From lifting the Cowdray Gold Cup last year to making his debut as England captain, life is good for the latest Beresford polo protégé, discovers Madeleine Silver
It’s mid-morning on a blustery early summer’s day, and all six foot five inches of Tommy Beresford is thundering towards me, dark glasses on, to say he has one more chukka to play before he can break. We’re on the silky green pitches at Manor Farm on the Cowdray estate, where his UAE team is based. It might be more than 30 years since Jilly Cooper published her racy tome Polo but the cast and stage here are still the same: nonchalant Argentine grooms warming up ponies pitch-side; willowy girlfriends lounging against car bonnets, and a lineup of patrons’ Range Rovers as gleaming as the ponies. And Beresford, just turned 28, is the latest hero of this troupe: England captain, the first English player in 22 years (and only the fifth since the Second World War) to reach an eight-goal handicap, and polo bloodlines that, if equine, would command eye-watering stud fees.
When Beresford lifted the hallowed Cowdray Gold Cup last July, he became the third generation of this Irish dynasty to do so. His father Lord Charles Beresford won it in 1982, while his grandfather, the Marquess of Waterford, clinched it in 1966 and 1969 flanked by his great uncle Major Lord Patrick Beresford and The Duke of Edinburgh. The Chilean lineage is equally starry, with his mother María Teresa Donoso winning the British Ladies Open several times and his uncles, the late Gabriel Donoso and Jose Donoso, once revered fixtures on the British high-goal circuit. “It might not be common for English families to talk about polo around the dinner table but that’s something we do,” he tells me, steaming maté in hand and his dachshund on his lap.
Home for Beresford and his girlfriend (a doctor) is in nearby Midhurst: a polo Mecca that comes alive during the Gold Cup tournament in July. Four miles outside the town is his family home where he grew up with his older brother and sister. Beresford spent early days in the saddle with the Cowdray Hunt Pony Club, and his father is still the polo manager at the Great Trippetts Polo Club, where Beresford came of age as a player. There’s a sentimentality to this corner of West Sussex: during the Gold Cup last year his girlfriend found the cashier in Tesco wishing this local boy good luck in the final. “I’ve never been one to dwell much on achievements or performance but I struggled to move on from last year’s Gold Cup,” he admits. “Achieving that childhood dream was something that stuck with me; I found myself waking up in the morning for a while still thinking about it.”
Beresford’s earliest memory of a ‘grown-up tournament’ was playing alongside his father as a nine-year-old at Knepp Castle. “The only thing I can really remember is crying because we lost the final,” he laughs. “Rather than being horse mad, I just love playing. I was lucky to have had the facilities at Great Trippetts when I was growing up, to be around 10-goal players and play practices with them, to have my father who played and to have my uncles, who were at the top of the game.”
On the promise that he did well in his GCSEs, his parents let him leave Wellington College aged 16 to make a go of becoming pro and begin the year-round globe-trotting required, flitting between England, Argentina, Chile, Dubai and Florida. “People were saying: ‘Are you sure you’re going to do this?’ Leaving school to pursue polo is a very un-English thing to do. I was one of the better English players of my age group but as Argentine standards go, I was definitely below par.” The punt paid off: over the past decade he’s totted up a CV to rival his ancestors. There was his Queen’s Cup victory in 2017, aged just 21, with RH Polo alongside 10-goaler Adolfo Cambiaso (the late Queen told Beresford it was like standing next to a lamp post when she presented him with the cup); he won it again with his current team UAE in 2021, and last year he made his debut as England captain, winning the Westchester Cup in Florida and the Coronation Cup at Guards as well as playing in his first Argentine Open match.
Such dizzy success is, perhaps, predisposed but there is no cavalier arrogance here. Beresford gushes about his parents’ sacrifices to enable him to play at this level; of his patron Her Highness Sheikha Maitha bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum he’s “very grateful”, and he’s quick to acknowledge his luck at playing alongside the team manager and nine-goaler Lucas Monteverde. But most telling of all? While others leave their boots to be polished by a groom, he does them himself: a small prematch ritual. “My mother has always reminded me that I’m part of this small world, a glass box, and so not to burn any bridges. She’s always said: ‘Behave well, be professional,’” he recounts.
Gone are the headline-grabbing antics of his predecessors, when gossip columns were filled with reports of a brewing romance between Lord Patrick Beresford and Princess Margaret in the 1950s, or later his jacuzzi parties on the edge of Windsor Great Park. The latest Beresford polo protégé is more likely to spend evenings playing tennis at his parents’ house or exercising his young horses. And, as the British season draws to a close, downtime is a remote shooting lodge in the Wicklow Mountains (east of the imposing family seat Curraghmore House in Co Waterford).
Ask Beresford to ponder the future and he looks uneasy, enviably content with the status quo, riding the crest of his sport. Paradise is a sunny day, stick in hand on Lawns at Cowdray, mounted on the best horsepower going. “I live such a nice life,” he concedes. “I really can’t say I need a day off.” After diligently checking I don’t need anything for my journey home, he returns to the stables to drink maté with his grooms. As he says, it’s a very nice life.
