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 t
ell 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 w
as 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.
Straight on Till Morning Page 36