‘Banks are robbers with a licence,’ Beryl used to grumble when she owed them thousands. By the mid 1960s she was running everything herself, for Jørgen had bought his own farm at Nanyuki in partnership with the Bathurst Normans’ son-in-law. She was hopeless at administration and budgeting and at times, despite her huge success, was so broke that Buster had to scratch around to pay the horses’ feed bills. ‘But the horses never went without the best, no matter what. I remember one night our dinner consisted of potato soup, followed by baked potatoes, and we drank crème de menthe all evening. It was all there was, and that’s bloody desperation! The week after that we had eight winners and two seconds in a two-day meeting and we were back on champagne again.’
When the Markham stable went down to a race meeting they often used to take twenty horses: twelve which were to run, and eight reserves. The reserves hardly ever ran. Once, the railway track was washed away at Thika and the horses were walked from Thika to Nairobi, but even so Beryl got six winners at that meeting.
Beryl and Buster often fought noisily. Times without number Buster walked out. ‘Right! That’s it. I’m leaving,’ he’d storm.
‘When?’
‘As soon as I can book a flight out to Denmark!’
‘What are you waiting for, then?’
And he’d stump up to his cottage and pour out his grievances to Anna. Two days later there would always be a knock on the door and one of Beryl’s houseboys would be standing there with a package. ‘From the memsahib. She says will you come up to the house?’ Often the parcel would contain a couple of silk shirts, or a nice tie. ‘By then my temper would have cooled off anyway, and I would go up to the house to find Beryl fluttering about. She would never discuss the quarrel – instead she’d say, “How about a little pinkie, darling?” and everything would be back to normal.’
One of these stormy scenes was enacted on the day before the Oaks. ‘This time,’ Buster told Anna, ‘I really mean it. Pack up, we’re definitely going this time. I can’t take any more.’ Without telling Buster, Anna went up to Beryl’s house, taking the racing silks as an excuse.
She found Beryl in tears and drinking heavily. ‘Please send him up to me…don’t let him go…’ she said. On the following day Blue Streak won the Oaks and no more was said about going home – until the next time!16
‘She really didn’t know how to take me. At first, like the other jockeys, I called her madam, but later I called her Beryl. I was the only one allowed this privilege. Once Tony Thomas called her Beryl inadvertently. She looked over her shoulder to see who he was talking to…’
Beryl used to hold weekly court sessions for the employees on pay days, with a ‘Fines and Advances book’ very much in evidence, for minor misdemeanours such as poor work and drunkenness. Beryl spoke fluent Kipsigis, Kikuyu, and – of course – Swahili. She also spoke Luo and a little Maasai, though she pretended not to. ‘If we had any trouble I couldn’t cope with she’d have the culprit in, and sit and question him for hours,’ said Buster. ‘They could hide nothing from her for she spoke their language and also, more importantly, she knew how their minds worked. She could be just as devious as them and she had the advantage of superior intelligence. She always got the truth in the end. For major crimes like robbery, the man would be put off the farm, and if he didn’t go quickly she’d set the dogs on him! But there wasn’t much of that, and nor did she have any trouble during the Mau Mau because she knew her people. We had eighty staff on the place – syces, riding boys, shamba [garden] boys, house servants. If we needed sixty people to run things, Beryl would have eighty – that was her way.’
‘Beryl never gave me an on-course instruction in all those years I was with her,’ Buster told me at the end of his three-day interview. ‘On the gallops, or over dinner we’d discuss tactics, but never on the course. If I won, she’d always say, “Well done, sweetie. I knew you’d win.” If I lost she’d say, “Never mind, darling. You did your best.” If there was ever a problem about a horse she’d have the first choice at solving it. If she was wrong, I got my crack next time round.’
A short time after Beryl moved to Naivasha, ‘Romulus’ Kleen returned to Kenya and visited her. She had last seen him nearly thirty years earlier, in 1934 when she was ill with malaria after their abandoned flight to England. One evening he dined with Beryl, Jørgen and Charles Norman. When the other two men had left, they began to talk and Romulus told Beryl a story he’d kept to himself all the intervening years.
When Romulus had arrived in Nairobi in 1934 before the proposed flight to England, a mutual friend of theirs, considerably older than both of them, took Romulus aside and said to him: ‘Now my boy, I am going to give you some fatherly advice, and it is this. You have very little money, so do not get emotionally involved with Beryl, because if you do, you will be put in an awkward position should anything go wrong with the aircraft during your journey, and you have to make prolonged stays in hotels on the way. As neither of you is exactly a teetotaller, when the moment comes for you to pay the chits (which you will naturally have signed), you may – to put it mildly – pale beneath your tan.’ Romulus thanked the well-meaning friend for his kind warning, and accordingly, when – on most nights that he was her guest – Beryl had appeared at his bedroom door to wish him goodnight (sometimes repeated several times), he had merely responded with a cool and formal, ‘Goodnight, Beryl. Sleep well.’
Beryl was highly amused at his confession, and told him, ‘Well, I do admit to having wondered at the time if you could possibly have been gay! Oh dear, now you will never know what you missed!’ The incident was not finished, however. Over dinner that evening Romulus had told Beryl that he had to ride a race in Nairobi the following week. Since he had been with the UN Force in the Congo he had not been on a horse for a month. ‘Could I ride work for you tomorrow morning to get my muscles back in shape?’ Romulus asked, adding hopefully that his first mount should be a quiet and steady sort. ‘No problem at all…’ Beryl assured him.
Next morning after the gallop he dismounted with buckling knees. He was received by a grinning Beryl, and her two amused male companions of the previous evening who had obviously been invited to rise early in order to come along and watch the fun. ‘He ran away with you, didn’t he?’ Beryl asked with obvious delight. Romulus admitted that the pace had been considerably faster than he had intended. He did not add to her obvious satisfaction by revealing that his shins were bleeding, and his entire body felt as though it had been put through a mincing machine. Later Buster Parnell told him that the horse he had been given to ride was Speed Trial, the Derby winner of the previous year and known to be the fiercest puller in Kenya.
At times Beryl’s humour had a slightly sadistic side to it, Romulus recalls, and he had noticed this even in the 1930s. On one occasion when he was flying with her she suddenly started circling over broken country. After about half an hour of this he couldn’t help asking if she had a problem. She replied that everything was fine but she had to wait for the clouds to clear over her intended landing strip. ‘Why?’ she asked, grinning wickedly at his discomfort, ‘were you getting frightened?’17
One of Beryl’s greatest moments on the track was in the 1963–64 season, when Lone Eagle won the East African Derby. Like her little filly Niagara, Lone Eagle was by Toronto out of a mare called Xylone, which Beryl had bought in-foal, for Norman & Thrane Limited, at the Nakuru horse sales. Lone Eagle ran first in their colours: farm companies were allowed to own horses but they had to be run as though they were privately owned. As the date for the Derby drew close it was obvious that Lone Eagle stood a very good chance and another of Beryl’s owners, Lady Kenmare, bought the horse from the Norman/Thrane consortium ‘because she dearly wanted to lead in the Derby winner’, Doreen Bathurst Norman said.18
With justification Block and Soprani were annoyed when Lone Eagle walked off with the Derby trophy. Their own horse, Mountie, had been a fancied Derby prospect, and Beryl had not run him. This caused a bitter row
. Beryl had run Lone Eagle to please Enid Kenmare and because she loved Lone Eagle, whom she had delivered as a foal, and reared from that day on. In addition to the Derby winner that season, Beryl trained Fair Realm to win four races including the Spey Royal Cup and Kenya Guineas, and Spike (an outstanding two-year-old by Kara Tepe out of Harpoon), who won races with style and grace: ‘…but once Spike, a beautiful mover, was called upon it was all over,’ enthused the East African Standard. ‘He is a fine colt and it will be interesting to see if he can stay, and become an E.A. Derby winner in the traditions of Niagara and My Realm.’19
All that spring, however, Beryl’s winners were becoming harder to find, and in the summer of 1964 it was realized that a mystery illness had attacked all but the older horses. It was a strange sort of lethargy, which Beryl later attributed to an excess of fluoride in the water. Her horses still looked magnificent but the muscles were affected in some unexplained way which prevented their expanding in exercise, and they could not gallop. No matter what she did she could not cure the problem, and in particular Lone Eagle, Mountie and Spike were affected by what Beryl called ‘fluorescent poisoning’.
One of Kenya’s most respected journalists, the late Mervyn Hill, visited Beryl at this time and asked her over lunch how the thrills of flying and racing compared. She told him, ‘In flying you are handling the plane yourself and no one can interfere for good or bad. In racing you can produce a horse in the paddock as fit as you think it can be. After that it’s up to the jockey. Within minutes, even seconds, months of planning and hard work can be undone.’ She was emphatic about the greatest gift a trainer could have. ‘Infinite attention to detail. Your judgement grows over the years, but you can never afford to let up. Flair alone will not win races.’20
Beryl never let up for a moment. ‘In mechanical terms she was born with a super-charger and no governor on the accelerator,’ Doreen Bathurst Norman said.21 Beryl’s appalling behaviour to the Bathurst Normans in the first year after she returned to Kenya had not only been caused by her illness, which was real and serious, but also a frustration which drove her at times to the edge of madness. Now, successful and fulfilled despite her problems over paperwork, she could stand back subjectively and cope with them. Jørgen often spent weekends at the Naivasha training establishment to help with such matters, and the mere fact that he was available was enough to maintain Beryl’s confidence in her ability.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1965–1980
Enid, Countess of Kenmare, was Beryl’s wealthiest owner. Her oblique links with Beryl stretched back into the past, for Lady Kenmare had previously been married to Lord Furness after his marriage to Thelma Morgan ended, and Beryl had first met the countess in the mid 1930s when Tom had worked for the couple as a private pilot. One day, Beryl flew in to Burrough Court with Tom, and the then Lady Furness told her nine-year-old daughter Patricia, ‘Today you are going to see a very beautiful lady.’ ‘And I did – I shall always remember the first time I saw Beryl. She was dressed in a white flying suit and looked so glamorous and beautiful – and she remained so as long as I knew her,’ Patricia (now Mrs O’Neill) told me.1
Raised in Australia, Lady Kenmare was the daughter of Charles Lindeman, who introduced vines to New South Wales and thus pioneered a great industry there. Her own interest in horses was, like Beryl’s, a life-long one. Much married and widowed, she was reputedly fabulously rich after an astonishing run of bad luck had dispatched her four husbands early to their respective graves, providing Lady Kenmare with a series of inherited fortunes. Her first husband, Roderick Cameron of New York, whom she married in 1913, died in the following year leaving her with a baby son, also named Roderick, who ultimately became a writer. Her second husband, General Frederiek Cavendish, whom she married in 1917, died in 1931 leaving the beautiful relict with two further handsome children and his considerable worldly wealth. In 1933 she married Lord Furness. He died in 1940, again leaving her ‘a fortune’. Finally she married the 6th Earl of Kenmare in 1943, and he died within a matter of months of the wedding.
Her serious interest in racehorses stemmed from the period of Lady Kenmare’s marriage to ‘Duke’2 Furness when the couple owned famous stud farms in England and Ireland. After Lord Furness’s death, these were acquired by the Aga Khan. Lady Kenmare bought a property in Kenya some years after the war, in which she lived during the winter months, when not at her villa in Cap Ferrat in the south of France which her son Roderick made his permanent home. Her son by General Cavendish inherited the title Baron Waterpark and lived in England and her daughter Patricia Cavendish, another horse-lover, accompanied her mother to Kenya.
At the time of Uhuru there was general consternation among the relatively newly arrived wealthy expatriates who owned to massive doubts about Kenya’s future as an independent republic. There was a small scale exodus, mainly to Rhodesia and South Africa, but the old-established settlers, in the main, stayed on. Lady Kenmare had no deep roots in the country and was the recipient of constant and mixed advice about her financial situation in Kenya. She had a friend who was very highly placed in the new government and it is believed that he advised her to get her money out while she could.
Lady Kenmare’s concern reached a peak in the summer of 1964, at the very time that Beryl was having her problems with the mysterious illness which had attacked her horses. Beryl was sure that these problems were due to the water at Naivasha, and she knew that to cure them she would have to move. Lady Kenmare’s daughter believes that the main impetus for the arrangement which resulted came from Beryl, who badly wanted to train in South Africa. ‘She worked on my mother for about six months to get her to agree to the move.’3 Eventually Beryl and Lady Kenmare came to an agreement that they would move to South Africa together and set up a training establishment there. Firstly, though, there was the question of finding suitable premises.
Beryl always made friends easily. She had contacts all over the world who she was convinced would come to her aid, and indeed she was right. This occasion was no exception, for some friends of Beryl’s, Air Vice Marshal Freddie Smart and his wife Doris, had moved to South Africa in the early 1960s due to his ill health. Sadly, even the move to a lower altitude with a temperate climate had not helped, and when Beryl contacted her, Doris Smart had been recently widowed. The letter from Beryl told Doris of her plans to move to the Cape to train, and of the search for a suitable establishment. Money, Beryl said, was no object whatsoever.
Doris accordingly approached appropriate estate agencies and sent Beryl details of various properties, including a stud farm called Broadlands. Having narrowed the choices down to two, Beryl and Lady Kenmare flew to South Africa within a week of receiving the information and had no hesitation in declaring that Broadlands was the ideal situation. The deal was struck on the spot.4
In August Beryl announced that she expected to move to the Cape in the following January, as private trainer to the countess. She would take with her a considerable proportion of the best open-class horses. Lady Kenmare purchased Spike, Speed Trial, Mountie and Battle Axe from Messrs Block and Soprani. Despite shipping in large tanks of spring water Beryl was still having difficulties with fluoride poisoning, and Spike was withdrawn as unfit though he remained Beryl’s best hope for the forthcoming East African Derby. In the event Beryl achieved a notable double with a new horse, Athi, who before her departure for South Africa won both the East African Derby and the St Leger in the season of 1964–65. It was Beryl’s fifth Derby winner and her fourth victory in the St Leger.
Some time after the new year, Doreen Bathurst Norman had ‘a yell for help from Beryl who was in the depths of packing up’.
I said of course I’d help, so I got the car out – it was an old Holden – and drove down to Naivasha from Thompson’s Falls where we were living. Forest Farm had been sold for settlement by then.5 I remember the drive down to Beryl’s place very well, for as I came over the escarpment the brakes failed.
We finally got everything pack
ed but there was a lot of fuss and bother getting exit permits for the horses and in the end they only came through the day they actually left. Jørgen was helping her make the arrangements, and he hadn’t bothered Beryl with the details, but actually I don’t think the permits had arrived when the horses left Naivasha.
Doreen was as sceptical as many others in Kenya of Beryl’s ability to take on the high-class bloodstock of the Cape with her Kenya countrybreds. Beryl, though, was convinced that she could make a success of it and clearly convinced Enid Kenmare, who had ‘all the money in the world, and thought that with Beryl as her private trainer she would sweep the boards’.6
Beryl had also persuaded Jørgen to accompany them to South Africa to manage Broadlands. It is doubtful that he ever seriously intended to do so as he had only recently invested heavily in his own farm, Kamwake.7 But he did drive down to South Africa with Beryl in her new blue Mercedes, and Beryl clearly thought he was going there on a permanent basis.8 Beryl had always had Jørgen around at weekends to tackle anything which was a problem to her. His help during those years cannot be overestimated. She depended on him absolutely and he had never failed her.
The horses travelled by sea to Durban and arrived in very poor condition after a ‘terrible voyage’ during which the temperatures in the hold reached 120 degrees. It took a long time to get them back into condition.9 The ménage, including Lady Kenmare’s nine assorted dogs and Beryl’s two great danes, settled into Broadlands, but Jørgen stayed only until he was satisfied that everything was functioning well. His departure was a very bitter blow to Beryl, though it came as no surprise to anyone else. After he left, Beryl became ‘unspeakably rude’ to Lady Kenmare.10
Straight on Till Morning Page 37
