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 thoroughbreds 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 impossible.
‘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:
Beryl had used her persuasive powers on my manager and told him I’d agreed to let her build a house on my property. She had turned down the idea of buying the property next door and got away with using my farm. Well, I let it carry on. There was no point in doing anything about it then because the place next door had been bought – snapped up by somebody else. Quite rightly, it was a real bargain! Anyway, her establishment was soon completed and she moved in with her horses.11
Tubby was the son of Abraham Block, a pioneer who had arrived in British East Africa in 1903 from South Africa, at the time when it was proposed that the protectorate could provide a homeland for the Jews. This scheme did not materialize, but Block stayed on, and although he had no money he was befriended by Lord Delamere. Over years of immense hard work and sacrifice he became involved in many business activities ‘usually profitably’, but on one occasion at least, he was reduced to his last span of oxen. His experience must have been akin to that of Beryl’s father, though Block would not have had Clutterbuck’s initial advantages of birth and social position. Tubby was born in 1919, and was still a small child when his father acquired the Norfolk Hotel through a shrewd piece of wheeler-dealing. Abraham gave up his other interests to concentrate on the hotel business, founding Block Hotels, and in the process creating a dynasty.12 Tubby, like Beryl, was a child of Africa. They dealt well together.
Beryl’s house at Naivasha was at the edge of the lake on the way to Hell’s Gate, the district adjacent to the Maasai Reserve. It was the best house she ever had in Kenya, and the one she most liked. The number of birds was almost incalculable and the area was once described by Sir Peter Scott as the finest bird sanctuary anywhere in the world. ‘One was always awakened by the cry of the fish eagle, and a boat trip on the lake was like stepping into a Disney film. There were quite incredible birds everywhere,’ Doreen Bathurst Norman recalled. ‘From the giant goliath herons and countless kingfishers, to lily trotters dashing across the lily leaves. The early-morning haze on the water reminded one of a painting by Turner – it was a world of magic.’ Tubby Block continued Beryl’s story:
After Beryl moved into Naivasha, Aldo Soprani and I gave Beryl quite a few horses. She used to tell us which horses to buy. She always did us extremely well in that respect – we were leading owners for three years running. We had four Derby winners and won every other classic – every other race there was to win on the Nairobi race course.
Buster Parnell told me of some of the horses that Beryl located for Block and Soprani:
Mountie was one of them. He was a mountain of a horse but pound for pound he was the best horse we ever bought. Beryl was in the hairdresser’s when she heard the asking price, £1000. That was two arms and two legs in those days. She said she’d take him. ‘Tubby can afford it,’ she said airily. He won eleven races and was never beaten. Spike was another good horse she found for Tubby. Money (other people’s, especially) was no object to Beryl. When we went to buy Spike, she watched him gallop down the paddock then she turned to Noreen Kidman and said, ‘Yes, we’ll have him.’
‘Hold on,’ said Noreen. ‘You don’t know how much I want for him yet.’
‘I said we were buying him, sweetie,’ said Beryl. ‘Not paying for him. You’ll have to discuss the price with Tubby.’
A constant source of annoyance to Block and Soprani was Beryl’s habit of running several of their horses in the same race. She was never sure which was the best horse on the day. If she told them X was best that day, they could almost be sure that Y would romp home.
In the 1961–62 Derby she ran two of our horses, Rio Grande, which was the favourite ridden by the stable jockey, and Speed Trial, ridden by veteran jockey Arthur Orchardson who was then sixty-three years old. Needless to say Speed Trial won!13
Beryl always regarded Speed Trial as ‘the most brilliant horse I have ever trained, until he went wrong’.14 Buster Parnell explained that the horse was once frightened by pigs, had reared up and fallen over, damaging his spine. ‘He was never quite the same after that.’
Arthur Orchardson had grown up with Beryl at Njoro, and had absorbed almost as much of the Clutterbuck equine magic touch as Beryl had. As well as being a good jockey (he won many East African classics), he was a first-class shot, and took a third prize at Bisley in the mid 1960s using the old 303 rifle. Arthur donned his boots and silks – and had his skull-cap tied on – before eleven o’clock. Then he walked nervously around the race course for hours before the race, and was stunned and delighted by his unexpected win. He bought a sports-model racing bike out of the proceeds.
On the weekend after his Derby win, Anna and Buster Parnell passed Arthur on the main road and stopped to talk. He was cycling from Nairobi to Nakuru. Anyone who knows this road will be impressed, for it consists of a series of significant undulations and under the heat of the equatorial sun at heights of over six thousand feet, it was not a ride to be undertaken lightly at any age.
Despite her owners’ complaints Beryl continued to run several horses together, and Buster Parnell particularly remembered one race. It was not a classic or even very important, but all races were important to Beryl. Buster was riding the favourite who had been backed down to four-to-one on; Tony Thomas, the second stable-jockey, was on a fifteen-to-one outsider. ‘Look,’ Buster said to Tony before the race, ‘your horse is only here today for the outing. Tuck him in behind the others and take him round. If you can get a place, let him go, but whatever you do, don’t pass me!’ As the field came round Cemetery Corner at the Ngong Forest course, Buster suddenly found Tony was up alongside him, sawing at his horse’s mouth. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he asked angrily.
‘I can’t hold him.’
‘Well he can’t win, you’ll bloody well have to hold him.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Fall off the bloody thing if you have to!’ Buster said, and kicked on hard to pass his colleague. As Buster flashed by the winning post, an empty horse shot past him – it was Tony’s mount. Buster looked around and asked the other jockeys if they’d seen Tony fall, but no one had seen anything. But retribution was just around the corner, for over the loud speaker system came the instruction, ‘Will Buster Parnell please report to the stewards.’
Buster entered the room shaking like a leaf and looked around at the grim faces of the stewards, and then at Tony who was holding his head at an odd angle and gazing at Buster with mute appeal in his eyes.
‘Parnell. I understand that as you came around Cemetery Corner you instructed Thomas to fall off his horse because he looked like overtaking you. Is that right?’
Buster thought for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, m’lord.’
There was an interested shuffling of bodies in the seats in front of him. ‘I see. Can you give us your reasons?’
‘Well, my lord. It occurred to me that if the number one stable-jockey on a horse backed at four-to-one on was beaten by a horse from the same stable, ridden by the second jockey carrying odds of fifteen to one, the crowd might not to be too happy about it.’
There was silence. Then, ‘Wait outside, Parnell. Thomas, you can go.’
Ten minutes later the senior steward came out. ‘All right, Parnell, you can go. But tell Mrs Markham not to run two horses in the same race if there’s likely to be a repetition of this situation!’ Fortunately Beryl was amused when he told her.
Her undisputed reign over the Kenya turf continued, and by the mid 1960s she had won the Kenya St Leger four times (including her win in 1926 with Wise Child) and the East African Derby five times. With Parnell as her stable-jockey, Beryl changed the face of racing in Kenya, and set standards for performance on Kenya turf. Parnell thinks she could have done this anywhere in the world. ‘No matter where you are you have to beat the competition. That’s what she set out to do and she could have done it anywhere. She proved that when she went down to South Africa with her Kenya countrybreds and won there, against top-class horses…’
I asked Buster to tell me about some of Beryl’s owners and he obliged, characteristically:
That whole period was a fusion of talents and coincidence. Beryl, Soprani, Block and me. In particular Block and Soprani provided the money for Beryl to really show what she could do. She never could have done it all without them. Between 1962 and 1964, Block and Soprani had something like sixty-five horses with us – Soprani was a coffee baron up at Thika. She gave them what they wanted in the way of winners, but she certainly got her money’s worth in return. She used to sit outside the Stanley [one of Block’s hotels] in the Thorn Tree café15 and say to the manager, ‘Send that funny little thing out to me to do my nails.’ And then, while holding court like the Queen of Sheba, she’d have her nails manicured by one of the girls from the beauty shop. ‘Send the bill to Tubby would you?’ she’d call out as she left.
Sir Derek Erskine was another owner. He was a wonderful old boy; a charming man. He had a lisp and couldn’t sound his Rs. He built a huge swimming pool on the first floor of his home and when asked why, said, ‘To keep the fwogs out of course.’ He was immensely wealthy and owned a rather lovely Bentley. Once at the race course he ran out of petrol. ‘Lend me ten shillings would you old chap?’ he asked. Him with all that money and me on a jockey’s pay! ‘You must be joking,’ I said. ‘Ten bob’s worth of petrol in that thing won’t get you far.’ ‘No, but it will get me to the gawage, where I have a cwedit account.’ I never got the money back! He had the best string of polo ponies in the country, but he wasn’t a great player. He used to gallop up and down all day wearing them out and not scoring goals. Sometimes, when you won a race on one of his horses Sir Derek would give you a present in kind. He had a grocery/greengrocery wholesale business (which was why we called him the Galloping Greengrocer), and usually you got a case of something which had been ‘sticking’ in the warehouse. Once I was the lucky recipient of a case of tinned prunes. I thanked him, not quite sure of my luck, and he peered at me, saying earnestly, ‘They’re warver good for you, you know. Only twy not to eat them all at once.’ When he got his knighthood I congratulated him. ‘Yes,’ he said brightly, telling me he had to go to London to be touched on the shoulder by Her Majesty. ‘Fwightfully nice of her wasn’t it?’ I loved him, and so did everyone else.
Living in isolation sometimes had its drawbacks, such as the time Buster recalled when one of the horses developed a hernia.
It was Rio Grande, a big colt who showed a lot of promise. We called in the vet but he was a new chap. Had never even castrated a horse, let alone operated on a hernia. We had no electricity, just candles…There wasn’t enough pinker, pinker, to get electricity out to the stables. Beryl got John Pettifer on the phone from Limuru. He gave instructions by phone and I ran between Beryl and the new vet with instructions and questions. It was a total success and a month later at Nairobi, Rio was the biggest certainty of the day.
Mickey Migdoll, a great chum of Beryl’s, had put a very large bet on him, the biggest bet he’d ever had on a horse in his life, and now he was sweating on it. When we started Rio jumped out of the stalls in front, really full of himself, but when we got to the first corner he became confused and ran the wrong way up a slip road. The rest of the field put on a spurt, and by the time I turned Rio and set sail after them, they were a couple of furlongs ahead of me. Mickey Migdoll was furious. He took off his hat and slammed it down to the ground. ‘What a fix!’ he said with understandable bitterness ‘That’s the biggest swindle I’ve ever heard of. I’m never coming near this place again.’ And he got into his car and drove to the gate. As he reached the gate he heard the crowd cheering. ‘Who won after all?’ he asked the gateman. ‘Rio Grande won, bwana.’ Hardly believing him, Mickey rushed back into the stands to find that Rio Grande had won by three lengths. There was no stopping him. When I caught up with the others I gave Rio a little push and he sailed past them as if they were standing still.
Mickey also recalled this race but his version is as follows:
It was a race where Rio Grande was in such company that I thought the only way he could be beaten was if he fell down (he started at odds of one to three on), and that it would be a mere formality to pick up one hundred pounds, which was a lot of money in those days. So I laid the odds; three hundred pounds to win one hundred pounds. Sitting in the box and watching the race, I saw that Rio Grande was last by twenty lengths and appeared to be going further back. I turned to Paddy [Mickey’s wife] and said, ‘You see that horse at the back of the field, I have three hundred pounds on him!’ Anyway he maintained this position as they turned into the straight and I really thought I had lost my money, when all of a sudden Rio Grande took hold of the bit, and before you could say Jack Robinson he had hit the front and went on to win by over three lengths.
Undoubtedly Mickey lived through some anxious moments; Buster’s more colourful version was probably born in the after-race release of tension and high spirits. He is a born raconteur and was happy to tell me another story about racing in Kenya.
Peccadillo was a fantastic miler that Beryl trained, and he could not be beaten over that distance. Once though, he was beaten. A farmer from up country had gone bankrupt just before this particular race. He was a very well-liked man and his syces and some of the jockeys had clubbed together, putting the entire amount of money they collected on a rank outsider in the race at fifteen to one. This horse, a mare, couldn’t touch Peccadillo under normal circumstances of course, but when I got down to the start I noticed that she was foaming with sweat and literally jumping out of her skin. Doped to the eyeballs – this was in the days before mass dope testing. I mentioned the mare’s appearance to her jockey who put me firmly in the picture. ‘This horse wins this race. Don’t get in my way!’ he warned me grimly. Not that I had any choice. When the machine opened, the mare shot out in front leaving a stream of bubbles behind her. I pushed Peccadillo for all I was worth but the best I could manage was a poor second. When the horses were led into the winner’s enclosure one of the senior stewards stepped forward. ‘I say!’ he said, ‘I know that horse and I think she’s been d…’ He didn’t get any further. All I saw was a hand come out of the crowd with a brick in it. It hit the speaker on the head and down he went. By the time he came round both horse, owner and prize money had gone. We never saw either of ’em again.
Buster was champion jockey five times in Kenya. He won the title each time he contested the championship and was never beaten. When, in the mid 1960s he was offered a good post in Ireland, Beryl was very unselfish. ‘Of course you must go,’ she told him when he expressed doubts. ‘It’s a marvellous opportunity!’ It was, for he became champion jockey there. This might be considered surprising in view of the fact that for some years he had been riding in Scandinavia and East Africa, areas not noted for prominence in first-class racing circles. However it indicates the level of performance that he and Beryl had jointly presented in Kenya.
At the height of her success, Beryl was like an eagle. No one and nothing could touch her then, and after a successful race meeting she was as high as if she had been on drugs. On the day Lone Eagle won the Derby she went to dinner in the New Stanley Grill. She timed her entrance just right – everyone had just finished their fish course. As she entered the room everyone rose to their feet and gave her a standing ovation. She was like a queen as she swept to her table, amidst cries of, ‘Well done Beryl!’ ‘Oh thank you darling!’ she’d say, smiling and blowing a kiss here and a giving a little wave there. ‘So kind of you, sweetie,’ she’d say as she patted an admirer’s cheek. It was almost as though she had a hundred-watt bulb in her head and the rest of us had only seventy-five.
As always, in social matters she was unreliable. She would accept dinner invitations and just not turn up. ‘Silly little man, he must have made a mistake!’ she’d say, when her host complained. This was a well-entrenched habit noted by Florence Desmond twenty-five years earlier. Probably it stemmed from her upbringing; East Africans have the same disdain for time. But if a horse was involved Beryl was always punctual and was never late with a feed or a poultice.
Once in the 1963–64 season Beryl won forty-six races in twenty-six days’ racing; her stable won everything that year except the Leger. ‘Horses came first, second, third and fourth with her. That’s why we got on so well together,’ Buster said.
Once every fortnight or three weeks we’d drive down to Nairobi, singing our heads off, and make for the New Stanley or the Norfolk. Tubby paid for everything, we always went first class at the Block hotels.
For weekend meetings the horses were loaded on Thursday night, after an eight-mile walk to the station. Then we’d take off for Nairobi. The horses would arrive Friday night and then there’d be a boozy party. When I went to dinner with her on my arm I was a proud man. Even though she was thirty years my senior, she was a knockout. When she got dressed up to go out, there wasn’t a woman in Nairobi could hold a candle to her…Races were on Saturday and Monday – no Sunday racing then. Monday nights there was always a terrific party. On Tuesday we would get all the supplies we needed to last until the next race meeting, and then we’d drive back to Naro Moru again – singing at the tops of our voices, because now we were glad to be going back. We lived in a different way up there. It was pure fantasy land.
‘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.