Of Gunboat Jack and Princess Amina

As the city of light turned into a city of violence, some characters that marked Karachi's social scene in the 1950s and later remain etched in people's memories

By Kaleem Omar

Bobbie Berry was one of the star girl athletes at Karachi Grammar School in the mid-1950s. She was the daughter of a now long dead Anglo-Indian lady named Mrs Berry. An attractive widow in her forties, Mrs Berry lived in a modest, second-storey flat in central Karachi's Saddar district. In some circles, she was affectionately known as 'United Nations' Berry, because, so it was rumoured, she had male friends of many different nationalities.

One of these friends was a certain 'Gunboat' Jack, a black American sailor and self-styled adventurer. Soon after the outbreak of World War II, Gunboat Jack had somehow washed up like a piece of flotsam and jetsam in Bombay, of all places, where he had turned to the lucrative business of running contraband goods into India. In other words, and not to put too fine a point on it, he had become a smuggler.

By early 1940 Gunboat Jack had taken to visiting Karachi on weekends for a bit of rest and recreation. During one such visit, so the story goes, he was introduced to Mrs Berry. It was also at about this time that he acquired the nickname Gunboat Jack. One theory had it that he was called Gunboat Jack not because his name was Jack, but because he had a tendency, whenever he got into a fight, to settle matters with a car-jack that he carried.

Be that as it may, Gunboat Jack soon became a regular weekend visitor at Mrs Berry's flat in Saddar. Bobbie Berry, who was born in 1941, was said to have been the product of one of those weekend liaisons. As the years went by, Bobbie Berry grew up into a teenager who had her mother's high-cheekbone good looks and svelte figure and her father's natural athleticism.

At Karachi Grammar School, Bobbie Berry excelled in the high jump, the long jump and sprint races. Easygoing by nature, she was a popular girl at school and made lots of friends there. Many of them remember her with affection to this day. After finishing school in 1956, she hung around Karachi for a while, attending the occasional teenage party but not doing very much else.

Then, sometime in the late 1950s, she disappeared from the Karachi social scene, leaving her friends wondering where she had gone. They got the answer to that question in a most dramatic fashion in 1963 when Bobbie Berry suddenly reappeared in Karachi to perform at the Le Gourmet nightclub as a belly dancer billed as 'Princess Amina', accompanied on the bongo drums by (wait for it) the Right Honourable Tony Moynihan, if you please.

Tony Moynihan was the eldest son of Lord Moynihan, a member of the British peerage. His younger brother was Colin Moynihan, who went on to become a minister in Margaret Thatcher's government. By contrast, Tony Moynihan was always something of a ne'er-do-well and a drifter to boot.

That, however, still didn't quite explain just what the son of a member of the House of Lords was doing playing the bongo drums with a belly dance act in Karachi. The mystery was solved when it was revealed that Tony Moynihan had married Bobbie Berry a couple of years earlier and -- by some mysterious process of alchemy -- had transformed her into the belly dancing sensation, Princess Amina.

Her performances at Le Gourmet electrified Karachi's nightclub crowd. Princess Amina wasn't just another belly dancer; she was the ultimate belly dancer -- a performer of dazzling virtuosity and seemingly inexhaustible stamina. There were nights when she would perform for more than an hour non-stop, ending with a pulse-pounding shimmy routine atop one of the dining tables, bringing the cheering audience to their feet in a standing ovation.

Compared to her, even such belly dancing greats as Egypt's Samia Gamal were nothing. What gave Princess Amina's dancing its special quality were partly her skill, partly her supreme physical fitness, and partly the sheer aura of sensuousness she radiated. Her curvaceous body gleaming, her bare feet pounding and stomping, her hair flying, she was -- in a word -- the supreme exponent of the belly dancer's art.

Le Gourmet, the nightclub where Princess Amina performed every night for six full-house weeks in 1963, was part of the Palace Hotel -- a wonderful 1920s building located at the corner of Club Road and Kutchery Road, where the Karachi Sheraton Hotel now stands. I'm using the old names for these roads here, because I've always been firmly opposed to this unfortunate tendency we, in this country, have of renaming roads and even cities at times.

When the Palace Hotel was torn down in the late 1970s to make way for the Sheraton, it marked the end of not just one of Karachi's most beautiful buildings but of an era and a whole way of life. For the decades that followed the 1970s saw Karachi, once known as the city of lights, turned into Karachi the city of ethnic violence, curfews, bomb blasts and massacres. Any lesser city would have collapsed. But Karachi is a city of broad shoulders. It can take a lot.

After her engagement at Le Gourmet ended, Princess Amina and Tony Moynihan departed for parts unknown -- or, more accurately, for the Far East, where she was booked to perform at various nightclubs. Karachi's nightclub crowd were saddened by her going, but they cheered up considerably when word came down the grapevine a year later that she would soon make a return appearance at Le Gourmet.

And sure enough, she did make a return appearance in 1964. But while the skill and virtuosity were still there, something seemed to have gone out of her. It was as if, in that brief one-year on the road, she had seen too much, experienced too much. Thinking back on it now, I am reminded of a of a scene from the 1957 movie 'Fire Down Below' in which Rita Hayworth says to Robert Mitchum: "I'm all used up, all burnt out. Armies have marched over me."

Sad to say, Rita Hayworth, Hollywood's golden girl of the 1940s, died in the 1980s of Alzheimer's Disease, in a New York old people's home. Robert Mitchum, Hollywood's tough guy of the 1950s, is also no more. As for the Right Honourable Tony Moynihan, well, he divorced Princess Amina in the late 1960s and married another belly dancer. She wasn't a patch on Princess Amina, however, and the newlyweds soon parted company. Upon his father's death in the 1970s, Tony Moynihan inherited his title and became Lord Moynihan.

He then got married for the third time -- to yet another belly dancer (would you believe it!) -- and hit the road again. He wandered around Europe for a while, dabbling in various business ventures, and then moved to Manila, where he eventually ended up owning a somewhat less than reputable nightclub and became an informer, on the side, for MI-5, the British intelligence agency.

He got his 15 minutes of fame in the early 1990s when his name featured prominently in the international media in connection with what was billed as the biggest multi-nation drug bust ever. Information provided by Tony Moynihan to the British authorities and the US Drugs Enforcement Agency was said to have played a key part in the bust. He died in the mid-1990s -- unsung and, I suspect, largely unmourned.

I am happy to be able to report, however, that Bobbie Berry is alive and well and, by all accounts, still nearly as svelte as she was in her dancing days. She lives in Rome now, with her Italian second husband.

But what of Gunboat Jack, you may well ask. What happened to him? Well, believe it or not, he ended up working as the head of watch and ward at a boys' boarding school in Madras, India. Eventually, the US Embassy in India was persuaded to pay his fare back to the United States.

The Indians, too, have a tendency for renaming things, and Madras, for some obscure reason, is now called Chenai. To Karachiites of my generation, however, Gunboat Jack will always be Gunboat Jack and Princess Amina will always be Bobbie Berry.