Monolulu Still In Business At 80

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29238, 23 June 1960, Page 8

Monolulu Still In Business At 80

(From me London Correspondent ot “The Press”)

LONDON, June 3.

On the night before the Derby the gypsies on Epsom Downs scratched the name of the winner, St. Paddy, on a well outside the Amato public house. It was the sixth year in succession that their tip has correctly foretold the Derby winner as it has done scores of times for more than a century. But the world’s most famous tipster, if a less successful one than the gypsies, does not pass on his advice silently by night: Ras Prince Monolulu, tall, flamboyant, huskily shouting his famous cry, “I gotta horse,” shaking his great, red-plumed headdress, plucking envelopes from his scarlet robes. His large brown face is wrinkled with a slightly cynical smile and 80 years of a fabulous, tough career of strange jobs, sudden riches, equally sudden losses, the extremes of fame and nonentity in which he has sold monkey nuts to Bavarians and given race tips to kings. He will be 80 on October 26.

Before the Derby, Monolulu was tipping a long shot. Proud Chieftain. It came in fifth. For the following days at Epsom, Monolulu was tipping Petite Etoile for the Coronation Cup, and Never Too Late for the Oaks: “They’re both certs,” he said. Both won.

Monolulu is a showman. Everyone who has been at a major race meeting in Britain has at least seen him. Many have given him a shilling or two for his tips. At racecourses he built up a huge circle of friends and acquaintances. The Duke of Windsor, when he was King, always had a word for him. So had the Aga Khan and Lord Derby. So had Edgar Wallace and Lord Lonsdale.

“Edgar Wallace made more money on horses than he did from writing, and he lost it, too,” Monolulu says.

Ras Prince Monolulu says he was born in Abyssinia. “My father was a chieftain of a Jew-

ish tribe called the Falasha, who live in the mountains of Harra," he says. As a boy, he found his way to Djibouti in French Somaliland; then, when he was a mere 14, he was a stoker on a ship bound for New York. That was a hard city in the roaring nineties. Prince Monolulu went hungry until he got himself a job cleaning spittoons in a Bowery bar. In New York he joined the Salvation Army, carried a banner round Madison Square for coffee and a sandwich, and began to preach religion to Bowery toughs. To get to London he looked after seasick horses on a ship to Britain. When he got there he sang songs on street corners. Nobody listened, so he became a patent medicine man. “It cured nothing, of course. But it paid the rent and gave me a living,” he says. Then he went north to Lancashire. And there he became a street-corner dentist. Monolulu says he put a record on a gramophone when he pulled a tooth, so that the customers outside would not hear the patient inside. Monolulu made a trip to Moscow, where he began his career as a tipster at the midnight races. There, he married the first of six wives. “I loved them and I lost them,” he says. “Every one of them robbed me, which is one reason why I love horses. They don’t rob me so often.”

He went to Germany. He went to Austria. He went to France, Switzerland, and Italy. He has no trouble thumbing lifts to race meetings, though Monolulu makes enough money to take him on fabulous trips all over the world. In 1958 he went to Miami to back Ballymoss. He arrived back in London with sixpence and had to sell his feathers to raise a train fare. He went to the Vatican for the election of the Pope and offered odds of two to one against the American Cardinal Spellman “just to promote Anglo-American relations.” Next month he is off to Russia —then to America again.

Monolulu enjoys betting hugely —but not on horses he tips. “I am afraid it will bring bad luc v ,” he explains enigmatically. He has won and lost thousands and claims he won £35.000 on the 1935 Derby. He lost every penny of it the next day.