Straight on Till Morning

by Mary S. Lovell

  Broadlands was a lovely place. Sited at Somerset West, near Lowry’s Pass on the national road, it was approached through a black wrought-iron gate flanked by two imposing white pillars. A half-mile, tree-lined drive led to a white-walled Cape Dutch house with huge blocks of stables set among 400 acres of green paddocks, orchards and vineyards.11 The house, which dated back to 1780, was one of the oldest in the area, and the Kenmare finances were put to work even before the new owner arrived, in a gutting and redecoration programme that had locals gossiping for weeks.

  Broadlands was the only training establishment in the Cape which was owned and run entirely by women. With Lady Kenmare and Beryl were Patricia Cavendish and a secretary Julie Wharton, ‘all of whom are passionately interested in horses and all have fascinating stories to tell’, the Cape Times reported.12 Miss Cavendish, whose love for animals was not confined to horses, told reporters the story of her pet lion cub Tana, who slept on her bed until as a four-year-old lioness she was taken to a game reserve. Miss Cavendish stayed with the lioness until she had been taught to hunt and look after herself. She had loved her life in Kenya, where she was surrounded by a collection of ‘wild’ animals, and initially resented the move to South Africa.13

  Julia Wharton met Lady Kenmare by accident. She was on holiday in Natal and had been asked by a friend to help unload Beryl’s string of horses from the ship at Durban and transport them to Broadlands. She met Lady Kenmare in a railway siding at Bellville and accepted the job as her personal secretary. Later Doreen Bathurst Norman found to her surprise that Julia was a distant cousin.

  If skill and dedication were a measure of success then this combination of enthusiasm and money should have been unbeatable. Beryl obtained a training licence, one of only two issued to women trainers at that time, and everything looked set fair. Broadlands did, in fact, enjoy early success and Beryl’s name as a winning trainer soon appeared in the lists. She scored a good double at one of her first meetings later that year when Marie Celeste II won the Durbanville Cup and Mountie won the third race of the day. Further victories with Title Deed and Kara Prince, Lone Eagle and Mountie followed, all viewed with a certain amount of astonishment because of their breeding. But Beryl felt that she was following in the hallowed footsteps of her father. He too had gone to Durban and trained successfully. ‘What would my father have done?’ was still her greatest aide-mémoire in times of stress. And the stress came all too soon.

  It was scarcely avoidable. Both Beryl and Enid Kenmare were beautiful women with strongly developed characters. Both were accustomed to getting their own way. In fact the combination of Beryl’s talent and Enid’s money was never enough to guarantee a successful union. Beryl had never worked happily with women, she was more at ease with, and preferred, the company of men. Nevertheless for a while both powerful personalities suffered the partnership to continue for each had her own reward, even from uneasy relationship.

  Beryl was not easy to work for. She was tough and demanding on the staff. One morning on a workout ride, a girl groom was thrown from a horse and broke her arm, and as she lay on the ground in considerable pain, Beryl rode back to see the cause of the delay. Looking at the girl, she said with exasperation, ‘Bloody fool!’ and rode away again, leaving someone else to take care of the injured girl. ‘That’s what she was like. Very hard. But if it had been her who’d fallen and broken her arm, she would have said the same thing, “Bloody fool!” and then she’d have got up and carried on, broken arm and all, I’ve no doubt. She was immensely courageous and stoical about pain,’ the former Miss Cavendish recalled.14

  In June 1965 Buster Parnell flew out from Ireland to ride for Lady Kenmare. His wife Anna had recently given birth to a son, David, and Beryl became the child’s godmother. ‘Funny little thing, isn’t he?’ she said when she first saw him, but she became quite fond of him in her own way – and also of his sister Tina. ‘She would sometimes say to Tina, “Come along, sweetie, let’s go and play,”’ Anna Parnell told me, ‘and she’d allow Tina to make up using all the contents of her make-up drawer. Tina was only about three years old then and loved it, she used to come home with her face in a terrible mess.’ By then Beryl would have tired of the fun. ‘What a dreadful little child,’ she’d say, handing Tina back to her parents.15

  Buster saw immediately that Beryl was unhappy. ‘One of the main problems was that she simply couldn’t get on with the stud-farm manager,’ he said. ‘He was undoubtedly knowledgeable about managing a stud, but he had no conception of how a training establishment should be run and they were constantly at loggerheads. Beryl often had to back down – being a private trainer isn’t quite the same as being a public one.’ One of her particular problems was the maintenance of gallops. The manager simply didn’t know how to keep the gallops as Jørgen had done. For example Beryl would constantly find that on the eve-of-race workout, a horse would go unsound because it had bruised a foot on a stone. ‘This would never have happened if Jørgen had been around – he would never have allowed that sort of thing to happen. Beryl had become accustomed to that level of back-up. She didn’t get it at Broadlands.’16

  The truce between Lady Kenmare and Beryl was thin on occasions, as Buster observed:

  Lady Kenmare threw lots of parties, luncheons and dinner parties – they were marvellous fun. There’d often be anything up to eighteen or twenty of us – a real mixture too, dukes, archbishops – you never knew who was going to be there. Beryl was always the last to arrive and she’d sail in, usually after everyone else had sat down, looking marvellous with her two boxers, Circe and Caesar, trailing her. She never consciously made an entrance, but it happened that way. Enid habitually allowed her two pugs to join her at dinner and the four dogs caused absolute havoc. It would always start well, but after a while there would be stirrings and murmurs from under the table. Then little growls. Eventually the diners would be politely holding on to their wine glasses and politely pretending they hadn’t noticed that the whole table literally shook from the minor war occurring around their feet. Eventually Beryl would say plaintively, ‘Enid, I do wish you would control your dogs, darling.’ Enid would smile sweetly and raise her glass – which never contained anything stronger than water or Coca Cola.17

  Anna Parnell remembered a similar incident: ‘Once at a particularly important luncheon Enid asked Beryl not to bring her dogs into the dining room. All went well until there was a great crash and Caesar and Circe leapt through the open window. All conversation was stopped, and I looked at Beryl who sat quite unperturbed, continuing her meal – I thought she was rather pleased.’18

  Buster stayed through 1967, but he found the situation almost intolerable. He had gone there to do a job of work and found himself in the middle of the constant squabbles. Matters did improve when the old manager left and a younger man was recruited from Kenya, but tragically he had not been there long before he was killed in a car accident outside the gates of Broadlands.

  Finally, Beryl could take no more. If she couldn’t manage the stables as she wanted, then she really couldn’t be expected to turn out winners. A final quarrel over stable management led her to leave, taking the few horses she herself owned – Niagara, Title Deed and Kara Prince. Responsibility for the break-up lay on both sides. Beryl had been for years a public trainer and therefore responsible to no one, except for the individual performance of a horse to its owner. But as a private trainer she was, ultimately, the paid servant of Lady Kenmare, and the silken chains weighed heavily. Lady Kenmare was then well into her seventies, and although she was only ten years older than Beryl, she looked and acted as though there were more than that number of years between them. She had suffered a back injury some years earlier and had (according to Beryl at least) begun to act in the cantankerous way of the elderly. ‘She could never make up her mind exactly what she wanted to do with the farmland. One minute she would plan to plant vines, and the next she would have them all ripped out for another crop. Beryl felt it was all very unsettling,’ Anna
Parnell stated.

  ‘Enid was getting very old and difficult. She couldn’t understand what I needed, and so I left,’ Beryl told me.19

  Lady Kenmare, who originally thought she had been buying into Broadlands in a partnership arrangement, with Jørgen Thrane taking all the administration and management off her hands, found instead that she was the sole owner, and having to take full responsibility. She had no help from Beryl, who was uncooperative and embittered by Thrane’s departure.20

  Hoping to set herself up as a public trainer, Beryl managed to find a temporary home for herself and the horses with a friend, Belinda Black.21 The new stables were in the Flats, a rather poor area and not at all what Beryl had been used to. But she couldn’t afford to set up properly, and despite her successful years she had no savings. Buster and Anna Parnell used to go out to see her during this time, before they too became discouraged and returned to Europe. ‘It was a really dreadful place she had there. You had to walk miles over sand to get to Beryl’s place, it was quite awful – and of course she had no money. She never really stood any chance of succeeding there. Oddly enough I became very good friends with her during that period. At Naro Moru she had never paid any attention to me, but at the Cape when she was unhappy and needed someone to talk to then I got to know her and liked her very much…’ Anna said.22

  Finally, after a row with the stewards at Cape Town, Beryl moved briefly to Natal, but after a few months decided to move permanently to Rhodesia.23 At sixty-six she was no youngster to be thinking of starting afresh in a new country where her reputation was unknown. However, few people would have guessed her age, for physically she was as slim and lovely as ever and looked at least twenty years younger than her true age. She always dressed in slinky, silky materials, and there was always some little item like a silk scarf, or some other accessory which added chic to her outfits. She moved with extraordinary lightness ‘as if she had wings on her ankles’, and it was as if age had passed her by. She settled on Inverness Farm at Ruwa near Salisbury, and at first she was confident that she could succeed there despite the lack of a ‘supporter’.

  Interviewed shortly after her arrival, she said, ‘I wish now that I’d settled here when I left Kenya…I would have been well established now. I have been very impressed with the standard of racing here…’ Asked about her flying career she replied, ‘I can’t remember how many hours I’ve logged – it must be about three thousand – but horses have always been my first love. I can’t wait for my first race, it beats flying every time for excitement.’24 In fact it was nearly thirty years since she had last piloted a plane, but the trails of her glamorous flying career still clung to her and whenever she could, she used them to get publicity for her training establishment.

  Peter Leth, an old friend from Naro Moru, where he worked for a while culling buffalo at Soysambu, was living in Rhodesia when Beryl arrived. He recalled, ‘She was taking a hell of a gamble when she went to Rhodesia. She had no contacts, she couldn’t get anyone to send good horses to her to train and she couldn’t get any jockeys to ride for her. I used to drive out to her place about ten miles from Salisbury to ride fast work for her. She was certainly in a mess financially and a friend of mine, a solicitor, tried to help her. But she never really had a chance there, the odds were all stacked against her.’ The odds included constant rows with the stewards, while concerns about her establishment revolved mainly around her doubtful financial ability to run a training yard. In addition Beryl could never accept handicaps allocated to her horses. In Kenya during her youth the stewards had all been family friends and to argue the handicap was all part of the game. In more formalized racing circles such arguments were viewed more seriously.

  ‘She was such a character you couldn’t help being fond of her, but she had a shocking temper,’ Leth told me. ‘On one occasion I rode a morning workout for her. When I got back to the stables, I slipped off the horse and turned to Beryl, expecting to be thanked or at least to discuss the performance of the horse. Instead I turned to get a bucket of cold water thrown over me with great passion. “You slowed that horse up,” Beryl stormed at me. Apparently there were prospective owners looking on and they hadn’t been impressed. I got the blame.’25

  Tired, dispirited and once again penniless, Beryl soon realized that she would have to return to Kenya. A wealthy friend helped her by buying her beloved Niagara for breeding. Part of this bargain was that Beryl should keep the resulting foal from Niagara’s visit to the top South African stallion, Ships Bell. Ships Bell had done little on the racecourse, for he damaged his knees and had to be pin-fired as a comparative youngster. He had been sold out of training for only 300 guineas. However his breeding was impeccable, being by Doutelle out of Belle of All (winner of the One Thousand Guineas at Newmarket), and he could get very good progeny. The result of his meeting with Niagara was the lovely little colt Water Boy, whom Beryl reckoned would be ‘a really great horse’.

  When in 1970 Beryl returned to Kenya she knew that she would need quick success. But the task was not so great as she had faced in Rhodesia. Here she was known, indeed was a celebrity, almost a legend. Her reputation and contacts were immense. When she found some difficulty in regaining her trainer’s licence she approached the (then) vice president, Daniel arap Moi, who was sympathetic and personally saw to it that she was registered as a trainer. Once again Aldo Soprani helped her by giving her his best horses to train. Tubby Block thought better of returning to her, and risking the constant shauries, but she immediately persuaded a few other influential owners, and she set up her establishment at Thika on Soprani’s coffee plantation.

  Her house was situated in the middle of the plantation, on the slope of a hill with railed paddocks at the side, and there were good stables. The disadvantage was that there was no jockey’s house nearby and jockeys had to travel by motorbike each day along seven miles of appalling tracks which were impassable in wet weather.

  Soprani’s trust in Beryl was not misplaced. Only weeks after the opening of the 1970–71 season she provided him with winner’s trophies. Using the recess between seasons to prepare the horses, she planned carefully and brought on two new purchases for Soprani, Heron and The Sultan. With Heron, a grey yearling bought from Jack Ellis for Soprani’s string, Beryl once again carried off the coveted Kenya Triple Crown of the East African Derby, Kenya St Leger and Kenya Guineas. With the brilliant two-year-old Sultan (winner of the Derby and St Leger) she also won the Futurity Stakes and the Champagne Stakes, and four others. In all, during that season of 1971–72 she helped to lead in twenty-three winners and became firmly entrenched in her usual position at the top of the leading trainers’ league table.

  After considerable difficulty she was able to import her own Water Boy into Kenya. The horse’s South African parentage was against him, however Beryl had powerful allies and she was not afraid to use them occasionally. In this instance the allies were patrons Peter Kenyatta, son of the President of Kenya, and the equally well-connected the Hon. Charles Njonjo. Whatever it took, Water Boy was imported and, despite inevitably heavy handicapping, bore out Beryl’s initial hopes.

  As a three-year-old he won four races including the important feature races Delamere Gold Vase, Italian Challenge Cup and the Summer Handicap. After his ‘surprise win’ in the Delamere Gold Cup, under the headline, ‘Red Faces after Water Boy’s win’, the East African Standard’s racing correspondent conveys Beryl’s attitude with precise humour:

  ‘I wish Water Boy was in the Derby,’ was the sentiment expressed somewhat understandably by the colt’s trainer after racing on Sunday – understandable for Beryl Markham that is, but a line of thought likely to put Mr Michael Cunningham-Reid off his cigars. For on Sunday [his horse] Devon Lad…had run a really tremendous race to finish six lengths clear of the whole Delamere Gold Vase field bar Water Boy.

  Mrs Markham seemed to gain a good deal of amusement, after the race, even if not before it, from my own conclusion last Saturday that Water Boy did not have
the class for such a contest.26

  Water Boy never went on to achieve the greatness that Beryl predicted, although he won a total of ten races. ‘He was weighted out of it,’ she said matter of factly to me, ‘his breeding, you see.’ Nevertheless his speed was impressive, and his time over 1400 metres of 1 minute 26.2 seconds remained a course record for many years, vindicating Beryl’s faith in him.

  In 1971 Beryl received news that Gervase had been involved in a car accident and was critically injured. Mansfield flew to France to be with his son during the weeks that he hovered between life and death. ‘During that time I really got to know him,’ said Gervase’s wife, Viviane. ‘He was so kind to us and so sweet to the girls. It was the first time since our marriage that he had behaved as I thought a father, and a grandfather, should. That was a terrible time for us all. Gervase was in great pain but he was, like Beryl, immensely stoic. The bravest person I have ever met in that respect.’27

  Following their visit to Beryl in Kenya in the mid 1950s Gervase and Viviane lived in London for twelve years with their two daughters Fleur and Valery. For most of that time Gervase worked for the Financial Times. In December 1967 they moved to France where Gervase launched an English weekly edition of Le Monde. A disagreement over advertising policy caused his resignation and he subsequently worked for a while at the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris. Beryl could not afford to travel to Europe. She was distressed when she heard that her son had died in hospital, but she had never been close to him. Many of her recent friends were not even aware that she had a son and the sensitive, introverted man had made little claim on the mother he saw as an unattainable figure. Gervase’s body was taken to England for burial in the Markham family tomb and within months Mansfield too was dead.28