Straight on Till Morning (11 page)

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.
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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.
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But the name which stuck all her life was Memsahib wa Farasi (lady of the horses).
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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,
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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.
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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 during 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.

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.

It must have been difficult at first for owners to accept that this attractive young girl, still childlike in her manner, could possibly make a successful trainer in such circumstances. Of course she had had a spell of success some years earlier, but then she had the backing of a husband, and operated from established racing stables, and it was easy to assume that she had merely inherited the work and support of an existing team. Now Beryl had to prove her ability all over again by producing winners from unknown horses. She had as her working capital a remarkable talent and capacity for hard work and she was supremely fit. Doreen Bathurst-Norman recalled a story which Beryl had told her of her time at Nakuru. Once, when mounting a particularly temperamental horse, Beryl was flung across the yard and slammed down on her back across the stone water trough. This was enough to break her back but she escaped with minor injuries, and although the muscle webbing had been torn from her ribs, she got back on the horse immediately and rode it.
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In April 1926 Tania Blixen wrote to her mother: ‘I saw Beryl recently, she seemed very happy, working hard training racehorses, I think she is probably very good at it. It seems to give her only just enough to live on but she finds it a very pleasant change from marriage. She looked fine, had just driven her car down from Nairobi along the most impossible roads where nobody else could get through…'
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Wrack, the chestnut colt, was fancied by Beryl as a potential winner of one of the two big classic races – the East African Derby or the St Leger. When she moved to Nakuru, Wrack went with her, sold by the Carsdale-Lucks to Mr E. Ogilvie-Boyle along with Melton Pie. Beryl trained Wrack to the hilt with the St Leger in mind, and was deeply hurt when, after an argument, his owner removed him from her stable three months before the race and placed him with a rival trainer.
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Ogilvie-Boyle sold his other horse Melton Pie to Major Cavendish-Bentinck and Beryl continued to train this horse until she bought it herself in the following year. And fortunately there was another horse on which to pin her hopes of a classics winner – Wise Child, a filly which belonged to Captain Eric Gooch, a family friend of long standing.

This filly was impeccably bred out of Clutterbuck's good mare Ask Papa by Wise Dove – a stallion imported by Eric Gooch. The Wise Dove progeny were to shine in subsequent years in Kenya racing circles and Wise Child was among the best of them. She was considered to be the best three-year-old in 1925 but developed ‘a leg' before the Derby and could not run. Knowing that the horse needed special training, Beryl took her on and got her fit again. Sonny Bumpus, then a very young amateur rider but nevertheless one of the best in the colony, had also suffered a disappointment when the horse he had in training for the race broke down. Beryl asked him to ride Wise Child in the St Leger.

On Saturday 7 August 1926 under the headline ‘Wise Child Wins the St Leger' the
East African Standard
stated: ‘This day can be written down as one of the most successful in the history of racing from any point of view. It certainly indicates that racing in Kenya is increasing in popularity…Scotch Bitters lost six lengths at the start. Restless made the running for a mile when Wise Child came on to win in a canter.' The result was: first Wise Child; second Restless, third Foolish Pride and fourth Scotch Bitters.

The report does not reveal that Wise Child broke down a few yards from the winning post when a tendon gave out, and she passed the post on three legs. Nor did the report give Beryl credit for training the winner, which was described as ‘trained by owner'. But the people who mattered knew that Beryl had been training the horse, and the nail-biting finish gave Beryl her first classic winner. She gave Sonny Bumpus a silver cigarette box to commemorate the occasion, which he treasured until his death in 1985.
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Wrack did not run in this St Leger, although he was a declared entry, and in
West with the Night
Beryl uses the race as the scene of a dramatic contest between Wrack and Wise Child. In fact the race that Beryl wrote about so convincingly never took place. It was merely a vignette, the sum of Beryl's experiences, triumphs and disappointments distilled into what has been described as the most exciting and moving description ever written of a horse race.

The two horses did race together on other occasions but never in the manner which Beryl described. In February, whilst Beryl was still training Wrack, the colt had romped home by three lengths clear to Wise Child's poor third place. On another occasion described in the
East African Standard
in October 1926 when Beryl was training Wise Child but not Wrack:

This result also indicates how Beryl embellished the facts in her memoir, for in
West with the Night
the story ends happily ever after, with the owner declaring that the gallant little mare deserves never to have to race again. In reality, despite her weak tendons Wise Child made regular and successful appearances on the racecourse for some years.
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When she did eventually retire she proved a gold mine to her owner at the stud.
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At twenty-four, Beryl had every right to enjoy her success. She had worked hard, and had earned her place in the male-dominated racing circle. She often rode Pegasus to winning places in local gymkhanas and races,
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and had a wide circle of admirers. She would have been a saint if she derived no pleasure from a comment in the 15 January 1927 edition of the
East African Standard
: ‘Wrack is an unlucky horse, continually running second. He has not won a race since leaving Mrs Purves' stable. Evidently the air at Nakuru agreed with him better than that at Nairobi does!' She was no saint, but the perfectionist within her would have been deeply sorry that the talented colt had not achieved the brilliant career she could have helped him to gain.
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Lord Delamere invited her to train from his farm at Soysambu, but here Beryl's personal accommodation consisted of one of the horse-boxes, tastefully furnished with a table, chair and a bed which, with a zebra-skin thrown over it, also served as a sofa for visitors. Yet it was an improvement over Nakuru.

An acquaintance remembered her father, one of Beryl's owners during these years, saying that Beryl always submitted her accounts written meticulously in her own hand and always accurate.
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Later, there were many people in Kenya who said that Beryl was virtually illiterate, but these claims are at the very least exaggerations. Beryl's learning process was ill-disciplined, not absent.

It took a particular type of intelligence, as well as immense skill, for a young, unprotected woman to succeed in ‘a man's game' in Kenya, at a time when women in England were still excluded from the profession of racehorse training. It is therefore tempting to compare Beryl's life at that time, when she was successfully competing with long-established male trainers such as Spencer Tryon (a contemporary of Clutterbuck's who had a clear field until Beryl's entry into the lists), with the advice being ladled out on the women's pages of the
East African Standard
. There, more homely virtues for women were stressed, in notes on ‘The Registration of Servants' and ‘Comfort for the Convalescent'. No one seemed to think her position in any way odd, and in the same edition of the newspaper appears the comment: ‘Mrs Purves holds a very strong hand with both Charlatan and Welsh Guard (ex Camsiscan) in her stable.'

Beryl achieved her pole position in a remarkably short time, chiefly because of her ability, but also because she was free from the feelings of constraint that beset many of her female counterparts.

By the mid 1920s Kenya society had undergone a significant change from the days of the pioneer communities. This has been attributed to the huge influx of Soldier Settlers and other hopefuls, together with a new prosperity and the general frivolity of the bright young things in the Jazz Age after the horrors of the First World War. Many of the new farms which had sprung up in the highlands were large and comfortable, built of stone with panelled rooms, containing sumptuous furnishings. They were surrounded by smooth, well-groomed green lawns and staffed by armies of servants, in the style of English country houses.
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In the more opulent of these homes dwelt the lotus eaters of the so-called Happy Valley set; many were the younger sons of wealthy English families, victims of the English law of primogeniture. Unlike the hard-working settlers they had regular incomes and with no need to work they established a lavish and frivolous lifestyle which included a seemingly endless round of picnics and house parties, where champagne flowed and casual love affairs between the guests were the order of the day. Their meeting place in Nairobi was the Muthaiga Country Club, and it was here that Beryl was to meet many of this privileged (and some say much-maligned) coterie.

Beryl's involvement with the people of the Happy Valley was insouciant. She was always attracted by the titled, rich and famous, and although she joined in the high-spirited activities at the fabled Oserian (or the Djinn Palace as it was known), and other up-country retreats, she never became a full-blooded member of the set.
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But she enjoyed the fun and high spirits of their never-ending parties and for the next decade Lady Idina, the Errolls, the Carberrys, Kiki Preston, Alice de Janze, the Soames, the Broughtons – all the leading members of the now infamous clique, were among her closest circle of friends. However she was never a party to the reported wilder excesses such as drug-taking.
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‘I always thought she was a very quiet person,' said the late Sonny Bumpus. ‘At a party you would often see her quietly sitting in a corner talking seriously to someone. She was not pretty, more inclined to be beautiful with a tall, slim figure and a graceful, sort of slinky walk.'
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