Beryl Purves is staying with me at the moment…she is only 20, really one of the most beautiful girls I have seen, but she has had such bad luck. She is married to a man she doesn’t care for, and he won’t agree to a divorce, nor will he give her any allowance, so she is pretty stranded – but full of life and energy, so I expect she will manage…I have thought of painting Beryl as soon as I get them [paints from France]. It should make a beautiful picture, she really is unusually lovely – something like Mona Lisa or Donatello’s Holy Cecilia…Beryl’s mother, who was divorced from her father, married again and widowed – is probably going to rent the Mbagathi house for a year. It would be nice to have them as neighbours, Beryl and I could always have some fun together. She has her horse here and you know how pleasant it always is to have someone to go riding with.32
Beryl stayed with Tania for some weeks at her farm overlooking the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi, and Tania was happy to have her company; but it was the rainy season and they could not ride much, or get about. On one occasion they drove into Nairobi to have dinner with Lord Carbery33 and his wife Maia who were leaving for America on the following day. ‘We really had an awful drive in, we slid from one side of the road to the other like a ship at sea, and several times we stuck fast and couldn’t move despite the fact that we had chains on…The dinner was most enjoyable, there were a lot of us. We stayed at Muthaiga last night but drove back here for breakfast…’34
In May Beryl’s mother, a widow since 1918, arrived from England bringing her two little Kirkpatrick sons. As arranged she moved into Tania’s empty house at Mbagathi where it was intended that Beryl should stay with her since she was now, clearly, estranged from Jock. All did not go smoothly however, as Tania related to her mother: ‘I have been having such trouble – I had just let the house to a Mrs Kirkpatrick – Beryl Purves’s mother, who is staying with me – but after she had been there for a few days she said it was raining in everywhere and today has gone back to Nairobi. I had taken so much care to get the house cleaned up and in order and to repair the roof, but with all the rain we have had recently practically nothing can keep it out…the unfortunate Mrs Kirkpatrick was quite desperate, she has her two small boys with her, and had to keep moving the beds around to find a spot where it didn’t rain in on them…’35 Later she wrote: ‘I am really sorry for Beryl, she is so “lost” just now – it is all very fine for the people who are born and brought up out here as long as everything goes well for them, but if things get difficult for them in this country they are not really suited for anywhere else in the world.’36
Beryl returned to Jock in the autumn of 1923 but after a row at Christmas, she took Pegasus out of his stable at ten o’clock at night and fled to Soysambu and the protection of Lord Delamere. Lord Delamere had known Beryl since she was three years old, and was a surrogate uncle to her, present at all important family occasions. His son Tom, two years older than Beryl and a lifelong friend to her, was also staying at Soysambu at the time. Beryl recalled that Lord Delamere and Tom bickered and fought, mainly because Tom did not share his father’s fanatical ambitions for the colony. One day after a typical scene between the two over the tea table, Tom got up to leave. His parent threw the teapot full of scalding tea after him, shouting, ‘How did I ever come to father that?’
Tom claimed later to good friends that he had lost his virginity to Beryl in the stables at Soysambu, and that his great generosity to her in later years was entirely due to his affectionate memory of this event.37 Whatever the reason, Jock attacked and beat up Lord Delamere, claiming that both Delamere’s farm manager and his son had been Beryl’s lovers and he wanted ‘satisfaction’. Tania Blixen wrote to her mother:
I met Beryl Purves [in Nairobi], I expect you can remember her, I am so sorry for her, her life is in such an awful mess and she is such a child and cannot cope at all with it, let alone even realize what is happening. A frightful thing has happened over her shauries [troubles; affairs] – her husband, who thinks he has been treated badly, partly by Delamere’s manager Long and partly by the Delameres’ son Tom Cholmondeley, and thinks that they have lured his wife away from him, attacked Delamere outside the Nakuru hotel the other day, knocked him down and injured him quite seriously…He will be in bed at least six months. For the sake of his son and Beryl, Delamere does not want the cause of his injuries made public, but everybody knows about it. Long has gone home in a panic as Purves threatened to shoot him. They say Delamere is very worried and depressed and of course it is very damaging for the whole country, most of the political meetings take place at his house now. I think it would be better if Beryl stayed away from the races now but I don’t think she has the slightest idea that in some ways people are blaming her, and how indignant they feel about Purves – after all Delamere has a special position here…38
Lord Delamere’s injuries were severe – he suffered several broken bones in his arm and his jaw, and injured his neck in the brawl with Jock who had jumped into Delamere’s car outside the hotel and refused to get out.39 Jock was a very strong, fit and athletic man, clearly distraught over the break-up of his marriage – for that was what it amounted to. There is a distinct impression of a man head over heels in love with his much younger wife, not knowing how to bring her to heel and lashing out savagely in all directions.
After this incident Beryl left Jock permanently, and most people blamed her for the break. ‘She behaved very badly.’ ‘Jock put up with a lot.’ ‘I think she was very bored with Jock. He was a good chap but not very exciting.’ ‘He played a bad game of bridge and told rather boring stories.’
Rose Cartwright, who knew the couple, was more forthright: ‘We all went round with the same crowd of young people, it was very jolly…Jock was delightful – a lovely man and absolutely devoted to Beryl. She was very naughty and started going off with other men. It was Beryl’s infidelities that ended the marriage.’40 Beryl’s rumoured promiscuity became legendary even in a society in which casual morals were perfectly acceptable and gossip was a major social pastime.
Beryl told a different story. Interviewed by a reporter in 1983, she claimed she left Jock ‘because he drank’.41 Friends who knew the couple dispute this. ‘Neither of them drank much – just the usual amount that everyone did.’42 But there was a court case in 1924 when Jock was charged with causing an accident whilst under the influence of alcohol. Witnesses claimed he was ‘very drunk and behaved aggressively’ after he had driven into another car.43
Clearly Beryl had no deep feeling for Jock and possibly resented his casual assumption that his position as her husband gave him an automatic dominant role in her life. She wanted to continue to live her life as she always had, without interference, and this was apparently impossible within the framework of their marriage. None of the extra-marital relationships meant anything to her, except as a gratification of her sexual desires. She seemed not to know, or care, that her behaviour was unacceptable, nor realize how it affected Jock. She had obviously asked for a divorce – Karen Blixen’s statement that Jock would not agree to such a course makes this clear – but it was some years before she was legally free.44
Jock remained in the colony for a long time after the separation, a lonely figure. He continued to play rugby for the Njoro and Nairobi teams. Eventually, after his marriage to Beryl was dissolved, he remarried, to the great disappointment of at least one fervent admirer, and returned to England where until 1939 he was a rugby football correspondent for The Times. At the outbreak of the Second World War he rejoined the London Scottish regiment, with which he had been associated since the age of eighteen. He had joined the regiment originally as a private but was commissioned during the Second World War and achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel – an impressive climb through the ranks. He served in the Ethiopian, North African and Italian campaigns until he was invalided home in 1944. He died in 1945 as a result of the wounds he had received. His obituary in The Times described him ‘as a man of adventurous nature, placid and gentle in m
anner, but most formidable to those who dared to trespass upon his good nature’.45
In January 1924 Beryl made her first visit to England. A friend believed her mother had loaned her the fare (about £47) and she certainly had very little money when she arrived there. Tania Blixen recorded: ‘On Friday I went into Nairobi to say good-bye to Beryl Purves who left for home today. I was so sorry for the poor child, she is so boundlessly naive and confused, and has more or less fallen out with all her friends – particularly after that shaurie with her – former – husband, who attacked Lord Delamere so violently. A year ago she was the most feted person out here, now she is travelling home second class and when she gets to England she will have only £20 in her pocket and will have to manage for herself – only Flo Martin and I were at the station to see her off. But she was cheerful enough and has no idea of the difficulties she will have…she is very beautiful – but it’s not certain whether that will help her or not.’46
In London Beryl stayed with a friend, the wife of Lord Delamere’s manager, ‘Boy’ Long. Another friend who had met Beryl in Kenya and was then living in London was Cockie Birkbeck.47 ‘I had been out for the day,’ Cockie recalled, ‘and when I returned my maid told me that a woman had been waiting all day to see me. I asked her what she was like and she told me she was very beautiful and was wearing a badly hand-knitted suit. I knew immediately it was Beryl. She had no money at all; one of my friends gave her a lovely dress and I took her shopping…I remember the thing she wanted more than anything else was a pair of sunglasses with tortoise-shell rims. They were not at all fashionable at the time and I told her so, but she insisted on having them! She opened an account and charged them to it.’48 Beryl stayed in England for about six months and then went back to Kenya – without paying the account, and probably others like it. All her life she had a total disregard for money, but then she very seldom had any. Her entire career, all her adventures and travels were carried out without money, and she quite blatantly opened accounts with no thought of how she was to pay them. She always assumed that she would get by somehow – and somehow she always did!
During this visit to England she met many people whom she had known previously in Kenya – among them Tania Blixen’s brother Thomas, Denys Finch Hatton (who had hurried home to his mother’s sickbed – an illness which resulted in her death), and Frank Greswolde-Williams. The latter had a farm in the Kedong Valley about forty miles to the north of Nairobi. He was a very wealthy man but, having been more or less brought up by his parents’ grooms, had a rough manner. Despite this apparent coarseness, Tania Blixen found him ‘an unusually kind and nice person’. He had been one of Clutt’s owners for years and had known Beryl since she was a child – indeed he had been a guest at her wedding. In addition to his farm in Kenya Greswolde-Williams had several properties in England, including the family seat in Worcestershire. He was a keen shot and lost an eye shortly after the First World War in a shooting accident when a rifle exploded in his face, adding to his craggy appearance. He was nearly thirty years older than Beryl but for the remainder of her stay in England Greswolde-Williams became her generous protector and lover. When she returned to Kenya Beryl was beautifully dressed and possessed of a wardrobe with somewhat more chic than the badly hand-knitted suit in which she had arrived in England six months earlier.
In July Tania Blixen wrote to her mother Ingeborg Dinesen: ‘Beryl Purves was back again, dressed like Solomon in all his glory with big pearls around her neck, and as she was in the greatest need when I saw her last and nothing in her situation has officially changed, it was quite hard to know how to behave towards her. They say Frank Greswolde-Williams is paying for it, she is living with him anyhow. I’m almost inclined to think it would be better if they got married, though actually it is too ghastly to want anyone to marry Frank. He was as drunk as a lord at the races…’49
The affair with Greswolde-Williams was a shooting star – over before most people knew about it – but he continued in his generosity to her for a long time afterwards and helped her to get back into training racehorses by lending her money. Later that year, according to friends, Beryl joined forces with John Drury and Gerald Alexander of Molo in a training venture which enjoyed some early success, for all three were knowledgeable horsemen. A sympathetic friend of Beryl’s, Mrs Carsdale-Luck,50 who had a farm at Molo, loaned Beryl a block of stables and a hut in which to live. Hilda Hill-Williams, Beryl’s old school chum, recalled that there were a lot of young people in the district by that time and they all had a lot of fun. ‘David Furse, an attractive young farm manager, moved into the district and came into our lives with a bang. He fell heavily for Beryl, and she and I both cared for him. But he later became my husband in 1926 and we all remained friends.’51
Initially Beryl had three horses in training at Molo, the best of these being Wrack, a yearling son of Camsiscan, owned by the Carsdale-Lucks. The other two were The Baron, owned jointly by her friends Tom Campbell Black and Gerald Alexander; and Timepiece, owned by H. D. Stanning. She did all the work herself with one of the Carsdale-Lucks’ houseboys as a syce but when her childhood playmate Kibii, (now a fully grown moran called arap Ruta), returned to Njoro to find Clutterbuck gone, he sought out Beryl in Molo and worked for her from then on as her right-hand man. Kibii was an African of great character. Although a few years younger than Beryl he was tall, grave and aristocratic in his bearing and he seemed instinctively to know what Beryl wanted of him.
‘He took all the rough edges off and dealt with people for Beryl. He was honest and intelligent and altogether a likeable chap,’ said Sonny Bumpus, who knew Ruta well and thought that the Scottish expression ‘having a good conceit of yourself’ particularly applied to him. ‘They seemed to be on terms of friendship rather than that of master and servant, although he always referred to Beryl as madam, and memsahib.’52
All Europeans were given Swahili names by their servants, and often these were excruciatingly accurate caricatures of some facet of personality – Bwana Samaki (fish) for example, for a man whose face had a solemn expression and protuberant eyes, or Memsahib Maua (the lady of flowers) for a woman who had a particularly sweet and gentle nature and who was often seen gathering flowers for the house.53 Beryl was no exception. She had one particularly complicated African name which translated to ‘she who cannot fall off a horse’, and a Somali once said of her, ‘To see her, she is like a spear’ – an evocative description of the hard, upright and fit young woman. ‘She was as strong as a man and far more capable than most men,’ said a friend.54 But the name which stuck all her life was Memsahib wa Farasi (lady of the horses).55
Predictably it was only a short time before Beryl’s horses appeared ‘in the frame’. In July 1925 she took two second places – Wrack on his first time out taking a close second in the feature race, the Produce Stakes. He won on his next outing,56 and the colt’s early performance on the race course must have given Beryl considerable encouragement. She soon had other successes with Melton Pie (also owned by the Carsdale-Lucks) and Timepiece.
She continued to get around the country attending race meetings in her car, and sometimes used a rickety old motorcycle for local transport. On one occasion, driving over to the Blixen house in the dark from Nairobi Race Course, Beryl hit a pot-hole and came off her motorbike, smashing her nose in the process. With her nose streaming with blood she walked the rest of the way. Her nose, previously aquiline, was to mend with an unsightly (to her) small bump which annoyed her for years until she had an operation to correct the damage in London in 1936.57
As her success grew, Beryl found the loaned premises at Molo too small, and after a disagreement with the Carsdale-Lucks she moved her training establishment to Nakuru Race Course. Here she was able to use the permanent stable blocks but there was no accommodation for her and she lived in a tent under the stands. A friend who had known her for some years recorded an incident from Beryl’s time at Nakuru. One day he met an English friend in a hotel bar in Nakuru and d
uring the conversation they discussed Beryl and the shabby way in which she was living. They decided to drive out to the race course and invite her to have dinner with them as a treat. When they arrived they walked over to the stable block to look for Beryl. As they rounded a corner they saw her.
The sun was setting when we arrived at the racecourse just outside of town. We found [Beryl], a slim girl, smartly dressed in riding boots and shorts leaning against a gatepost looking dreamily out over the lake. Outlined against the wide, calm surface of the water, with the dark forest in the background and huge rose-coloured clouds of flamingoes in the sky, she was a picture I will never forget.
We did not want to disturb her, but when the sun had gone down and she turned around we said hello. ‘How nice of you to drop by,’ she said. ‘Please come and see the stables and where I live.’
Below the stands was a row of horseboxes and she lived in one of them. The furniture was very primitive; she sat down on the camp-bed, my friend on the only chair and I sat on a bale of hay. The humble surroundings did not effect the atmosphere, which was very happy, as we talked and drank a bottle of wine which we had brought with us. Later we had dinner at the hotel which was great fun and I was glad afterwards that we had been able to make a change for her in her loneliness.58
Her humble surroundings did not affect her training ability either, and her horses were soon winning with daunting regularity. By then she had a useful string of horses from a number of owners. At a meeting held in Nakuru in July the winning horse, Ruddygore, was ‘trained by Mrs Purves and owned by Mr Frank Couldrey’. Mr Couldrey, one-time editor of the Kenya Weekly News, was the father of Mr Jack Couldrey, Beryl’s solicitor and friend until her death in 1986. Beryl had two other winners and two good second places at this meeting – she was moving inexorably to take over her father’s old position as leading trainer.
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