The legend of Sea Cottage

Gangsters, guns and smoke-filled rooms. Gavin Foster writes about the shooting of South Africa’s most famous racehorse, Sea Cottage.

It was early one day in June 1966 that three denizens of Durban’s seedy underworld got together in the Monaco Club in Field Street, near the Esplanade. The club – that offered perfectly legal snooker as a front for the illicit gambling activities that went on in the back rooms – was owned by a well-known shyster called Monty Labuschagne.  With him on that day, three weeks before the Durban July, was one of his henchmen, Johnny Nel, and a bookie called Sonny Chislett who operated from Natal Tattersalls across the road from the club. “The guys used to hang out there, playing snooker in the front and cards in the back,” remembers 84-year-old Herman Brown, a Hillcrest resident who was at one time both Natal champion trainer and the provincial snooker champion. “Chislett would go there often because it was convenient, while I’d be there for the snooker.”

Labuschagne owed Chislett a lot of money, and the bookmaker needed it because he saw big trouble looming – he stood to lose a fortune if Sea Cottage, the hot favourite, won the Durban July. The bookie, the dodgy club owner and his sinister sidekick worked out a deal where Johnny Nel would shoot Sea Cottage, Chislett would save a fortune in pay-outs, and Labuschagne’s debt would disappear. The gunman would earn R10 000 for a five minute job.

On the morning of June 10, 1966 Herman Brown was opposite Natal Command working his horses at the beachfront, as was the norm in those days, when he heard what he thought was a car backfiring, followed by a lot of shouting. Shortly afterwards one of his Zulu grooms told him that Sea Cottage had been shot at Blue Lagoon. “Syd Laird was a personal friend of mine and was training Sea Cottage, so we ran across to see what was going on”, says Herman. Laird’s horses had been walked down the path from the Newmarket stables (where the flea-market now operates) under the Rupert Ellis Brown viaduct, and on to the beach near Blue Lagoon. “There was a little rotunda thing at the southern end of the bridge and Nel waited there for them.”

The gunman didn’t shoot to kill. He fired a single shot from a 7,65mm pistol into Sea Cottage’s right rear hock, then jumped into his car and raced away, but his freedom didn’t last long. Various people, including Herman Brown, reported seeing him standing on the bridge with his two accomplices during the week before the shooting, watching Sea Cottage. His car – a yellow convertible – was very distinctive. When an Indian fisherman told the police the well-dressed white gunman had jumped into just such a car, they knew immediately who they were looking for. Nel was arrested within hours, as were his accomplices, but the bookie and the club owner were later released due to insufficient evidence. Chislett, however, was expelled from the Tattersalls and lost his licence to work as a bookmaker.

Nel was eventually sentenced to six years imprisonment, with half suspended. “Johnny was a real braggart who used to walk around with a gun on his belt,” says Herman. “He’d move his jacket aside so people could see it and there were lots of rumours about people he’d shot. He used to deliberately spread the stories because he wanted respect and liked it when people stared at him.”

Three years after the trial Herman Brown had a surprise visitor late one night. Nel had been released from prison and had nowhere to go. “He was crying like a baby and I’m a bit of a softy, so although we weren’t big mates I gave him a stiff brandy and R50.” Nel, who’d never received the promised payment for the shooting, died of cancer just months later.

Sea Cottage had the best medical care available at the time and made a miraculous recovery, returning to training within a week. Three weeks later, ridden by his regular jockey, Rob Sivewright, he ran fourth in the Durban July with the bullet still lodged in his hock, and two weeks later won the Clairwood Winter Handicap. The following year he won the Durban July in a dead-heat with Jollify, and by the time he was put out to stud late in 1967 he’d won 20 of the 24 races he’d contested.

As the years go by the Sea Cottage legend has grown, and many inaccuracies have crept in. One source says the horse was shot by a sniper with a high powered rifle, and another fancifully awards Nel the nickname of “Machine-Gun Nel”. One thing often still quoted that was for many years true but subsequently changed, was that the bullet was never recovered from the horse’s rump. Sea Cottage was bred and owned for his entire life by the Birch Brothers in the Eastern Cape, who leased him out during his racing days. “I had him put down at the age of 25 after he had a stroke and could no longer stand,” says Syd Birch. “At the post mortem they retrieved the bullet – it had moved around to the inside of his leg. We donated it to a fundraiser for a horse charity and it was bought, as I remember, by the Sivewright family.”  *