The years at the Guards Polo Club were amongst my happiest. Annual tours became the norm, playing for English or quasi-English teams. Probably the most memorable of these was playing in Chile with the captain of the English team, Julian Hipwood, and another English player, Lord Charles Beresford.
The Chilean people and their country were both magnificent, the memories a thousandfold. One in particular was of a small club in the foothills of the mighty Andes. We were probably only ten to fifteen miles away from the base of the mountain, yet the heat on the pitch was in the region of 115 degrees. This was to be further intensified by the heat generated by horse and rider during a frantic seven-and-a-half-minute chukka.
At the end of the first chukka, my head felt like a volcano that was about to explode. I rode to the sidelines and as my feet hit the ground I grabbed for the bottles of water on a nearby table before throwing myself under the only bit of available shade, which turned out to be a kind of rustic bus shelter, topped off by a sheet of rusting, corrugated metal.
Sitting there, dehydrated and exhausted on the ground, it was a minute or two before I finally took my head out of my hands and looked up, and there stood that towering mountain range where, in spite of the all-consuming heat, the peaks were glistening with snow. The effect was a bit like an Irish coffee: white and cold on top, but underneath brown and as hot as hell.
As well as Chile, polo has taken me to France, Belgium, the Caribbean, India, Australia, South America and Pakistan. It was in America on another of these trips where an incident happened that I would probably rather forget. We were due to play the Texas State Side at medium goal polo. The hospitality was fantastic. Parties, barbecues, and dinners – all were laid on for us. After beating a Southern American team in a friendly match, our stock rose even higher, and on the third day we were invited to be the guests of honour on something the locals called a night ride, which from what we could gather comprised of lots of beer, wine, women, song and, oh yes, horses and candles.
Before telling the next part of the story, I would like to say that I was not drunk or legless; I was plain stupid. We met first for drinks, warm hot toddies and beer, before setting out for the stables and horses. All were lined up along a tall fence. There were probably in excess of 120 horses with their riders in various degrees of readiness. It seemed to be more of a posse than a ride. Each rider carried either a candle or an oil lamp with which to light our way into the badlands.
‘Mount up and move ’em out!’ came the order across the still night air, and lights danced left and forward: the US cavalry was on its way. Within thirty seconds, the flank of horses took on the appearance of a huge man-made firefly. I applied slight pressure to the mouth of my steed, at the same time squeezing with my legs. This action normally brings some kind of response from the animal beneath me, but nothing moved. Urgently I squeezed again, this time pulling the reins straight across to my left side, and his left shoulder. No response. I kicked even harder.
‘Come on, move, move!’
The more I screamed at him, the more high-pitched my voice became. I was now getting frantic. The firefly was fast disappearing in front of me, and I was in danger of getting left there on my own. Here I was, the great polo player who wasn’t even able to get his horse to walk. This mount wasn’t going anywhere. All my renewed efforts achieved absolutely nothing, not even the slightest twitch.
With panic setting in, I strained my eyes into the fast fading light, but the four or five horses that had been at my rear were now some distance ahead. Their lights were dwindling with each passing step and, horror of horrors, Johnny Kidd, one of the English players, was rapidly being eaten up by the darkness. I was alone, marooned in a sea of blackness, unable to make the beast take a solitary step forward.
‘Johnny, Johnny!’ I shouted into the darkness. ‘Come here. Come look at this.’
Under the circumstances, there was very little else I could say.
‘Johnny,’ I repeated, and suddenly from out of the blackness he appeared. His legs almost touched the ground as he rode – Kiddy-boy must have been six foot six in his bare feet. He looked like an up-market version of Don Quixote. One thing I always remember about Johnny Kidd, and it is a thought he should be happy with, is that whenever I get a mental picture of him, I always envisage him with a warm smile grinning from ear to ear.
‘What’s up now, Bryan?’ he inquired.
Leaning forward over my ‘dead’ horse’s ear, I cautioned Johnny to talk quietly, and said, ‘I can’t get this fucking pony to move.’
He leant his six-foot-six frame forward and peered at my mount, and then went into near uncontrollable laughter that shook him from his head down through his body, right to his boots. Even his horse rocked as his mirth continued. He recovered momentarily after about forty seconds, which allowed me time in which to enquire as to what was so fucking funny?
His words hit me like a bolt in the cold night air.
‘Try taking the head collar off. Or untie the horse from the wall. It might go then!’
With that, he went into a new round of total hysterics, which nearly caused him to fall off his horse. I could have died. All I wanted to do at that moment was to disappear into that rich Texan soil. Thank god it was pitch black. Johnny and I quickly worked out a deal that was especially weighted in his favour. Silence does not come cheap.
Mind you, I did see the funny side of the whole affair as lamps in hand we cantered into the darkness to seek out and join the glimmering trail.
One of my dreams, albeit a remote one, was to build a new polo club. A club with style, humour and, above all, great polo. Too many times in the past, my ideas about facilities in other clubs had fallen on deaf ears; I was always suggesting ways in which I believed they could be improved for both players and members, but my views were not always shared. However, in the back of my mind, there was always this tiny thought of what could be.
By now, Greta and I had moved with our two children to Bartlett House, a Georgian house with stables and paddocks in Holyport, near Maidenhead. Early in the spring of 1986, I was faced with the dilemma of having a horse that needed to be schooled, but the paddocks around the house were very wet and unusable. I remembered a player at the Guards Polo Club, Norman Lobel, who had a purpose-built riding track at his house situated somewhere between my home and the Guards. I rang Norman and asked if I could bring my horse over to use his track for half an hour.
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘Help yourself.’
I had been schooling the horse for about thirty-five minutes and was preparing to leave when he approached me.
‘How’s it going?’
‘It’s one that I bred. It’s green, but it’s got possibilities,’ I said.
I had met Norman casually at the Guards, where he was a player, but up to this point had never spent any time with him. A few more minutes drifted by, spent in conversation about horses, players, and the coming season. Finally, the time to depart arrived. My groom loaded up the pony and I bade Norman farewell, thanking him for his hospitality. I was leaving his drive, when I remembered that I had seen a ‘For Sale’ sign at some stables about a mile down the road from him. My son Jamie, then ten years old, had pointed them out to me.
‘Do you know anything about the property that’s for sale down the road? The one with the stables?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My brother and I went to see it a couple of weeks ago. We weren’t impressed. The land’s in a terrible condition, basically the place looks like a junk yard.’
‘Well, I’m going to have a look anyway,’ I said. ‘It’s on my way home.’
‘I’m doing nothing,’ he rejoined. ‘Would you mind if I came along?’
The place was very much as Norman had described it, although the stables, which had been built at the turn of the century, still maintained a certain charm and dignity, in spite of their decay. The rest, however, was a mess. Two or three large ugly sheds were being used for all manner of storage, including a dozen or so old Bentleys and Rollers.
A couple of thousand bales of rather mangy hay, which had lost all of its freshness and life the season before, lay piled high. The bales on the bottom were mouldy and black through rainwater that had seeped through the roof and walls, and birds’ nests and long dark rats’ holes were in abundance.
Worse, much worse, was to come. The fields surrounding the stables were wrecked and broken. Undernourished grass lay yellow, feeding off a soil so dead that it could hardly throw up a buttercup or daisy, let alone a good crop of hay. There were broken trees and filthy ponds full of overgrown weeds and algae, while a veritable army of rotting tractor parts and plough shears lay scattered around like the wasted vehicles of war. Then we came across a totally dilapidated cattleshed, with old cow dung two feet thick inside, though, judging by its current state, no self-respecting cow had been near it for years.
And yet, as I stood there amidst all this dereliction and decay, I sensed it had magic. It sat on its own, forlorn in this wilderness, waiting for someone to remove the dustsheets of time, so that it could live and breathe again. But wait, what was this? From where I stood amongst the waist-high weeds and bracken bushes, I could see through the mangy trees on the other side of a large, listless pond, the remains of a racetrack.
‘You know, Norm,’ the words slipped out idly, but with great anticipation. ‘I reckon it’s about 150 to 200 yards to that fence.’
Norman looked at me, shrugged, and said, ‘So what?’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said, then paced in large, looping strides the distance from the cow shed to the far rails, picking my way between large rabbit warrens and squelchy, slippery ground – 180 yards. I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly the dream was becoming clear. If north to south was 180 yards, then east to west must be in excess of 500 yards. That was it. This was to be the Number 1 polo field, and the cow shed would be the Royal Box. In that moment, I knew exactly what had to be done and how to do it.
‘Bryan, Bryan?’
I looked up at Norman, who was standing beneath a 200-year-old oak tree, right in the middle of my polo field.
‘What exactly are you doing?’
His words brought me out of my reverie.
‘I’m going to build a new polo club. The first one in England for donkey’s years, and it’s going to be right here.’
‘What do you mean a polo club? You couldn’t turn this place into a field with decent hay, let alone a polo club.’
‘Norman. I’ll fill those ponds, cut down those trees, level this ground, and—’
My words were cut short. Norman had zipped across the distance that separated us, faster than I had seen him move all day. He was now right in front of me.
‘Can I be your partner?’
‘What? No, no, I don’t want any partners.’
‘Bryan, I want to be your partner in this polo club.’ I looked at him for a long, hard minute. Why not? Anyone who wanted to start a polo club had to be crackers, so why not two of us?
‘Bryan, look, I’ve got two sets of goal posts at home, and dozens of polo balls. What more do we need?’
We shook hands and the fun began. Less than twenty-four hours later, at midday on Sunday, I was to be shaking hands yet again. This time, it was to be with the vendor of the land. By the Tuesday afternoon, it was signed, sealed, and delivered. After the first rush of blood to the head reality took over. Suddenly the sheer enormity of the task became obvious.
This was not merely a case of cutting down a few trees and moving some soil around with a tractor. Oh no. This was proper landscaping. We needed earth-clearing machines as big as buses – the ones they use on motorways – and drainage machines that had vast lengths of plastic pipe perched on top, like a giant cotton reel. This was going to be huge.
Ochre-coloured machines pushed and shoved thousands of tons of soil every hour. In fact, 15,000 cubic metres of topsoil was moved, while 20,000 metres of subsoil was shifted to level the area. We laid 17.5 kilometres of plastic pipes to drain 1, 2, and 3 grounds. We used 120 tons of lime, 10 tons of red slag, 8 tons of fertiliser, 3.5 tons of grass seed, and 1,000 tons of fine sand.
Each working day for six weeks, the contractors burned hundreds of gallons of diesel in their machines. But this was only the beginning. We would also need two miles of fencing, two hundred horse boxes, a riding track, clubhouse, tennis courts, and don’t let’s forget the bar.
We started work in May, only to be pulled up days later by the local planning officer, who advised us that we needed planning permission to turn a field that had had horses on it into a flat field that was going to have horses on it.
I simply could not believe that we would need permission to do this. Enquiries were made, and the process seemed simple enough. We had to put advertisements in four local newspapers announcing our intention to build a polo club. The planning officer pointedly assured us that if no letters of disagreement were received at the end of a period of three weeks, we would be granted immediate permission from the dedicated powers (the chief planning officer). However, if there was even one letter of complaint, it would go before the combined planning committee in August.
This was potentially a major disaster for us, as it was imperative that the grass seed be sown by the end of September, and the groundwork alone would take up to four months. In simple terms, it meant that if for any reason we had to wait until August, we would be set back a full year. However, with no option but to comply with the council’s request, we duly placed our advertisements in the papers, and the machines stayed idle.
Three teeth-grinding weeks passed and the council received no letters. On the twenty-first day, my architect rang the council, who confirmed that as no letter of complaint had been received, our permission would be granted.
The very next morning, the twenty-second day, we had our first piece of major publicity on the new project. The headline rang out: PRINCE CHARLES’ FRIEND OPENS NEW POLO CLUB. The story read that the club was destined to become the ‘Annabel’s’ of English polo (the article was also accompanied by a not-too-bad photograph of Prince Charles and me). Included in the feature was a mention of where the club was going to be situated. The next day, the council received three letters of protest automatically.
Then all hell broke loose.
Our architect received a phone call from the chief planning officer saying that because they had now received these letters our application had to go before the committee in August. The council was now in the process of changing the rules in the middle of the game. I must have telephoned the planning officer thirty times in the next two days, trying to get an appointment, but to no avail. They were all too busy.
On the third day I left a message with his secretary saying that I was coming to see him at 11.30 the next morning, and would wait there at the council offices as long as it took for him to grant me an interview. I arrived the following day dressed in a black pinstripe suit, black shirt, and a garish pink tie. Within thirty minutes, I was sitting in the office of our chief planning officer.
After the usual pleasantries had been done away with, I asked how the council could change the rules to suit themselves.
‘Well,’ he explained, ‘the letters arrived a day or two after the twenty-first day, and er––’
‘Not good enough,’ I interrupted. ‘You made the rules and we complied by them, and now I want you to grant us permission.’
Twenty-five minutes had now passed and an impasse had been reached. The council had reneged on our agreement and they were not about to step down. I stood up, walked to the door, turned back and said, ‘Based on the information received by my architect, from this council, I signed a contract for £1.5 million with a contractor to build my polo fields and unless I receive permission to build within twenty-four hours I will have no recourse other than to sue the council for this amount plus punitive damages.’
‘You can’t do that,’ was his incredulous reply. ‘You can’t sue the council!’
‘Just watch your letter-box, and you’ll see what can and cannot be done.’
Before I had taken another step, our man asked if I would mind waiting in the outer office for a moment or two. He then adjourned to a separate office. Four minutes later, we had our planning permission. In the years since this occasion, our relationship with the council has improved no end and although I have asked the question several times no one has been able to explain why they did what they did.
We cranked up the diesel engines and those great earthmovers moved forward, devouring all that stood in their way. Everything went well for the first six weeks, until the first of August. I remember it as if it were yesterday. The heavens opened up and as the Bible said, ‘the rains smote the Earth’. For twenty-eight days in succession, it poured. The fields became a sea of wet, clingy clay, machines stood idle, and men scratched their heads. A miniature Flanders field.
By day fifteen, I was almost a nervous wreck. Every morning, I awoke hardly daring to open my eyes, or to bring my head from under the sheets to hear the incessant pitter-patter of raindrops on windowpanes. By the twentieth day, I actually started developing an ulcer, for we still had one and a half months’ work to do and if that seed did not go in there would be no polo the following May.
The word amongst those who knew in the polo community was that we had no chance of playing in May anyway, because the grass would not have taken by then. Oddly enough, the only person from the hierarchy of polo at this time who had shown any sign of putting his name to the project, or helping in any way, was Prince Charles. As far back as mid-June, in conversation one afternoon, he asked to hear all about the project and said that he would love to join. Because of this, he became the first member of the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club.
The grass seeds went in at the end of September and by the following May the fields lay there green and bright. Norman, Michael Amoore (our polo manager) and I mounted three horses and rode onto the pitches. We galloped, turned, stopped and repeated this for twenty minutes. The grounds were fine. On the first of May 1986, the first chukkas were played.
With the groundworks completed, our minds turned to other issues such as running this new polo club, and the one thing that polo players need more than anything are polo ponies. Around ninety-five per cent of all polo ponies playing in England originate from Argentina, the reasons being twofold.
Firstly, the vast number of ponies available there, which are used as working horses for separating cattle and sheep on the huge pampas; secondly, they were bred from the American quarter-horse and the English thoroughbred. The English thoroughbred gives them speed out of the box and the quarter-horse gives them stamina and turning ability on their hocks – the two essentials in the making of a good polo pony and, indeed, a working horse. Also, and quite importantly, the price, as breeding a pony in England is extremely expensive, because they need three to four years of training; something ponies in Argentina get every working day.
So it was to Argentina we went.
• • •
Major Ronald Ferguson always maintained that he had used the Wigmore Club ‘for massage only … and by that I mean a totally straight one’ and as ‘a kind of cocoon where I could shut myself away for an hour and think.’ Later it was alleged that the News of the World had actually been targeting a senior politician who was also a member of the club, and Ferguson had simply been caught up in the tabloid’s sting.
In his autobiography, The Galloping Major, he revealed that his biggest disappointment was the reaction of Prince Philip: ‘I was deeply wounded by Prince Philip’s refusal, as President of the Club, to discuss it with me. I made repeated requests to see him, and appointments were made which were subsequently cancelled.’
He left the Guards Polo Club after not being re-elected as deputy chairman, and went to work for Bryan at the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club, while he continued to be Prince Charles’s polo manager, scheduling his matches and looking after his ponies and equipment.
This relationship ended in 1993, after further tabloid revelations about an affair with Lesley Player, a young businesswoman with whom Ferguson had organised a Ladies’ International Polo Tournament. His position with Prince Charles was terminated abruptly in a letter from the Prince’s private secretary. Ferguson complained later, ‘After serving him faithfully and unquestioningly for twenty-one years, I was appalled by the way it was handled. The Prince of Wales did not have the guts to send for me and tell me straight to my face.’
Soon afterwards, Ferguson told Bryan he would also have to leave the Berkshire. After the Major died in 2003 at the age of seventy-one, Bryan added this postscript to his original manuscript.
• • •
Ronnie’s problems were twofold: he became the father of a princess, and his naivety. It is well documented how he wrote to a national newspaper asking if he could purchase the original cartoon of him coming out of the massage parlour; at the time he had done nothing wrong, as far as he was concerned. To compound his naivety, he wrote the letter on Guards Polo Club paper, which was not simply naive, to use his favourite phrase, it was plain ‘stupid’. It cost him his position in the club, and later his role as Prince Charles’s polo manager.
Having left the Guards, possibly the biggest disappointment in his life, Ron came to work for me as the sponsorship director of the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club. Ronnie was the most successful sponsorship director we have ever had. In fact, so successful was he that at the start of his second season with us, I had to ask him to cut down on the number of sponsored days he was bringing in. The reason for this being very personal, as it was expected for the chairman of a major polo club to turn up suited and booted each time a major day took place.
In his first year, Ronnie came up with about fourteen days. This may not seem like a lot, until you consider that the main sponsorship day was a Sunday. The heart of the season runs from the end of May until the end of July, so poor old Brysey was on duty, suited and booted in shirt, tie and suit virtually every single weekend from 11.30 a.m. till 4 p.m. So I asked Ronnie to cut down in his second season to give me a breather, but before he had got into his stride Lesley Player arrived on the scene.
When the story broke, the press ran riot; there were dozens of paparazzi outside my house, the Polo Club was overrun: they were everywhere. What better than the father of a princess having an affair, truly his annus horribilis? Ron finally came up to me and said, ‘Bugler, this can’t go on, I’m sorry, it’s having a dreadful effect on your club. I think I’d better go.’
So Ron left. He retired to Dummer, if not a broken man, then very disappointed. He didn’t deserve it, he was unique.
When my daughter Karina was born prematurely in 1979, weighing only 2.5lbs, the hospital was in total stress as one of the important parts of her incubator was malfunctioning and they couldn’t find a replacement. I mentioned it to Ron later that evening.
At 4.30 in the morning, I received a phone call from him to say he had been scouring the whole of Hampshire and the South and that he had finally managed to procure this new part that we required. He then delivered it to Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in Hammersmith. This he did of his own volition and it took him the best part of a night.
Ronnie Ferguson was a true friend, someone you could rely on in adversity. Sure he bellowed, but he had a heart of gold. His youngest daughter and my goddaughter, Eliza, is today a beautiful young woman and is a constant reminder to me of a man that I literally loved.