Straight on Till Morning (44 page)

1965–1980

Enid, Countess of Kenmare, was Beryl's wealthiest owner. Her oblique links with Beryl stretched back into the past, for Lady Kenmare had previously been married to Lord Furness after his marriage to Thelma Morgan ended, and Beryl had first met the countess in the mid 1930s when Tom had worked for the couple as a private pilot. One day, Beryl flew in to Burrough Court with Tom, and the then Lady Furness told her nine-year-old daughter Patricia, ‘Today you are going to see a very beautiful lady.' ‘And I did – I shall always remember the first time I saw Beryl. She was dressed in a white flying suit and looked so glamorous and beautiful – and she remained so as long as I knew her,' Patricia (now Mrs O'Neill) told me.
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Raised in Australia, Lady Kenmare was the daughter of Charles Lindeman, who introduced vines to New South Wales and thus pioneered a great industry there. Her own interest in horses was, like Beryl's, a life-long one. Much married and widowed, she was reputedly fabulously rich after an astonishing run of bad luck had dispatched her four husbands early to their respective graves, providing Lady Kenmare with a series of inherited fortunes. Her first husband, Roderick Cameron of New York, whom she married in 1913, died in the following year leaving her with a baby son, also named Roderick, who ultimately became a writer. Her second husband, General Frederiek Cavendish, whom she married in 1917, died in 1931 leaving the beautiful relict with two further handsome children and his considerable worldly wealth. In 1933 she married Lord Furness. He died in 1940, again leaving her ‘a fortune'. Finally she married the 6th Earl of Kenmare in 1943, and he died within a matter of months of the wedding.

Her serious interest in racehorses stemmed from the period of Lady Kenmare's marriage to ‘Duke'
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Furness when the couple owned famous stud farms in England and Ireland. After Lord Furness's death, these were acquired by the Aga Khan. Lady Kenmare bought a property in Kenya some years after the war, in which she lived during the winter months, when not at her villa in Cap Ferrat in the south of France which her son Roderick made his permanent home. Her son by General Cavendish inherited the title Baron Waterpark and lived in England and her daughter Patricia Cavendish, another horse-lover, accompanied her mother to Kenya.

At the time of Uhuru there was general consternation among the relatively newly arrived wealthy expatriates who owned to massive doubts about Kenya's future as an independent republic. There was a small scale exodus, mainly to Rhodesia and South Africa, but the old-established settlers, in the main, stayed on. Lady Kenmare had no deep roots in the country and was the recipient of constant and mixed advice about her financial situation in Kenya. She had a friend who was very highly placed in the new government and it is believed that he advised her to get her money out while she could.

Lady Kenmare's concern reached a peak in the summer of 1964, at the very time that Beryl was having her problems with the mysterious illness which had attacked her horses. Beryl was sure that these problems were due to the water at Naivasha, and she knew that to cure them she would have to move. Lady Kenmare's daughter believes that the main impetus for the arrangement which resulted came from Beryl, who badly wanted to train in South Africa. ‘She worked on my mother for about six months to get her to agree to the move.'
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Eventually Beryl and Lady Kenmare came to an agreement that they would move to South Africa together and set up a training establishment there. Firstly, though, there was the question of finding suitable premises.

Beryl always made friends easily. She had contacts all over the world who she was convinced would come to her aid, and indeed she was right. This occasion was no exception, for some friends of Beryl's, Air Vice Marshal Freddie Smart and his wife Doris, had moved to South Africa in the early 1960s due to his ill health. Sadly, even the move to a lower altitude with a temperate climate had not helped, and when Beryl contacted her, Doris Smart had been recently widowed. The letter from Beryl told Doris of her plans to move to the Cape to train, and of the search for a suitable establishment. Money, Beryl said, was no object whatsoever.

Doris accordingly approached appropriate estate agencies and sent Beryl details of various properties, including a stud farm called Broadlands. Having narrowed the choices down to two, Beryl and Lady Kenmare flew to South Africa within a week of receiving the information and had no hesitation in declaring that Broadlands was the ideal situation. The deal was struck on the spot.
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In August Beryl announced that she expected to move to the Cape in the following January, as private trainer to the countess. She would take with her a considerable proportion of the best open-class horses. Lady Kenmare purchased Spike, Speed Trial, Mountie and Battle Axe from Messrs Block and Soprani. Despite shipping in large tanks of spring water Beryl was still having difficulties with fluoride poisoning, and Spike was withdrawn as unfit though he remained Beryl's best hope for the forthcoming East African Derby. In the event Beryl achieved a notable double with a new horse, Athi, who before her departure for South Africa won both the East African Derby and the St Leger in the season of 1964–65. It was Beryl's fifth Derby winner and her fourth victory in the St Leger.

Some time after the new year, Doreen Bathurst Norman had ‘a yell for help from Beryl who was in the depths of packing up'.

Doreen was as sceptical as many others in Kenya of Beryl's ability to take on the high-class bloodstock of the Cape with her Kenya countrybreds. Beryl, though, was convinced that she could make a success of it and clearly convinced Enid Kenmare, who had ‘all the money in the world, and thought that with Beryl as her private trainer she would sweep the boards'.
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Beryl had also persuaded Jørgen to accompany them to South Africa to manage Broadlands. It is doubtful that he ever seriously intended to do so as he had only recently invested heavily in his own farm, Kamwake.
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But he did drive down to South Africa with Beryl in her new blue Mercedes, and Beryl clearly thought he was going there on a permanent basis.
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Beryl had always had Jørgen around at weekends to tackle anything which was a problem to her. His help during those years cannot be overestimated. She depended on him absolutely and he had never failed her.

The horses travelled by sea to Durban and arrived in very poor condition after a ‘terrible voyage' during which the temperatures in the hold reached 120 degrees. It took a long time to get them back into condition.
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The ménage, including Lady Kenmare's nine assorted dogs and Beryl's two great danes, settled into Broadlands, but Jørgen stayed only until he was satisfied that everything was functioning well. His departure was a very bitter blow to Beryl, though it came as no surprise to anyone else. After he left, Beryl became ‘unspeakably rude' to Lady Kenmare.
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Broadlands was a lovely place. Sited at Somerset West, near Lowry's Pass on the national road, it was approached through a black wrought-iron gate flanked by two imposing white pillars. A half-mile, tree-lined drive led to a white-walled Cape Dutch house with huge blocks of stables set among 400 acres of green paddocks, orchards and vineyards.
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The house, which dated back to 1780, was one of the oldest in the area, and the Kenmare finances were put to work even before the new owner arrived, in a gutting and redecoration programme that had locals gossiping for weeks.

Broadlands was the only training establishment in the Cape which was owned and run entirely by women. With Lady Kenmare and Beryl were Patricia Cavendish and a secretary Julie Wharton, ‘all of whom are passionately interested in horses and all have fascinating stories to tell', the
Cape Times
reported.
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Miss Cavendish, whose love for animals was not confined to horses, told reporters the story of her pet lion cub Tana, who slept on her bed until as a four-year-old lioness she was taken to a game reserve. Miss Cavendish stayed with the lioness until she had been taught to hunt and look after herself. She had loved her life in Kenya, where she was surrounded by a collection of ‘wild' animals, and initially resented the move to South Africa.
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Julia Wharton met Lady Kenmare by accident. She was on holiday in Natal and had been asked by a friend to help unload Beryl's string of horses from the ship at Durban and transport them to Broadlands. She met Lady Kenmare in a railway siding at Bellville and accepted the job as her personal secretary. Later Doreen Bathurst Norman found to her surprise that Julia was a distant cousin.

If skill and dedication were a measure of success then this combination of enthusiasm and money should have been unbeatable. Beryl obtained a training licence, one of only two issued to women trainers at that time, and everything looked set fair. Broadlands did, in fact, enjoy early success and Beryl's name as a winning trainer soon appeared in the lists. She scored a good double at one of her first meetings later that year when Marie Celeste II won the Durbanville Cup and Mountie won the third race of the day. Further victories with Title Deed and Kara Prince, Lone Eagle and Mountie followed, all viewed with a certain amount of astonishment because of their breeding. But Beryl felt that she was following in the hallowed footsteps of her father. He too had gone to Durban and trained successfully. ‘What would my father have done?' was still her greatest
aide-mémoire
in times of stress. And the stress came all too soon.

It was scarcely avoidable. Both Beryl and Enid Kenmare were beautiful women with strongly developed characters. Both were accustomed to getting their own way. In fact the combination of Beryl's talent and Enid's money was never enough to guarantee a successful union. Beryl had never worked happily with women, she was more at ease with, and preferred, the company of men. Nevertheless for a while both powerful personalities suffered the partnership to continue for each had her own reward, even from uneasy relationship.

Beryl was not easy to work for. She was tough and demanding on the staff. One morning on a workout ride, a girl groom was thrown from a horse and broke her arm, and as she lay on the ground in considerable pain, Beryl rode back to see the cause of the delay. Looking at the girl, she said with exasperation, ‘Bloody fool!' and rode away again, leaving someone else to take care of the injured girl. ‘That's what she was like. Very hard. But if it had been her who'd fallen and broken her arm, she would have said the same thing, “Bloody fool!” and then she'd have got up and carried on, broken arm and all, I've no doubt. She was immensely courageous and stoical about pain,' the former Miss Cavendish recalled.
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In June 1965 Buster Parnell flew out from Ireland to ride for Lady Kenmare. His wife Anna had recently given birth to a son, David, and Beryl became the child's godmother. ‘Funny little thing, isn't he?' she said when she first saw him, but she became quite fond of him in her own way – and also of his sister Tina. ‘She would sometimes say to Tina, “Come along, sweetie, let's go and play,”' Anna Parnell told me, ‘and she'd allow Tina to make up using all the contents of her make-up drawer. Tina was only about three years old then and loved it, she used to come home with her face in a terrible mess.' By then Beryl would have tired of the fun. ‘What a dreadful little child,' she'd say, handing Tina back to her parents.
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Buster saw immediately that Beryl was unhappy. ‘One of the main problems was that she simply couldn't get on with the stud-farm manager,' he said. ‘He was undoubtedly knowledgeable about managing a stud, but he had no conception of how a training establishment should be run and they were constantly at loggerheads. Beryl often had to back down – being a private trainer isn't quite the same as being a public one.' One of her particular problems was the maintenance of gallops. The manager simply didn't know how to keep the gallops as Jørgen had done. For example Beryl would constantly find that on the eve-of-race workout, a horse would go unsound because it had bruised a foot on a stone. ‘This would never have happened if Jørgen had been around – he would never have allowed that sort of thing to happen. Beryl had become accustomed to that level of back-up. She didn't get it at Broadlands.'
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The truce between Lady Kenmare and Beryl was thin on occasions, as Buster observed: