This South African coastal city is gripped by July Fever when everyone has the name of a horse on his or her lips. The race is run on the first Saturday in July and is a social event that draws the rich and the famous and the ordinary punters who love the game. This year the talk is of the exceptional three year old colt trained by Mike de Kock, Hawaam, but then there is racing and anything could happen.
I remember the great Syd Laird trained Sea Cottage, who was top of the betting when it opened that year. The bookmakers stood to lose a fortune if the horse won and one of them attempted to stop the horse by shooting him. Fortunately Sea Cottage was not killed but could not run because of the bullet lodged in his quarter.
Sea Cottage posing with trainer Syd Laird
The following year, 1966 Sea Cottage did run but came third to his stable companion Java head. I knew Java head’s jockey Johnny Cawcutt and he told me that after galloping Java Head over four furlongs on the Thursday morning he was convinced that nothing could beat his mount. This proved to be the case and here is a picture of the two after the race. Java Head carried 127lb, the top weight of the day, and broke the course record.
The great Java Head and Johnny Cawcutt
I have a particular interest in him as he was retired into my care. I hunted him with the Cape Hunt and Polo Club and never rode a stronger horse. He had a lovely temperament and was a great favourite at the riding school I ran then with the pupils. He had a liking for polony sandwiches and the children’s mothers had to pack them when they came for riding lessons especially for Java Head!
This however did not diminish Sea Cottage’s record. He was a great horse and his performance in the Queen’s Plate at Kenilworth is stamped on my mind forever. The horse was tailed off last as the field came around the bend when jockey Sivewright tapped him on the shoulder and Sea Cottage took off to win going away. The win was described as a terrifying stretch run!
Sea cottage won the July in 1967 beating Jollify. Robert Sivewright said “He was a horse the like of which was rarely seen anywhere in the world.”
I am so looking forward to this year’s race. I believe 40 000 visitors are expected in Durban and the race is going to be a great affair with beauty and fashions and of course the racehorses.
Some years ago I wrote a novel called July Fever,based in part on some of my experiences in the racing industry, of course bearing little relation to any actual events (wink, wink). The book was launched in 1980 at the July and received rave notices from the press with one newspaper labelling it the “Book of the Month!”
Here is the unexpected comment I received from a reader whom I do not know and have never met. I hope it tempts you to buy this racy, sexy novel from Amazon.
“Hi, I recently picked up a copy of your book at a second hand book store near where the old New Market race course used to be. As an avid racing fan it caught my attention straight away.
I would like to congratulate you on an excellent book which I found difficult to put down when reading it. I dabbled in part ownership of a race horse a few years ago but I’m afraid it was no Free Reign and didn’t win a race. I attend races at Turfontein occasionally and really enjoy it. I do follow the horses every weekend and love the excitement of the races.”
I turned eighty years old yesterday, the 26th January. I was born in 1939 and the Second World War began in the September. On these warm nights I have lain awake thinking about the events I have seen and experienced during these years.
I think the earliest memory was of the air raid sirens that would require us to gather at Aunty Phyllis’s house nearby. I remember the house clearly and I must have been three years with the war into its third year. I remember my father in his Cape Town Highlanders kilt being photographed with his mates, however he did not pass the medical due to a missing little toe and in any event he was needed by the railways to maintain the steam engines that pulled the trains taking soldiers up the East Coast where they were to engage the German army in German East Africa. One of his mates never returned and another came back with one leg.
My paternal grandmother, Granny Goodwin who was Cornish, was born on a ship in Sydney harbour (I never did hear the full story). Granny had bought me a sunhat, a pair of sunglasses and a little cardboard suitcase. She lived opposite us at Hazendal that is now Sybrand Park in Cape Town. One day I was very cross with my mother so donned the sunhat, packed the suitcase and ran away to Granny Goodwin! The next morning she gave me mealie pap (maize meal porridge) for breakfast and I hated it so ran back!
My two cousins Jean and Tom Swarbreck lived nearby, as did Tommy Webb, another cousin. My father had grown a field of prize strawberries that were ready to harvest on his birthday on the 24th October when we would enjoy them with my mother’s homemade ice cream that I still make for my grandchildren. One year the naughty boy cousins picked and ate the strawberries before the birthday and were given good hidings! Not to mention the sore tummies!
Every year my father would have a bet on the premier horse races such as the Metropolitan Handicap in Cape town and the Durban July in Durban. He would have a bet and take part in the railway workshop sweepstake. I was six when the Durban July was to be run and I fancied a horse called Mowgli who was favorite at 9-2 along with his rival Radlington who was 12 – 1.
Mowgli as a two year old had dropped in the middle of a race. He was odds on favourite and was racing to what seemed certain victory when he checked in his stride and dropped back falling as if he had been poleaxed. The veterinarians put it down to heat stroke.
Because of this incident my father was convinced the horse would not win and changed my bet! Mowgli and Radlington were locked together at the finish and the judge took ten minutes to decide that Mowgli had won by a couple of inches. My father had to pay me out as a matter of honour! I had no idea then that horses would play a prominent part in my later life or that I would write a novel called July Fever that would be launched at the Durban July in 1980 to rave reviews in the press.
Durban July Photo Finish 1952
When I was seven and attending Observatory Girls school my parents sold their house, and decided to go into a partnership with our neighbours, Lalu and Taffy Ovenstone and buy a chicken farm in Kuilsriver. They decided that I had to continue at that school and I had to walk three miles to the station in Kuilsriver, take a train to Salt River, change onto the suburban line and get off at Observatory. This was when I became aware of the race division in the country with separate carriages and benches for white and black people.
The second world war was over and in 1947 King George, Queen Elizabeth and the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, were due to visit South Africa arriving on the frigate Vanguard. My father promised that he would take me to the city to watch the ship arrive. Crowds were due to line the streets and the dock area. The day dawned and I was so excited to see all of the fanfare, but the morning was incredibly hot and my father’s prize pig, a huge animal, fainted with the heat. We spent the day pouring water over it while listening to the arrival on the radio! I was bitterly disappointed, but the pig recovered.
One afternoon on the way back from school my train was stopped at Bellville station and everyone told to disembark. It was explained that the line had to be cleared for the White Train carrying the Royal Family was due. Imagine my delight when I had a first class view of the King and Queen and the two princesses. The Station Master realized that I must be very hungry while waiting for my train to reappear and gave me a pastry with what looked like squashed flies in the middle but I ate every bit of it before my train arrived and delivered me safely to Kuilsriver where my mother was frantic with worry.
The Royal White Train
Later I learned that my mother’s cousin Amy Van der Schyff’s husband, Richard was a chauffeur for the Government Garage and had driven the Royals around Cape Town to all their appointments. He told us how Princess Margaret, a wonderful mimic, would take off all the dignitaries including General Smuts, the Prime Minister!
At the time my little sister, Veronica had polio and one leg was in calipers. She was pushed around the property in a pushchair and would ask for it to stop while she gazed into a wooded area. When asked what she was looking at she would say “A funny little man.”
Finally Lalu asked her to describe the little man. She did so and when next in the village Lalu asked about the previous owner who had died before we moved in. The description tallied with Veronica’s description. Apparently the owner had hated cars and declared that no vehicle would be allowed on his property! My parents had an electric blue Terraplane and the car would never start on the property but would once down the driveway and onto the farm road.
Behind the chicken runs was a stretch of fynbos the Afrikaans name for the indigenous vegetation now world famous for the spring flowers in the Cape, and I would love to walk through this veritable garden picking proteas and then selling the flowers on the farm road! The freedom fed my sense of adventure and my imagination. This experience would influence my life.
Holidays were spent on train journeys as my father had a first class free pass being a railway employee. We could plan our journey providing we did not retrace our route and loved travelling around the country listening to the sound of the train, tucked up in our bunks at night with the stars above. Meals in the dining car were special treats with spotless white linen, heavy silver cutlery and smart waiters while little stations passed by in the blink of an eye.
When I was ten my parents sold the farm and we moved to Fish Hoek on the Cape Peninsula. Fish Hoek nestles against the Cape Mountain chain on False Bay in the Indian Ocean. The Atlantic Ocean washes against the other side of the mountains. I joined the girl Guides and as a patrol leader took my patrol on weekend camping trips up the mountains. My friends and I loved the beach with its catwalk along the rocks where we would dive, pick up lost fishing sinkers and sell them back to the fishermen.
One day my friend and I were having fun in the waves on car tyre tubes when two dorsal fins approached. Our hearts stopped, thinking that they belonged to sharks but then the dolphins leapt over us and joined us in a great game. The two were photographed, made headlines and were named Fish and Hoek. They returned each summer for a few years.
I achieved my Queen’s Guide badge. Sir Herbert Packer was Admiral of the Simonstown naval basin. Britain owned the naval base at that time and I was presented with my badge by Lady Packer at Admiralty house. Lady Joy Packer was a writer and novelist. She wrote a book called Grey Mistress about her husband’s destroyer and the various ports they were stationed at over the years and a novel called The Valley of the Vines set in Constantia near Cape Town famous for its wines.
I grew up, left school and became a student nurse at Groote Schuur Hospital, that later became famous when Doctor Chris Barnard did the first heart transplant there. This was where I met my first love whose family had a yacht moored at Royal Cape Yacht Club. We would sail on the yacht around Cape Point to Simonstown or up the coast to Saldanha Bay. During the Suez crisis in 1956 we were returning from Saldanha in a thick fog and the many ships crowded the bay waiting their turn to dock having been rerouted around the Cape as the Suez canal was closed. Their various foghorn calls warned other vessels of their presence to prevent collisions, we were so afraid of bumping into one in the impenetrable fog on our way back to the yacht club.
My father, who was now Chief Foreman of Salt River works as were his father and grandfather before him, was sent to the UK and Europe to vet the new diesel engines that were being manufactured there by the great engineering companies for the changeover in South Africa from steam to diesel for the railway network. My mother was unhappy with my boyfriend and dispatched me on the Union Castle Mail ship to join my father. The mailboat as it was called left every Thursday from Cape Town docks and took 12 days to sail to Southampton.
A band played Now Is The Hour when the time came to say goodbye, and streamers waved in the breeze between passengers and loved ones left on the quay, tugs hooted and the ship began to move breaking the strands of streamers. Table Mountain towered above as the ship turned her bow towards the open sea leaving the Fairest Cape behind. My boyfriend’s yacht escorted the ship through the dock and out into the bay before finally turning back. The year was 1958, I was eighteen.
Union Castle Liner Leaving Cape Town
My father met me in Southampton where we were to take the boat train to London, then the famous Flying Scotsman on to Glasgow. There was a delay with the departure and eventually Father strode down the station, gave advice as to the fault and then we were off! One night in London and on to Glasgow covered in snow. I spent two weeks with a friend of my father’s, a district nurse visiting crofters in the Kyles of Bute before heading for Manchester where I replied to an advert for air hostesses for the brand new British European Airways. I was part of the second intake and my new friend Sue was in the first intake.
We flew Dakotas to the Channel Islands and Ireland. These aircraft had done service in the war as had the pilots who were of ex Battle of Britain vintage! On one occasion we had engine trouble and landed on deserted Biggin Hill, a famous airfield during the war. From Dakotas I was transferred from Manchester to Heathrow where I worked on Viscounts, a turbo-prop aircraft and finally the ill-fated Comet after which I returned to South Africa.
In later years I lived at Langebaan where the flying boats used to land after their long journey across Africa where one of their stops was at an island called Jungle Junction in the Zambezi River. How far air travel has progressed over the years especially with the wonderful Boeing aircraft.
Now we are in a new industrial revolution and certainly my youngest grandchildren will experience a very different world. There were to be many milestones as the years passed by, and no doubt I will write about them one day..
My first experience of this great race and test of the best of the thoroughbred horse in Durban in South Africa was when I was around ten I think. My father worked in the South African Railways workshops in Salt River just outside of Cape Town. He was an engineer and each July the workmen would take bets on the possible winner.
I had been reading the papers and with as yet an unknown feeling for horses had noticed that the favourite was a horse called Mowgli. Now I don’t know whether that was because of the Jungle Book stories by Rudyard Kipling but I was convinced that Mowgli would win the Durban July. Accordingly I counted up my pocket money and gave my father 2s 6d to put on the horse for me.
The week before this big race there are public gallops with coffee and buns etc when the public have a glimpse of the horses’s potential to win. Mowgli had his gallop and dropped, thought to be dead onto the turf. Miraculously he recovered and got up. His odds lengthened. Nobody thought he could possibly win but the veterinarians pronounced him fit and he duly ran with Radlington matching him yard for yard. Nobody could separate them at the finish but the stewards awarded the race to Mowgli!
Unfortunately my father had felt sorry for me and put my 2s and 6d on another horse that never finished a place! He grudgingly forked out!
Far into the future I began riding work for Beverley Stables at Muizenberg in the Cape. The trainer was Theo de Klerk and my future husband Trevor Botten was his assistant trainer. They had a horse called Sky Bird entered for the July and we all went up for the race. The Durban beachfront was being developed with huge skyscraper new hotels and we checked into one.
Now Durban has a lively Indian population who love their racing and my husband knew an Indian man called Ishmael. Ishmael knocked on our door before we had time to unpack and produced a dish cloth covered dish of fish curry the like of which I have never eaten since. His wife appeared the next day and took me off to a dressmaker who decked me out in Indian clothes.
Sky Bird did not win but my entrancement with the Durban July lives on to this day. I well remember the great Sea Cottage, a light slightly effeminate colt who had won the Cape Guineas over a mile for three year olds coming from stone last around the bend at Kenilworth race course in Cape Town. His jockey just tapped him on the shoulder and he took off like a Ferari! I got goose pimples and still do today as I think about it.
He started as the shortest price ever at that time for the July and at the gallops was shot by a member or the underworld of racing, receiving a bullet in his hind quarter. There was no way he could run the race, but with the help of a doctor and Syd Laird’s training he was declared fit to run.
Syd Laird also trained his stable companion Java Head and Jockey Johnny Cawcut had the ride. Java Head had two gallops before the July and after the second over four furlongs Johnny dismounted and pronounced that nothing, nothing, would beat this horse in the July. Johnny Cawcut was based in Cape Town and the racing crowds loved him. As he cantered down before a race they would shout CAWCUT WILL WALKIT!!
Java Head had the top weight of 127 lbs on his back and sure enough he won in record time with the gallant Sea Cottage in fourth place.
Java Head was then given to me in his retirement and I would hunt him with the Cape Hunt and Polo Club in Tokai forest and other venues. It was a drag hunt with the hounds after a scent IN A SACK pulled along the trial by a rider. Now the thing was that the field would not be allowed to pass the Hunt master and I was always just behind his horse’s rear end with a pretty good idea that Java saying to himself, I won the July why should I stay behind this . . . you can guess!
At the time I had a riding school and the children would come and spend the day and bring lunch sandwiches in paper packets. They often had polony sandwiches and as Java used to walk around freely he began to sample these packages developing a taste for the polony sandwiches so the mothers had to make extra for Java Guava as the children called him.
Justin Snaith has five horses in the race. Well I remember his father Chris giving me a dark bay pony called Midnight. Midnight was as old as the hills but knew all about gymkhana’s and my eldest son Mick rode him to victory in many a bending race, the old man knowing all the ropes!
There was a gymkhana at Noordhoek that we wanted to attend and having no transport for the horses at that stage determined to ride over from Muizenberg.
The road runs parallel to the railway on the edge of the Indian Ocean at the foot of the peninsula mountain range. The children and the ponies trekked along the road until reaching Fish Hoek when they turned West to Noordhoek on the Atlantic seaboard. The ponies performed well but the star was Midnight with Michael always about six inches of air between himself and the saddle. The won the Victor Ludorum!
Tired children and ponies then walked all the way back home. A tremendous feat for them and testament to the fitness of the ponies and the children and their determination.
I am inserting below an excerpt from my novel July Fever that was launched at the July in 1980 and is now available on Amazon and Kindle. The heroine, Meryl, has a dream of breeding a racehorse capable of winning the Druban July. It is a story of her unfailing belief in her horse Free Rein and the loves of her life.
BY MOLLY JOYCE
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON AND KINDLE
This is all I’ve left; the horses; my only hope for the future. This is all that’s left of my dreams.
Meryl’s dirt stained hands came up to cover her sunburned face. Her blond hair, stringy and unkempt, falling forward as the tears creased clean tracks through the dirt. And the sobs came. All the pent up emotions of the last few months welled up and overflowed into great gulping sobs. Abruptly she threw back her head. Glared at the blue sky, hazy with heat. Squinted at the brightness of the light and shook her fist in the air.
“All right, I’m beaten. You’ve extracted your punishment. But I’m not staying beaten. I’ll start again. I’m going to survive, do you hear?”
She looked at the foal, a colt, now almost on its feet, with a surge of hope. “You are going to do it for me. Together you and I are going places. We’re going to hit the top!”
This year’s July was run yesterday and the winner was Justin Snaith’s Do it Again!
Molly's Musings On Life And Travel 