Straight on Till Morning (3 page)

When I returned to the cottage Beryl was waiting for me, standing on the terrace, leaning against the doorpost. Here at last was the famous, indefinable glamour everyone had told me about. She was wearing a modern, pale blue denim trouser suit and a scarf she had borrowed from me (I still wear it with affection); her hair – now ash blonde and expertly styled – had been patted into shape; her finger and toenails were newly painted. Her china-blue eyes sparkled with triumph, and she acknowledged my compliment on her appearance, knowing full well that she looked sensational.

That is the way I like to recall her. At the races she was constantly surrounded by people coming over to say hello. She enjoyed the Derby, sitting next to an old friend (Elizabeth Erskine), but she tired quickly, and afterwards a young man was sent for to carry her to my car (he often carried a disabled relative so was quite experienced). Unfortunately, he slipped halfway down the flight of stairs and the two of them tumbled to the bottom. Beryl was not injured, so George and I took her home, but she was very shocked. I rang her doctor but there was no answer, so I told Adiambo to give her some hot sweet tea and rushed back to the racecourse to find the course doctor (this was before the advent of mobile phones). I immediately found Charles Markham, who grasped the situation without the need for long explanations, and he arranged everything. I did not see Beryl after that because I was already running late for my flight, and I had to scramble to collect my things from the hotel and drive to the airport. From there, I telephoned Paddy Migdoll and was relieved to hear that she had been to the cottage and found Beryl sedated and resting comfortably. She was fine, just shocked…nothing to worry about, Paddy told me.

Shortly after returning to England in May I gave up my job to work full time on the biography. I could not think about anything else and was totally obsessed with Beryl and her story. I was delighted to hear from Paddy that Beryl was walking every day, and the surprising news that she had accepted an invitation to travel to England in September to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of her record-breaking transatlantic flight at RAF Abingdon. Paddy had agreed to accompany her. In July I was in Santa Barbara, California, visiting Beryl's old home there and interviewing some old friends of Beryl's, when Paddy telephoned with bad news. Beryl had tripped over her dog and was now in hospital with a broken hip. I didn't like the sound of it, but as the days wore on, the news was good. ‘She's holding her own…fighting…they are pleased with her progress…' Paddy reported. After Santa Barbara I drove up to San Francisco to visit George Gutekunst, and I was with him on August 3 when Paddy phoned to tell us Beryl had died that morning. We were both stunned.

In the weeks that followed I organised a Thanksgiving service for Beryl's life at St Clement Danes in London and met Beryl's granddaughters, Fleur and Valery. I was proud and sad to watch Fleur Markham, standing in for her grandmother at the Abingdon show, accept the replica Vega Gull trophy from the station commander. Beryl would have adored the occasion. She would have loved, too, seeing her book climb through the sales charts in the United States. By Christmas 1986, five months after her death, her book had reached number one and remained there for weeks on end, on the back of interest generated by a PBS television documentary about her life.

Beryl became so much a part of my life that it is hard for me now, looking back over twenty-five years, to accept that I knew her personally for only a few short weeks. She totally transformed my life. Her advice to me – ‘Never look back. You've got to keep looking forward. Something will always happen if you try to make it happen…' – inspired me to resign from my well-paid job (which I enjoyed) to write full time. I had always wanted to be a writer but lacked the courage to cast myself adrift from a regular salary. ‘What's stopping you?' Beryl asked when I told her this. I muttered something about mortgages. ‘If it's what you want to do you must do it…it will all work out. It won't always be easy. Hardly anything worth doing is easy…'

I have met many remarkable people in my subsequent writing career (which has been more successful than I ever dared to hope). But no one else has won a place in my heart remotely similar to my affection for Beryl. Perhaps even greater than her own intrepid nature, her adventures and her extraordinarily chequered life was her ability to inspire others. I remain indebted to her.

Mary S. Lovell
Brockenhurst, Hampshire
August 3, 2010

1890–1906

In the spring of 1898 the long Victorian era was drawing to a close. The gay nineties were still in full swing however, and in high Leicestershire it was possible to hunt the fox in great style on five days a week, provided one had the money, the horses and the inclination. Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck certainly had the inclination. Horses were easy to come by, for people would always lend him a bad horse, and Charles could ride anything on four legs. Money was more of a problem.

Some months earlier he had been asked to resign his army commission, and debt was almost certainly the reason for this request. His career and reputation, at least among his army contemporaries, were in ruins. It was a pity. An intelligent man, with a good, though not wealthy, family background and a classical education, Charles had enjoyed the army, and he had been a good officer.

The younger of two sons of his father's first marriage, after attending school at Repton
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where he was considered a very bright boy in the classics stream, he entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst as a gentleman cadet. The courses he took whilst at the academy were all military subjects: Military Law and Administration, Tactics, Fortification, Topography and Reconnaissance, Drill and Gymnastics. His conduct, according to his record, was exemplary.
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Commissioned shortly before his nineteenth birthday in 1890 into the 1st Battalion, King's Own Scottish Borderers, Charles had taken to regimental life with ease. He served in Burma for a while, catching the last six months of the regiment's service there, and was awarded the Indian General Service Medal with the bar Chin Lushai. The battalion returned to England in early 1891.
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The remainder of his service life was spent in England, mainly at Aldershot. In 1893 he was promoted to first lieutenant. He had an undoubted ability to make and ride horses, even very difficult horses. He often rode in regimental races, and he often won.

The peacetime life of an officer in those days could be very pleasant. Duties were not onerous, and the social life was good. In addition to an endless round of mess activities, bachelor officers were in constant demand at dinner parties in the town, and there were steeplechasing and polo. London with its hotels, gentlemen's clubs, Weatherby's and Tattersall's, was within easy reach of Aldershot, and Charles, a slim, good-looking man with a good deal of address, made full use of its amenities.

Above all though, there was the hunting. The army had always encouraged officers to hunt, on the grounds that it encouraged bold horsemanship, an asset in the days of cavalry warfare. Wellington declared of his victorious officers that they had ‘picked up their excellence in riding across country when hunting in England'. Charles had enjoyed it all, but increasingly found that he could not afford to maintain the social standards set by his brother officers.

Charles's mother died whilst he was a child, and his father, a Carlisle solicitor, remarried. This second marriage produced a clutch of five children so that when, in 1891, Mr Richard Henry Clutterbuck died suddenly of influenza, within weeks of his wife producing a son, the estate had a great number of calls upon it. All Charles received when his father died was two silver candlesticks, three silver salt cellars, some shares in the County Hotel Company and the residue of the sale of a modest London property after all bank debts and overdrafts of the deceased had been met.
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It was unlikely that this was more than a few hundred pounds, far short of the expectations of the young officer. The main part of his inheritance was a half share in the substantial family home and contents, but his stepmother and her young children were to enjoy those for her lifetime.
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No officer could manage indefinitely on army pay alone, and by 1897 Charles could no longer afford to continue his military career.

At the age of twenty-seven Charles was out of the army, and living on a small farm at Knaptoff in Leicestershire. He was not quite dishonoured, though his record in the army lists bears the terse comment ‘removed from the army',
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the usual synonym for slow horses, fast women or debts. No one, ever, could accuse Charles of slow horses, so it was certainly one of the latter.

At that time and in that place the horse was king. A good hunter was almost worshipped, and cosseted beyond belief.
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Charles had already found that he could buy badly-schooled or poorly-made horses cheaply, and make them into good hunters, selling them on for acceptable profits. He had done this with some success in the army, but not, it seems, enough to keep him out of financial deep water.

It was whilst he was hunting with the Cottesmore Hounds that Charles first saw Clara Alexander. He had an eye for a beautiful girl and at nineteen Clara was undoubtedly a lovely creature. Tall, reed-slim, and strikingly handsome, she sat and handled a horse in a manner which turned heads. In addition she had a particularly sweet clear voice
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and a pouting, appealing manner. Her classical features and silken brown hair turned Charles's head and he and Clara were married on a hot August day in 1898 in the parish church of Wintringham, York, where Clara had been living with her mother after the family returned from India following the death of her father.
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In July 1900, at Scarborough in Yorkshire, Clara gave birth to a son, Richard Alexander Clutterbuck. She must have travelled to the North Riding for her confinement, for the couple had resided since their marriage in Uppingham, Leicestershire. Two years later the Clutterbucks had moved to Ashwell, in the heart of the Cottesmore country. From here they could hunt with the three best packs in the kingdom – The Quorn, The Belvoir and The Cottesmore.
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A second child was born on 26 October 1902, at Westfield House, Ashwell in the county of Rutland. It was a girl. The parents evidently could not think of a suitable name, and even by 3 December when the child's birth was registered, no name was mentioned. The birth certificate merely records that the child was ‘female' and Charles declared his occupation as ‘farmer'. Eventually the baby was christened Beryl at the lovely old Norman church of St Mary in Ashwell on 7 December.
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Charles and Clara continued to hunt, mixing easily in the hunting set. For many years after the Clutterbucks left the area, they were reputed to have been the best-looking couple and the hardest riders to hounds in Melton.
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Charles often rode in hunt races on his two good horses, Hot Chocolate and Snape, and when his regular successes became noticed he also began to train chasers, as an additional source of income to that earned from his farming and horsecoping.
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But money was always a problem, and the domestic obligations which two babies brought with them could not have helped the situation. The couple began to have serious disagreements and in the summer of 1903 they separated. Charles stayed at Westfield House with the children and Clara went to live in Melton Mowbray where she ran a tea shop in Burton Street.
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Beryl was only starting to walk when her father decided to emigrate to South Africa. It was generally believed that there were fortunes to be made in farming there: it was another India, just opening up. Everyone knew how much money had been made in India, but Africa, it seemed, was even better, for there were no feudal princes in Africa, land was to be had cheaply and a well-run farm could make one a millionaire. A man could breathe in the vastness of Africa. In the spring of 1904 Charles and Clara made an attempt at reconciliation, following which Charles sailed for the Cape where his intention was to farm and to train horses. If he were successful Clara would join him there with the two children.

Charles did not stay in South Africa long, for as soon as he arrived he became interested in the East African Protectorate, then known as British East Africa or simply BEA. Almost certainly his imagination was caught by the virtues being widely advertised for the territory in an attempt to encourage white settlement of the newly opened country.

The British government had spent an enormous sum mainly in the building of the famous railway line from Mombasa on the coast to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria.
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This railway to Uganda, dubbed the Lunatic Express, opened up a vast territory of great potential value – the White Highlands of Kenya.
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However, maintaining the sparsely populated protectorate would remain a very expensive enterprise. Following recommendations from Sir Charles Eliot, HM Commissioner in East Africa, that white settlement was the essential route towards making the project self-supporting, it became a matter of prime importance to encourage the ‘right sort' of settler. The Commissioner of Customs, Mr A. Marsden, was therefore dispatched to South Africa to advertise the potential of the country.

Probably as a direct result of this action, Charles sailed for East Africa, arriving at the old Mombasa harbour, subsequently named Kilindini, on 29 July 1904. As the steamer slowly edged through the gap in the coral reef, he had his first view of the town with its white beaches fringed with palm and mango trees.
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Above the shoreline, the lush tropical vegetation, with its climbing carpet of flowering bougainvillea, palms and the peculiar, unique baobab trees, gave every indication of swamping the whitewashed, red-roofed houses.
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He would have been prepared for the humid heat, but the vibrant colours of the abundant flowers, and the alien sounds of the cosmopolitan town with its population of Arabs, Africans and Europeans, must have burst upon his senses after the monotony of the sea voyage. He stayed for one night at the Grand Hotel before boarding the train for Nairobi.
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‘Mombasa…', wrote Winston Churchill after his visit in 1907,

From the windows of the carriages the passengers gazed upon the great herds of antelope, gazelle and zebra. Giraffe, lion and ostrich were also to be seen in this Garden of Eden. The trains stopped at Voi which enabled the passengers to take dinner in a dak bungalow. When the engine driver gave the signal the passengers returned to their carriages and tried to get what sleep they could as the train chugged on through the night; but they were all awake early next morning, anxious to see the promised glory of Kilimanjaro, its ice-crowned summit tinted coral in the rays of the rising sun.
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The hot and dusty train journey ended for Charles at Nairobi, then merely a collection of shabby, tin-roofed shacks around the railway station. Situated on a treeless plain, it had been chosen as a halt for trains to take on water, before the line began a dizzying series of contortions over the Kikuyu escarpment into the Rift Valley. It was an unhealthy place and only two years earlier had been affected by bubonic plague. A huge swamp bordered the river along the length of modern-day Nairobi's city centre, a constant breeding ground for malaria.

Charles's favourable impression of Nairobi was no doubt coloured by the fact that he arrived there during Race Week.
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This was a far cry from the formal green turf of Ascot, but not too unlike the hurly-burly of a hunt point-to-point and Charles would have been instantly at home in such company. Soon after arriving in Nairobi he met Lord Delamere. The great pioneer of Kenya was quick to spot the ability of the young, well-educated farmer and undoubtedly encouraged him to settle. This included the offer of a job as manager of his farm at Njoro (where Delamere had over fifteen hundred head of cattle including imported pedigree Herefords), and suggestions about several good parcels of land for which Clutterbuck could apply.

Hugh Cholmondeley, third Baron Delamere,
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had left his ancestral estate, Vale Royal in Cheshire, for a couple of grass huts in BEA. He had, it must be admitted, also acquired 100,000 acres, but this was virgin land, virtually valueless at that time. In subsequent years he brought the Vale Royal estates to bankruptcy for the sake of the land in Kenya, and dedicated the rest of his life to making Kenya one of the most efficient and prosperous colonies in Africa.