London has never been short of eccentric individuals who have made their mark on the city’s history, and few have made their presence felt as much as Ras Prince Monolulu.
Ras Prince Monolulu, real name Peter Carl Mackay, could be easily recognised in the 30s, 40s and 50s walking around London’s East End with his eye-catching feathered headdress, particularly around Mile End market.
He claimed to be a chief of the Falasha tribe of Abyssinia, in present-day Ethiopia, and that he had been kidnapped from the African coast and placed on a British ship, which became shipwrecked in Portugal.
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While on the ship, he says he told his kidnappers that he was an African prince in the hope that he’d get better treatment. Eventually, according to his account, he was taken to New York before making his own way to London in 1902.
However, in reality Ras Prince Monolulu was born in St Croix, Danish West Indies, which is now part of the United States Virgin Islands. He was born to a family of breeders, raisers and racers, which made it very easy for him to get into the business of being a horse tipster.
He began travelling the country and much of Europe in the early 20th century, going as far as St Peterburg, Russia to perform as part of an American ‘negro show’. He was in Prussia when the First World War broke out, and ended up being held in a German prison camp near Berlin until 1919.
After the war, he made his way back to Britain and started to attend various racecourses across the country, where he started selling tips on horses.
In 1920, he made a handsome £8,000 profit, equal to around £400,000 in modern times, after picking a horse that had 100–6 odds of winning the 1920 Derby in Epsom. Thereafter, he became a household name.
Well-known for his catchphrase “I gotta ‘orse!”, which he used to attract punters to bet on the horses he claimed to be backing, Ras Prince Monolulu’s success as a tipster led to him becoming a minor celebrity.
Arguably the most famous Black man in Britain at the time, he appeared in the 1939 propaganda film The Lion has Wings. He also made appearances in the 1952 film Derby Day and the 1954 film Aunt Clara, as well as the 1959 film Make Mine a Million.
Off-screen, Ras Prince Monolulu, was known for his extravagant lifestyle, which included owning a large house in Epsom, Surrey, and driving a Rolls-Royce. The self-styled African prince also claimed to have married six times, although only three of those marriages can be verified.
While in Russia in 1902, he claimed he married in a Jewish ceremony to a girl in Moscow who was later taken away by the police. Then, a year later in Germany, he said he married a woman in a Catholic ceremony but she was later killed in a car accident.
One marriage that can be verified, however, was his marriage in 1908 to Elizabeth Arnold, another German lady, who tragically passed away in 1911. After that he married Rhoda Carley in 1922, to whom he stayed wed for seven years before their marriage dissolved.
His marriage to Nellie Adkins in 1931 also broke down not long after. In the 50s, it was rumoured that he was romantically involved with an Austrian governoress in London, although there’s no evidence they married.
Ras Prince Monolulu was 83-years-old when he died in bizarre circumstances at Middlesex Hospital in February 1965. He had been visited by journalist Jeffrey Bernard who brought with him a box of Black Magic chocolates and offered him a ‘strawberry cream’.
As he was eating the sweet treat, it got lodged in his throat and cut off his oxygen supply. Ras Prince Monolulu died choking on the chocolate as the journalist, who had turned up to interview him, watched on in horror.
Years after his death, Ras Prince Monolulu got a mention in a 1974 pilot episode of the UK comedy series Rising Damp when character Rigsby compared new tenant Philip, who claimed to be the son of a tribal chief, to the legendary former Londoner.
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