Straight on Till Morning (40 page)

Beryl had
arap
Ruta to help her on her farm. She had tracked Ruta down when she visited Kenya after the war, and she never subsequently lost touch with him. Soon after arriving at Naro Moru, she suggested to the Normans that they should give him a job. He'd be very good, she told them. ‘In fact he was quite good, though by then he'd started to drink a lot and at times was rather a nuisance because of it,' Doreen recalled. During her illness Beryl had also begun to drink quite heavily, but she managed to ease up after her recovery and disapproved of other people drinking to excess.

Not long after her move to her own farm, Beryl was visited by her son Gervase and his heavily pregnant wife Viviane. They were en route to Europe after spending the first year of their marriage in India. The couple had met when they were lunch guests of a mutual friend at the Cavalry Club in London in 1951. Viviane, who was on holiday from her home in France, was instantly attracted to Gervase and the feeling was mutual, but by a strange quirk of fate Gervase was leaving on the following day for a holiday in France. He was not due to return until Viviane herself left for France. ‘A case of ships that pass in the night you might say,' chuckled Viviane. However Gervase managed to return earlier than planned, and the pair had a day together before Viviane went home.

They wrote to each other constantly. ‘We more or less fell in love by letter. After our marriage, shortly after he came down from Oxford, Gervase had the opportunity to work in India – a country that I had passionately wanted to visit all my life. Our time there was a great happiness to us both, but it was almost a spiritual home-coming for me.' On their way home to Europe they stopped over in Kenya to visit Gervase's grandmother, Lady Markham, who had virtually raised Gervase, and who had remarried and moved to the colony. However, hearing that they were in Nairobi, Beryl telephoned and asked the young people to stay with her at Naro Moru.

‘Beryl was very sweet to us,' Viviane recalled. ‘She was not at all what I expected – she seemed very quiet and ordinary, not the sort of person who had lived the adventurous life that I knew she had.' The couple liked Thrane and enjoyed the happy atmosphere that prevailed on the farm. Indeed the entire visit was a very successful one. Beryl did not behave ‘like a mother', but then she never had. Her relationship with her son is an intriguing one, for she undoubtedly cared for him in her own way, but she had no strong maternal need to see him or have him around her. She talked of Gervase occasionally to close friends but somehow did not feel it necessary to make any contact with him, or indeed his family when he later had two daughters. Interviewed in 1986 for this biography she spoke of ‘my little kid' in a way that would have suggested to a stranger that she had enjoyed the most intimate maternal relationship. But in fact that brief visit in 1955 was the last time that Beryl ever saw her son, and she never met her two granddaughters.

Interestingly Gervase never spoke of his mother to anyone but his wife. ‘He was extremely proud of her achievements but of course he had never really known her as a mother.' His two daughters, Fleur and Valery, grew up with a very hazy and confused picture of their maternal grandmother.
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In the mid 1950s Beryl suffered two bereavements. Firstly her half-brother Sir James ‘Alex' Kirkpatrick was killed in a shooting accident. Beryl had liked him, though her affection for him was always tinged with reflected dislike of their mother and she disapproved of his drinking. Doreen Bathurst Norman recalled that between the two there had been ‘the mutually critical attitude that is very common between brother and sister'.

Then, in 1957 Clutterbuck died in South Africa. It was a deep and lasting sadness for though she had not seen much of her father during the previous twenty years, Beryl still retained her hero-worship of him.
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Clutterbuck was still successfully training horses until shortly before his death and told his daughter that although he would leave his estate to Emma Orchardson he would leave Beryl his ‘best horse'. He did so, and Beryl would have loved to have taken the horse, but South African horses could not be imported to Kenya and Beryl hadn't the resources to cope with the problem. So she had to let the opportunity go by.

With Beryl's drive and ideas, and Jørgen's herculean assistance, the establishment started to take shape. There were horse-boxes, feed stores, tack stores, exercise yard and gallops to be built, and in 1956 Beryl took delivery of her first crop of horses, all from Kay Spiers' Lolchorai Stud. Mrs Spiers is remembered as one of the greatest horse-breeders in Kenya, and until her death in 1977 she produced consistently good racehorses. Title Deed was initially owned by Kay Spiers and trained by Beryl. Ulysses, whom Beryl ‘bought', was her first good horse. However, she had little or no money with which to pay for the horse, ‘so Kay supplied her more or less on HP terms', Doreen Bathurst Norman recalled.

Ulysses was a particularly good-looking horse and Beryl loved him. He was not only a racehorse but had won prizes in the show ring – the perfect, and rarely found, all-rounder. Title Deed, a two-year-old, was a marvellous little bay horse with a big heart, who flicked his ears forward as he passed the winning post. He was particularly good over middle distance, and gave her her first win, a two-year-old plate in September 1958. He was a sound, honest and consistent horse who in six seasons won thirteen races, and was placed nineteen times.

Beryl's own colours of blue and gold had long since been reallocated when she started training again, so she re-adopted the old Clutterbuck colours of black and yellow. Soon they were seen in pole positions at race meetings.

One day Beryl went to look at a horse called Little Dancer. She immediately recognized the horse's potential but this gave her a problem, which she took to Charles Bathurst Norman. Look, I've bought this horse but I can't afford to pay for it,' she told him. The Bathurst Normans characteristically bought the horse for her. On New Year's Day 1959, thirty-three years after she had won the same race with Wise Child, Beryl's second brilliant career in training took off when Little Dancer won the Kenya St Leger.
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Her next horses were Niagara and Snow Goose, both bought as yearlings. Once again Kay Spiers sold them to her on hire-purchase terms. Something about Niagara particularly attracted Beryl, and she had to have the little filly. Curious to see this horse about which Beryl seemed so anxious, the Bathurst Normans went down to see her. ‘She was an extraordinary little grey thing, still with her fluffy foal coat – she didn't look anything out of the ordinary,' Doreen remembered. They were perhaps understandably doubtful about Beryl's confident prediction that ‘this horse is going to win the Derby for me…Niagara was by a horse called Toronto out of Propaganda, and as Beryl started to train the youngster, she knew she'd made the right decision. Niagara was very fast indeed.

The 1959–60 racing season belonged to Beryl. She was selective about her horses and the races in which they ran. The leading trainer and owners are positioned not by the number of races won but by the value of stakes. With her small stable she took on the big trainers and Niagara obliged by winning the Kenya Guineas, the first race in the Kenya Triple Crown series. The East African Derby was Beryl's next goal.

There was a great deal of rivalry between the syces in Beryl's stable and those of the then leading trainer Gladys Graham, whose farm and training establishment marched with the Bathurst Normans' land. At times, as Beryl's success grew, the rivalry sparked into open confrontation. ‘You can imagine how popular Beryl's success was, can't you?' Doreen asked with a smile. Beryl's employees were absolutely convinced that Mrs Graham's syces would be out to sabotage Niagara, who was entered for the Derby, and they took no chances. The horse was never left alone for a single minute.

‘Of course Gladys would never have allowed anything like that but the boys were convinced and nothing would dissuade them. A few days before the Derby, Niagara travelled down to Nairobi by train accompanied by Beryl's childhood playmate Arthur Orchardson who packed a revolver just in case, and insisted on sleeping with the horse in its box,' Doreen recalled. The syces' anxiety was catching! Arthur rode for Beryl on a number of occasions and although he was then getting towards the end of a brilliant racing career (which included riding countless winners including – in 1936 – the winner of the Last African Derby), he was extremely fit. After Niagara had been loaded up and sent on her way, Doreen casually asked Beryl, ‘You are insured I suppose?' and was shocked when Beryl replied: ‘Well actually no…' Doreen immediately telephoned the insurance company.

This inattention to administrative detail was typical of Beryl. In later years nearly all her problems were caused by her lack of concern for the form-filling which is an essential task of the trainer, but while she had Jørgen to take care of this side of things for her everything ran smoothly. Like Ruta, Jørgen smoothed all the rough edges and left her free to concentrate on the horses. Beryl was even reluctant to make the commitment of declaring a horse for a race. She always procrastinated, and usually would not even name the rider until the very last minute.
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On the eve of the Derby, Beryl and Doreen travelled down to Nairobi and went to the racecourse. ‘We found everyone in a fearful flap. Niagara had cast one of her racing plates and had worked herself into such a highly-strung state that she would not let anyone near her to replace it,' Doreen told me. Beryl listened with mingled disbelief and exasperation to the complaints poured into her ears. Without a word she stumped into the box and picked up the horse's leg. Turning around she said to the suddenly silent little crowd, ‘Well! What are you waiting for? Get on with it!' Beryl had the knack of making even a highly excited horse quiet simply by touch.

On 3 August 1959 the
East African Standard
racing correspondent declared, ‘The Miller will stay when others have had enough,' covering himself by adding: ‘The only three-year-old that has proved herself to be in any way outstanding is Niagara, winner of the Kenya Guineas over a mile. I am not sure that she will stay the extra half mile, although there are very few…that I would choose to beat her.'

Riding Niagara was Tony Thomas, a jockey recently brought into the country by Beryl. ‘He was a gentle and totally unsophisticated man, much at a disadvantage with the tougher Kenya jockeys, whom he feared. The week before the Derby he had made a mess of a race and Beryl had told him that if he made a mess of the Derby he would be sent home on the next aeroplane,' Doreen Bathurst Norman said. ‘He therefore took Niagara right round the outside, going yards further than anyone else, and then let her go. She needed no urging – in fact she stopped if hit – and went like an arrow. Tony was a gentle rider with beautiful hands, and all problem horses went well for him.'

On the following day the racing correspondent of the
East African Standard
reported the race under the headline ‘Niagara wins Derby by eight lengths'.

The race was the most valuable ever in Kenya to that date with a stake of £835 going to the winning owner. Beryl was ecstatic. There had never been any doubt in her mind, and she was well aware that when Niagara shot past the winning post she wasn't even being hard pushed.