I have met many remarkable people in my subsequent writing career (which has been more successful than I ever dared to hope). But no one else has won a place in my heart remotely similar to my affection for Beryl. Perhaps even greater than her own intrepid nature, her adventures and her extraordinarily chequered life was her ability to inspire others. I remain indebted to her.
Mary S. Lovell
Brockenhurst, Hampshire
August 3, 2010
CHAPTER ONE
1890–1906
In the spring of 1898 the long Victorian era was drawing to a close. The gay nineties were still in full swing however, and in high Leicestershire it was possible to hunt the fox in great style on five days a week, provided one had the money, the horses and the inclination. Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck certainly had the inclination. Horses were easy to come by, for people would always lend him a bad horse, and Charles could ride anything on four legs. Money was more of a problem.
Some months earlier he had been asked to resign his army commission, and debt was almost certainly the reason for this request. His career and reputation, at least among his army contemporaries, were in ruins. It was a pity. An intelligent man, with a good, though not wealthy, family background and a classical education, Charles had enjoyed the army, and he had been a good officer.
The younger of two sons of his father’s first marriage, after attending school at Repton1 where he was considered a very bright boy in the classics stream, he entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst as a gentleman cadet. The courses he took whilst at the academy were all military subjects: Military Law and Administration, Tactics, Fortification, Topography and Reconnaissance, Drill and Gymnastics. His conduct, according to his record, was exemplary.2
Commissioned shortly before his nineteenth birthday in 1890 into the 1st Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Charles had taken to regimental life with ease. He served in Burma for a while, catching the last six months of the regiment’s service there, and was awarded the Indian General Service Medal with the bar Chin Lushai. The battalion returned to England in early 1891.3
The remainder of his service life was spent in England, mainly at Aldershot. In 1893 he was promoted to first lieutenant. He had an undoubted ability to make and ride horses, even very difficult horses. He often rode in regimental races, and he often won.
The peacetime life of an officer in those days could be very pleasant. Duties were not onerous, and the social life was good. In addition to an endless round of mess activities, bachelor officers were in constant demand at dinner parties in the town, and there were steeplechasing and polo. London with its hotels, gentlemen’s clubs, Weatherby’s and Tattersall’s, was within easy reach of Aldershot, and Charles, a slim, good-looking man with a good deal of address, made full use of its amenities.
Above all though, there was the hunting. The army had always encouraged officers to hunt, on the grounds that it encouraged bold horsemanship, an asset in the days of cavalry warfare. Wellington declared of his victorious officers that they had ‘picked up their excellence in riding across country when hunting in England’. Charles had enjoyed it all, but increasingly found that he could not afford to maintain the social standards set by his brother officers.
Charles’s mother died whilst he was a child, and his father, a Carlisle solicitor, remarried. This second marriage produced a clutch of five children so that when, in 1891, Mr Richard Henry Clutterbuck died suddenly of influenza, within weeks of his wife producing a son, the estate had a great number of calls upon it. All Charles received when his father died was two silver candlesticks, three silver salt cellars, some shares in the County Hotel Company and the residue of the sale of a modest London property after all bank debts and overdrafts of the deceased had been met.4 It was unlikely that this was more than a few hundred pounds, far short of the expectations of the young officer. The main part of his inheritance was a half share in the substantial family home and contents, but his stepmother and her young children were to enjoy those for her lifetime.5 No officer could manage indefinitely on army pay alone, and by 1897 Charles could no longer afford to continue his military career.
At the age of twenty-seven Charles was out of the army, and living on a small farm at Knaptoff in Leicestershire. He was not quite dishonoured, though his record in the army lists bears the terse comment ‘removed from the army’,6 the usual synonym for slow horses, fast women or debts. No one, ever, could accuse Charles of slow horses, so it was certainly one of the latter.
At that time and in that place the horse was king. A good hunter was almost worshipped, and cosseted beyond belief.7 Charles had already found that he could buy badly-schooled or poorly-made horses cheaply, and make them into good hunters, selling them on for acceptable profits. He had done this with some success in the army, but not, it seems, enough to keep him out of financial deep water.
It was whilst he was hunting with the Cottesmore Hounds that Charles first saw Clara Alexander. He had an eye for a beautiful girl and at nineteen Clara was undoubtedly a lovely creature. Tall, reed-slim, and strikingly handsome, she sat and handled a horse in a manner which turned heads. In addition she had a particularly sweet clear voice8 and a pouting, appealing manner. Her classical features and silken brown hair turned Charles’s head and he and Clara were married on a hot August day in 1898 in the parish church of Wintringham, York, where Clara had been living with her mother after the family returned from India following the death of her father.9
In July 1900, at Scarborough in Yorkshire, Clara gave birth to a son, Richard Alexander Clutterbuck. She must have travelled to the North Riding for her confinement, for the couple had resided since their marriage in Uppingham, Leicestershire. Two years later the Clutterbucks had moved to Ashwell, in the heart of the Cottesmore country. From here they could hunt with the three best packs in the kingdom – The Quorn, The Belvoir and The Cottesmore.10
A second child was born on 26 October 1902, at Westfield House, Ashwell in the county of Rutland. It was a girl. The parents evidently could not think of a suitable name, and even by 3 December when the child’s birth was registered, no name was mentioned. The birth certificate merely records that the child was ‘female’ and Charles declared his occupation as ‘farmer’. Eventually the baby was christened Beryl at the lovely old Norman church of St Mary in Ashwell on 7 December.11
Charles and Clara continued to hunt, mixing easily in the hunting set. For many years after the Clutterbucks left the area, they were reputed to have been the best-looking couple and the hardest riders to hounds in Melton.12 Charles often rode in hunt races on his two good horses, Hot Chocolate and Snape, and when his regular successes became noticed he also began to train chasers, as an additional source of income to that earned from his farming and horsecoping.13 But money was always a problem, and the domestic obligations which two babies brought with them could not have helped the situation. The couple began to have serious disagreements and in the summer of 1903 they separated. Charles stayed at Westfield House with the children and Clara went to live in Melton Mowbray where she ran a tea shop in Burton Street.14
Beryl was only starting to walk when her father decided to emigrate to South Africa. It was generally believed that there were fortunes to be made in farming there: it was another India, just opening up. Everyone knew how much money had been made in India, but Africa, it seemed, was even better, for there were no feudal princes in Africa, land was to be had cheaply and a well-run farm could make one a millionaire. A man could breathe in the vastness of Africa. In the spring of 1904 Charles and Clara made an attempt at reconciliation, following which Charles sailed for the Cape where his intention was to farm and to train horses. If he were successful Clara would join him there with the two children.
Charles did not stay in South Africa long, for as soon as he arrived he became interested in the East African Protectorate, then known as British East Africa or simply BEA. Almost certainly his imagination was caught by the virtues being widely a
dvertised for the territory in an attempt to encourage white settlement of the newly opened country.
The British government had spent an enormous sum mainly in the building of the famous railway line from Mombasa on the coast to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria.15 This railway to Uganda, dubbed the Lunatic Express, opened up a vast territory of great potential value – the White Highlands of Kenya.16 However, maintaining the sparsely populated protectorate would remain a very expensive enterprise. Following recommendations from Sir Charles Eliot, HM Commissioner in East Africa, that white settlement was the essential route towards making the project self-supporting, it became a matter of prime importance to encourage the ‘right sort’ of settler. The Commissioner of Customs, Mr A. Marsden, was therefore dispatched to South Africa to advertise the potential of the country.
Probably as a direct result of this action, Charles sailed for East Africa, arriving at the old Mombasa harbour, subsequently named Kilindini, on 29 July 1904. As the steamer slowly edged through the gap in the coral reef, he had his first view of the town with its white beaches fringed with palm and mango trees.17 Above the shoreline, the lush tropical vegetation, with its climbing carpet of flowering bougainvillea, palms and the peculiar, unique baobab trees, gave every indication of swamping the whitewashed, red-roofed houses.18 He would have been prepared for the humid heat, but the vibrant colours of the abundant flowers, and the alien sounds of the cosmopolitan town with its population of Arabs, Africans and Europeans, must have burst upon his senses after the monotony of the sea voyage. He stayed for one night at the Grand Hotel before boarding the train for Nairobi.19 ‘Mombasa…’, wrote Winston Churchill after his visit in 1907,
is the starting point of one of the most romantic and most wonderful railways in the world…all day long the train runs upward and westward, through broken and undulating ground clad and encumbered with superabundant vegetation. Beautiful birds and butterflies fly from tree to tree and flower to flower. Deep ragged gorges, filled by streams in flood, open out far below us through glades of palm and creeper covered trees, every few miles are trim little stations with their water tanks, signals, ticket offices, and flower beds backed by impenetrable bush. In the evening a cooler crisper air is blowing…at an altitude of four thousand feet we begin to laugh at the equator…After Makindu station the forest ceases and the traveller enters upon a region of grass…the plains are covered with wild animals.20
From the windows of the carriages the passengers gazed upon the great herds of antelope, gazelle and zebra. Giraffe, lion and ostrich were also to be seen in this Garden of Eden. The trains stopped at Voi which enabled the passengers to take dinner in a dak bungalow. When the engine driver gave the signal the passengers returned to their carriages and tried to get what sleep they could as the train chugged on through the night; but they were all awake early next morning, anxious to see the promised glory of Kilimanjaro, its ice-crowned summit tinted coral in the rays of the rising sun.21
The hot and dusty train journey ended for Charles at Nairobi, then merely a collection of shabby, tin-roofed shacks around the railway station. Situated on a treeless plain, it had been chosen as a halt for trains to take on water, before the line began a dizzying series of contortions over the Kikuyu escarpment into the Rift Valley. It was an unhealthy place and only two years earlier had been affected by bubonic plague. A huge swamp bordered the river along the length of modern-day Nairobi’s city centre, a constant breeding ground for malaria.
…the railway station consisted of a wooden platform roofed by a few strips of corrugated iron and a godown with a kitchen clock suspended over the door. The arrival of the bi-weekly train was a great event. Naked natives flocked onto the platform to see the miracle…in the dry weather passengers arrived coated with a thick layer of red dust. The particles clung to everything – clothes, baggage, fingernails, hair, food. Faces were fantastically streaked as though they had been smeared with chocolate war-paint. The passengers had to walk from the station. There were no rickshaws or buggies to meet them. There was one small hotel, easily filled. The only alternative was to camp…The town consisted of one cart-track, recently labelled Government Road, flanked by Indian dukas [shops]…one European store and one office. Beyond lay the swamp where the frogs lived. Every night at dusk they used to bark out their vibrant chorus and spread a cloak of deep, incessant sound over the little township.22
Charles’s favourable impression of Nairobi was no doubt coloured by the fact that he arrived there during Race Week.23 This was a far cry from the formal green turf of Ascot, but not too unlike the hurly-burly of a hunt point-to-point and Charles would have been instantly at home in such company. Soon after arriving in Nairobi he met Lord Delamere. The great pioneer of Kenya was quick to spot the ability of the young, well-educated farmer and undoubtedly encouraged him to settle. This included the offer of a job as manager of his farm at Njoro (where Delamere had over fifteen hundred head of cattle including imported pedigree Herefords), and suggestions about several good parcels of land for which Clutterbuck could apply.
Hugh Cholmondeley, third Baron Delamere,24 had left his ancestral estate, Vale Royal in Cheshire, for a couple of grass huts in BEA. He had, it must be admitted, also acquired 100,000 acres, but this was virgin land, virtually valueless at that time. In subsequent years he brought the Vale Royal estates to bankruptcy for the sake of the land in Kenya, and dedicated the rest of his life to making Kenya one of the most efficient and prosperous colonies in Africa.
Charles travelled up country to look at several sites, two of which were serious possibilities. One was at Thika, which he rejected.25 The other was a large tract near Njoro in the White Highlands, which marched with, and was originally part of, Delamere’s own property which was known as Equator Ranch because the equator ran through one corner of it.26 Charles eventually purchased 1000 acres of this land at three rupees an acre,27 but first he got to know the land by working it for Delamere.
The land at Njoro consisted of raw and untamed bush on the slopes of the mighty Mau Escarpment, which forms the western edge of the great Rift Valley. Much of it was covered in dense forests of juniper (known as cedars), acacia and mahogo, but there were also areas of open pasture. The climate was pleasant: the site was situated at some 7000 feet, so the heat never became oppressive even in the strong sunlight of the equator, and mild frost at night was not unusual. During the day the air had an alpine sparkle to it, dry and clean.
The views were breathtaking. No man or woman alive could fail to be stirred by the sweeping vistas of the rift down to the distant Aberdare Mountains on one hand, and the multi-hued blues and greens of the Mau Forest stretching across the Rongai Valley to the slopes of the extinct volcano Menengai on the other. Game abounded in the forests, as did lions and leopards.
In one of his letters home Lord Delamere described the area around Njoro:
I measured a cedar yesterday on the road through the forest close here – 24 ft and 22 ft, three feet above the ground and round the butt, and there are many larger in the heart of the forest I believe. The more I see of the place the more I like it. This is the hottest time of the year and the thermometer has never been above 70° since I have been up here and is down to 50° in the mornings in my hut. After the rains I expect it to be very much cooler. At the next station on the place, Elburgon, it freezes even at this time of the year, but that is up in the forest.28
Charles Miller outlines the difficulties of the new settler who
made the initial stage of his African journey by rail from Mombasa to Nairobi, and thence to the station nearest his holding on the Kikuyu escarpment, the floor of the rift or the slopes of the Mau. The final lap was covered on ox-or mule-drawn wagons, whose axles screamed out under the weight of disc ploughs, harrows, grindstones, bags of seed, rolls of barbed wire, steamer trunks, chop boxes, bedsteads, tin bath tubs, toilet seats and veritable flea markets of household goods. Practically no roads existed outside a radius of a few hundred yards from any sta
tion. The grass rose above a man’s head. The ground was strewn with rocks that smashed wagon wheels, pitted with ant-bear holes capable of snapping an ox’s foreleg like a dried twig. During the rains, wagons would swamp easily while being wrestled through the mill races of bloated streams. A farm no further than fifteen miles from the nearest railway station might not be reached in a fortnight.29
With his few personal belongings, Charles settled on the land and, helped by African labour, started the task of making the farm which he optimistically called Green Hills.
In West with the Night Beryl wrote a poetic summary of the years which in reality must have involved a backbreaking, often heartbreaking struggle for her father. Much has been written about the difficulties besetting the pioneer settlers.30 There was often too much sun and not enough rain. Then, when the rain did come there was often too much of it. The dirt roads became impassable in hip-deep mud; the only movement possible for weeks at a time, was on horseback or on foot and the great ox-drawn wagons, scotch carts used for supplies, and water carts, stood idle.
Clearing the land could take months. A coarse outer beard of tall grass and dense knotted scrub had to be shaved clean with bush knives, or pangas as they were known. There were forests of gum, thorn trees and giant cedar to be felled, and their great stumps extracted like decayed teeth. As Charles Miller wrote:
Boulders and man-high anthills harder than concrete must be swept away. These chores, in turn, meant on-the-job training for the African farmhands, who were patiently taught how to wield axes, picks and hoes without amputating their legs or fracturing their shoulders. The workers also had to learn the rudiments of handling the ox teams that would drag the tree stumps from the earth with chains attached to their yokes. Even the oxen required education, being local beasts that had never known any sort of halter and that were deaf to the command of the human voice. More than one farmer harnessed his oxen by dropping the yokes on them from a tree, provided that one of the African workers could drive the animal under the branches.
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