Cartier's Involvement with Elephant Polo

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JUMBO POLO

MAKES A MINT Report by Tim Heald

 

How can you buy some £2 million of advertising with a £50,000 investment?

 

Answer: round up a bunch of celebrities with time to spare such as Ringo

Starr, Virginia Holgate, Barbara Bach, Billy Connolly and Max Boyce, mount

them all on polo-playing elephants in the shadow of the Himalayas, and

invite the world's press along, too...

 

eventy-five miles south-west of Kathmandu a tall, dark Scottish

landowner, property developer and sometime Cresta Runner grinned goofily

at an audience of about a hundred assorted Gurkhas, airline pilots and

officials, American millionaires and millionairesses, three-day eventers,

show-biz personalities, shikaris and fellow property developers.

 

" The rules are the same as for horse polo with one or two basic

differences, " he began. " You must

not interfere with your opponent's stick; women may use both hands; you

must not encourage your elephant to stop. You must not allow your elephant

to reverse.

 

" We do have a 50-page set of rules if anyone wants to read them, but above

all would you please try to be punctual. If you are not on time it jiggers

everything. " Once more he flashed eyes and teeth and laughed very loudly,

making the sort of noise associated with Harrow and the Household Cavalry.

 

James Manclark, founder and chairman of the World Elephant Polo Association,

was briefing the competitors at the fourth annual world championships,

staged by the Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge of Chitwan, Nepal, and sponsored by

Cartier, the jewellers, to the tune of £50,000. Cartier also had a team

improbably composed of Barbara Bach, Max Boyce, Billy Connolly and Ringo

Starr, later augmented by the Cartier president, Alain Perrin, christened

" Le Grand Fromage " by competitors under whom Cartier has trebled its

turnover to £320 million a year.

 

There were nine other entrants, and also a visitors' team which sometimes

had to scrape the barrel by allowing the international press corps to play a

chukka or two, but which also accommodated Steve Strange, late of the Camden

Palace, and the heiress Francesca von Thyssen. They had been spotted in

Delhi a few days earlier and asked along for the ride.

 

" Oh God! " said one of the Gurkha team, seeing Francesca take the field.

" It's that silly woman with the red hair. "

 

[image: Ringo Starr between chukkas...] The Gurkhas provided a consistently

down-to-earth antidote to the pretensions of the glitterati. " Tell me, "

inquired one of them sceptically, " Is it true that Cartier flew Ringo out

here? " - And on receiving an affirmative answer ventured: " Speaking as a

resident of Nepal I only hope they're paying him to fly back. "

 

They also came up with the best definition of the game. It was the

brigadier's wife who said it was " like playing one-handed golf from the top

of a double-decker bus with a puncture " . This quite accurately describes

the elephant's lurching gait but fails to take account of the fact that in

elephant polo you are opposed by four other punctured double-decker buses

with one-handed golfers on the roof.

 

At Tiger Tops they play on the golf-course-like expanse next to the

Meghauley grass airstrip five miles from the camp. " Plane stopped play, "

said Ringo, relaxing over a Coke in the Cartier tent as the 12.30 Royal

Nepal Airlines flight bumped along the grass in mid-chukka. It is a

beautiful site, flat as Cowdray or Jaipur and with the incomparable

advantage of the Annapurna range of the Himalayas as a backdrop. In early

morning the mountains were hidden in mist but they emerged white and craggy

against a pure blue sky at about the same time that the bar behind the goal

posts started to dispense spicy hot Bloody Marys. Around 11 o'clock.

 

In some ways the scene recalled Smith's Lawn, home of the Guard's polo club

at Windsor. All around the ground were burgundy banners with " Cartier "

embroidered across the middle in gold italic script - just as the legend was

embroidered across the chests of the celebrity guests. Above the tents by

the bar more banners welcomed the other teams, though nothing attained the

prominence of the Cartier hoardings. In this respect it was just like the

" International Day " which the firm sponsors at Windsor every summer. One

notable difference, however, was the presence of a " dung " or " shitty "

wallah, a man who wandered about the field during play scooping up piles of

elephant excrement with his bare hands and putting it in a sack. " Ah, " said

Billy Connolly ruminatively, " The Nepalese cure for nail biting. "

 

As a spectacle, the game is slower but funnier than the one played on

ponies. The elephants - four aside - are driven by local mahouts who sit

close behind the ears, occasionally giving the beasts a fearsome whack with

a stick on the dome of the head. The experts insist that this cannot hurt

because the elephant has a double skull. True or not the elephants remained

remarkably phlegmatic during play except during particularly keenly

contested passages or when a goal was scored. Then they tended to trumpet.

 

The players sat behind the mahout. The traditional *howdah* - the rigid

throne frame in which maharajahs and big game hunters sit in those old sepia

photographs - was abandoned in favour of the *guddi*, which is just a

hessian pad. There was a rope lap belt, rope stirrups and a rope strap for

hanging on to with the left hand. The stick, held in the right hand, is

between 96 and 102 inches long, depending on the size of one's mount. It

feels extremely heavy and wobbles about like rhubarb. It is as difficult to

estimate where its end is as it is to judge the exact length of one of those

extra- long billiard cues that you need a rest for. Experienced players

tended to whirl it round like a hammer thrower before delivering a hit. They

often missed altogether. Novices were more tentative. They also missed as

often as not.

 

Occasionally elephants would kick the ball to a chorus of " Well played the

elephant! " though this was an illegal move. Sometimes they trod on it - also

illegal. Frequently the ball disappeared under an elephantine stomach so

that the player was compelled to lean out dangerously and horizontally like

the crew of a racing yacht planing before a stiff breeze. No one fell off,

though the previous year James Manclark had come adrift after displaying

excessive zeal.

 

Locals, including the Gurkhas, had a great advantage in that they could

communciate with the mahouts. The mahouts did not speak English and there

was a widespread feeling, especially on the celebrity team, that the mahouts

were not on their side. Connolly, in particular, seemed to have trouble in

getting his elephant to move at all and was, partly because of this, unable

to carry out his threat of becoming the first elephant polo player to be

sent off for a professional foul. He was looking forward to a headline

saying " Connolly takes early bath " but sadly this never happened. For much

of one game he and his elephant actually had their backs to the other

players. " I was trying to lull them into a sense of false security, " he said

afterwards.

 

To spend thousands of pounds on a sport as esoteric as this, played in an

isolated camp seven hours' drive from Kathmandu, looks absurd, but Cartier's

sponsorship is hard-headcd. Last year they spent around £400,000 on polo

around the world. According to the calculations of head office in Paris, the

company netted £36 million of coverage in editorial material. No doubt this

article will be included in the 1986 figure.

 

" Four years ago, " said Pilar Misteli-Boxford, the appropriately chic and

soignée PR lady who runs the Cartier polo programme, " we asked, 'Where can

we go in sport?' At that time polo was starting to take off. We found that

polo was the sport to support because all the people involved with it were

either Cartier clients or Cartier potential. The environment is the world of

Cartier because it is the world of old money and new money and style and

beautiful people and. . . well. . . " (she has the sort of husky intonation

which makes the concept sound plausible) " well. . . jet-set. "

 

The idea of jet-set was never more clearly epitomised than by " Le Grand

Fromage " . Monsieur Perrin flew in from France three days after everyone

else and was met by an elephant with a golden *howdah* which transported him

across the rivers and along the dirt tracks to camp. He looked a little

self-conscious about this but next day was down on the pitch trying a little

" stick and ball " .

 

Like all Cartier employees, or at least all those who come into contact with

potential purchasers, he was wearing one of the firm's watches. His came in

a limited edition and is available to the man in Bond Street for between

£3000 and £4000 - or about £5000 more if you go for the gold strap. You can

wear it, should you choose, 300 feet under water.

 

The idea of elephant polo was first suggested to Monsieur Perrin last July.

He agreed to support it at once. " I said yes, we should do it, as long as we

have enough people to make it funny, " he said, a shade disingenuously,

adding with more candour: " It is a fantastic promotion for us. "

 

Indeed it is. Pilar Mistreli-Boxford said she was hoping for a quarter of

million pounds' worth of publicity, but Peter Drummond, the freelance

lO-per-cent man who originated the idea, was hoping for as mach as two

million. The *Figaro* Magazine was there, and *Frankfurter Allgemeine*, and

*Epoca* of Milan. The BBC were making a Max Boyce special, bringing along

the usual large crew, which even ran to a Welsh language expert to coach Max

in his native tongue. Nice girl called Glenda.

 

Throughout the tournament, won by the home team, the villagers of Meghauley

watched with wide eyes and little or no display of emotion. Most of them are

farmers. Some of their fields were a vivid yellow of mustard. In others bony

oxen pulled the sort of plough that might have been used in England before

the Norman Conquest.

 

On the field of play, the elephants, wet with sweat, rolled their heads and

trumpeted. They are an endangered species but, by using them for their

tourists' game watching and their polo, Tiger Tops ensures that some at

least are preserved. And funds from the tournament are helping to establish

Asia's first elephant sanctuary on a lOOO-acre site just down the road.

 

So elephant polo is good for elephants; and a very good time was had by the

humans, too. But in the end it is the burgundy-and-gold banners silhouetted

against the Himalayas which stay in the mind's eye. And the line which

lingers is that of Alain Perrin, " Ie Grand Fromage. "

 

" In the end you must have a result. And the result is publicity " .

 

 

SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, February 2nd 1986