroughbre
ds on these early-morning rides would number up to forty, and they were taken to the gallops on the slopes of Mount Kenya, which Beryl referred to as ‘the top gallops’. On the way they were always sure to see elephant, troops of colobus monkeys and buffalo. Beryl always rode at the head of the string with Buster following at the rear riding shotgun. He recalled their morning rides:
‘It was breathtaking in more ways than one up there at 8000 feet. After a gallop the string would pull up with horses and riders gasping for air and sweating…all except Beryl. She’d sit serenely cool, delicately fluttering a tiny pocket handkerchief in front of her face. The views from up there were unbelievable. Twice a year – for we used to get two harvests in Kenya – you could look out across Cole’s Plains and see a thousand acres of gold. When the sun shone on that wheat it was like looking down on a huge ribbon of molten gold, stretching away down to the Aberdares. The air was like champagne. There was a different clarity to it, a different smell. The water in the streams was glacially cold, but so soft that if you put your hands in it you could work up a lather, just from the oils in your skin.
‘They simply don’t make ’em like Beryl any more. She worked me like a dog, but I gained something from her that money couldn’t buy. Confidence, knowledge and a different dimension to life. Everything I’ve done since, all my personal success has its roots in what I learned from her. Her way of handling any problem was to say, “Now what would my father have done?” and she’d sit with her head in her hands thinking it out until she came up with an answer. She didn’t love her father – she idolized him. He was the one great love in her life. No other man ever measured up to him. I think Tom Black came closest and she worshipped him too.6
‘I’ve ridden for the best trainers in the world, people like Prendergast and other greats, but I can tell you she was the best. She could have taken on the world and won. Mind you, we had two syces to every horse! She never made any money out of all her successes, because for every thousand pounds she charged, she spent twelve hundred on the horses. She spent money like water, but she was a bit like the queen and never carried any with her…’
Instead, with a delicate wave of one of her long thin hands, she would say to whoever was with her, ‘Just pay the man, will you darling?’ or ‘Put it on the account!’ Personal accounts such as her Muthaiga Club bill went unpaid for years, but she kept nothing for herself during those years of success. It all went back into the horses.
‘The boxes were absolute luxury, nothing was too good for the horses. Each box was eighteen foot by eighteen foot. They were lined with teak, and had banana-leaf roofs. They weren’t placed in rows or blocks like conventional stables, but dotted around like a little African village. [Beryl insisted that horses were gregarious and needed to satisfy their herd instinct by looking at each other.] After gallops every morning we would have breakfast and discuss work. They were really pukka breakfasts with avocado pears, haddock or trout, cereals, kedgeree, cod’s roe, caviare, freshly baked bread and chunky marmalade. The table was always set with silver and best china.
‘One of the other jockeys, Tony Thomas, was a great fisherman. He used to toddle off to the river every morning with a bamboo pole to which was attached some line and a rusty old hook. Without fail he was back within half an hour, always with four lovely little fresh trout for breakfast. Tony wasn’t the brightest chap around so I thought, this must be easy, and went and invested in some expensive fishing gear and accompanied him on some of his morning jaunts. I never caught a thing! He could sit twenty yards from me and pull out four trout before I had got my fly into the water. I threw the fishing gear into the river one day in a fit of pique! Beryl told Tony rather unkindly one day that he was such a good fisherman because he understood the fish. “Your brain is about the same size,” she said. She could cut a man’s legs from under him with three words.’
Beryl kept stocked up with the best of everything, all on credit. ‘We might die tomorrow,’ she was fond of saying, and she ran up huge accounts all over Nairobi. Once someone gave her, or she won, a crate of champagne. It wasn’t what she was used to, not Dom Perignon or Krug, but some lesser brand. ‘Sweetie,’ she asked Buster thoughtfully, ‘who do we dislike enough to give this jungle juice to for Christmas?’
‘After breakfast we used to walk around the stables, there wasn’t much to do of course, the staff did all the stable work but she’d stop and look at each horse…perhaps to give a carrot here, a sprig of lucerne7 there, and give instructions to the syces. By eleven o’clock we’d be ready to go up to the house for our first drink (which she habitually called ‘a pinkie’) of the day. She had a phenomenal capacity for alcohol in those days, but you never saw her the worse for it.’
Buster Parnell told me frankly that he had loved Beryl. ‘But,’ he stressed (patently realizing that I must have heard of Beryl’s reputation), ‘it was an unconsummated love affair. The only time I ever kissed her on the lips was the day Lone Eagle won the Derby. It was a totally unnatural relationship; at times I hated her guts but by God I respected her. Now over twenty years later, though I haven’t seen her for years, I still love her like a lover.’ Spare, tanned and supremely fit, with greying hair and eyes that crinkle at the corners when he smiles, Parnell has the typical figure and stamp of the professional jockey. But the resemblance ends there.
For our first interview I met Buster Parnell over informal drinks, and could not help noticing that his understated silk shirt had the distinctive Dior symbol on the pocket. There is a confident swagger to his walk which was noticeably accentuated when, dressed in racing silks, he walked across the parade ring to greet the owners for whom he rode that weekend in Denmark and Sweden. It was difficult to rid oneself of the impression that he was somehow riding for them as a special favour!8
He is an immensely colourful and entertaining character who mentions as an aside: ‘As of today I have won two thousand and sixty-three races.’ One can imagine that with Beryl and Buster around life could never have been dull.
‘At times she was a first-class superbitch who never gave a damn about anyone but herself. She had a fantastic ego, unbelievable talent and a capacity to work that you wouldn’t credit. She wasn’t in the game for the old English motto of being in it for the pleasure of competing. Oh no! Win. Win. Win! She didn’t care how; she worked us like dogs, and she worked harder than all the rest of us put together. She was the epitome of Africa. Hard as nails! But she had great class – in the way that a Derby winner has class – it’s a sort of presence. Her success was due to the fact that she had more talent than all her competitors put together and she fed her horses better. That was her “secret”. It was just good feeding and hard work. That slight sheen that Mervyn Hill and Robin Higgin9 wrote about, that everybody put down to some magic formula she’d learned from the Nandis as a child…all nonsense – that was the superfit sheen you do get on really fit horses. She never fed any secret formula to her horses – she didn’t need to fake it – she was too good.’
Buster’s first impressions of Naro Moru were soon forgotten and it became ‘God’s own country’, both to Buster and his young bride, Anna. They stayed during that season, returning to Denmark for the summer, but they were soon back in Naro Moru the following autumn for the next season. Everything was as before. Every night they dressed for dinner and dined formally ‘as if we were at Buckingham Palace’. There was always a huge log fire for it gets very cold at night at Naro Moru. After dinner they would sit talking before the fire. About ten Beryl would suddenly say to Anna, ‘You look very tired, sweetie. Why don’t you run along?’ Anna used to be furious at this summary dismissal – especially as Beryl used to keep Buster talking, sometimes for another hour or two. Then she would say to him, ‘I think you ought to run along to that nice little wife of yours. You really oughtn’t to leave her alone so much…’
When it rained at Naro Moru they were totally cut off, because the farm was surrounded by black cotton soil which made movement by ordinary vehicle i
mpossible.
‘Jørgen had a four-wheel-drive machine, and even after he moved off Beryl’s place in about 1962, he used to come and keep us in contact with the outside world. Beryl would wait two days and when she ran out of some luxury item, she’d shout for Jørgen. We might have absolutely everything, but she’d perhaps run out of Beluga caviare and she was on the telephone immediately: “Jørgen, sweetie. I have to get some supplies. Can you help me?” Her cook could produce anything at all to cordon bleu standards and it was all done on a dirty little black, old-fashioned stove. The kitchen was filthy, you never went out there. After I saw it for the first time I didn’t eat for three days, for fear of food poisoning. After that I took good care not to go and look!’
In 1962 Buster flew down to Rhodesia with Beryl where they raced Speed Trial in the Castle Tankard race, and stayed in Salisbury. She had considered the possibility of moving there but she didn’t like the atmosphere, and was uneasy, although it seemed like paradise to him. ‘This won’t last,’ she told Buster. ‘We won’t come here.’ Events proved her right. ‘She was like that sometimes, not clairvoyant, but there was something uncanny about how she sensed things that were to happen later,’ said Buster.
Shortly before Uhuru10 Beryl’s farm at Naro Moru was sold to the government for African settlement. Before this, one of her owners, E. R. ‘Tubby’ Block, had discussed the imminent problem of new premises with her. He had some land by Lake Naivasha and suggested that she might set up a training establishment there. ‘I had a piece of land but I had no accommodation for her establishment. However there was a neighbouring piece of land which was up for sale, which consisted of a house with about a hundred acres.’ Much of it was lake frontage of soft volcanic sandy soil, unsuitable for viable farming purposes (although there was experimentation going on for the growing of asparagus), and so it wasn’t affected by the African settlement programme. He told Beryl that if she bought the adjoining property and needed more space for training, she would be welcome to use part of his land for this purpose. Apparently interested, for she wanted to move closer to Nairobi, Beryl asked the price of the property. ‘Three and a half thousand!’ Block told her. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she promised. It was a very reasonable price, and he thought she would probably accept. Shortly afterwards he went off to Europe for a holiday lasting over two months, but when he returned it was to find a new house and stables, in advanced stages of building, on his land. Block explained:
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