Web Page No 2580

11th May 2019

Prince Monolulu

1st Picture. Prince Monolulu cigarette card

2nd Picture. In later life

3rd Picture. Even a pub named after him!

 4th Picture. A good whist hand

Betting

My family were never into betting, in fact I don’t think my father ever entered a betting shop, if it comes to that neither have I. The nearest my family came to betting was that two afternoons a week my mother and grandmother would march off to the scout hut or the Drayton Institute to play whist.

All this and we lived next door to a Bookmaker.

The one racing memory I have is hearing about and seeing Prince Monolulu, the racing tipster. at race courses on the television. He became quite a cult figure, although his life story was very different from the tales he told.

He claimed to be a chief of the Falasha tribe of Abyssinia, but the reality is that he was born on 26^th October 1881 in St Croix, Danish West Indies (now part of the United States Virgin Islands). His baptism (as Peter Carl McKay) has been traced in the records of the English Episcopal Church of the Danish West Indies. His father, whose name is not shown in the register, was William Henry McKay and his mother was Catherine Heyliger. His father and brothers were horse breeders, raisers and racers on St Croix.

According to his own account, he made his way from his birthplace to the African coast, where he was shanghaied on board a British ship: he styled himself as a prince in the hope of receiving better treatment. His ship was subsequently shipwrecked on the Portuguese coast, from where he made his way to New York. More plausibly he travelled to New York via Puerto Rico. He had various jobs, on shore and at sea, and eventually reached London in 1902.

He first went to The Derby in 1903, and soon began to establish himself as a tipster. He adopted colourful robes, a plumed headdress, and the slogan "I've gotta horse!", sometimes alternating with "Black man for luck!". However, he also continued to travel around Britain, and around Europe, for example visiting Saint Petersburg with an American "negro show". He was in Königsberg when World War I broke out, and was held in Ruhleben internment camp, near Berlin, for the duration of the war. He returned to London in 1919. He rose to prominence after picking out the horse Spion Kop in the 1920 Derby, which came in at the long odds of 100–6, and from which he personally made some £8,000, a vast amount of money at the time.

However there is much doubt about his personal life. Monolulu claimed to have been married six times, though only five marriages are documented and reliable evidence exists for only three. He claimed to have been married first in a Jewish ceremony in Moscow in 1902, to a girl who was afterwards taken away by the police; and second in a Catholic ceremony in 1903 to a German girl who was killed in a car accident. More certain were his marriages to another German, Elizabeth Arnold, who accompanied him to England and whom he married in 1908, but who died in 1911; to Rhoda Carley in 1922, the marriage being dissolved in 1929; and finally to Nellie Adkins in 1931, a marriage which also broke down. In the 1950s he was romantically linked to an Austrian governess in London.

His death was a bizarre as his life A friend, Jeffrey Bernard, a horse-racing journalist visited Monolulu in the Middlesex Hospital to interview him. Jeffrey Bernard had brought with him a box of Black Magic chocolates and offered Monolulu a 'strawberry cream', which he accepted and subsequently choked to death on it this was on Valentine’s Day 1965.

Prince Monolulu frequently featured in newsreel broadcasts, and as a consequence was probably the best-known black man in Britain of the time. He appeared in a clip in the 1939 propaganda film by Alexander Korda, The Lion has Wings, Korda used him as an example of what Britain was, a nation at play and at ease with himself. He also appeared briefly in the 1952 film Derby Day, which is set around The Derby, the 1954 film Aunt Clara with Margaret Rutherford and Sid James, and also in the 1959 film Make Mine a Million.

In March 1957 he appeared on the You Bet Your Life TV quiz show, hosted by Groucho Marx. Even in the 1974 pilot show for Rising Damp Rigsby compares his new tenant, Philip, to the Prince as he had stated he was the son of a chief.

Peter

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