On a week-day Jack Kidd reclines on a large sofa on the expansive patio of his family’s impressive Holders House on the sprawling Holders estate. He has just taken a break from a morning of conducting polo lessons to talk to EASY magazine about his life’s passion – polo.
The six-foot four Jack has been a professional polo player for the last 20 years, ever since he left the prestigious British public school Harrow at age 17 to play on Britain’s junior team.
Kidd has built an outstanding career out of the sport. “I have played in pretty much every continent there is in the world. It has just been an incredible career,” he says, and it all started in Barbados. He was taught largely by his father John Kidd and Barbados’ Sir Charles Williams, also an avid exponent of the sport.
“I have won pretty much most of the tournaments there are to win around the world . . . . I have toured the world and played for some of the most interesting people you could ever wish to meet – from kings, maharajas, queens to rogues and gangsters.”
Polo professionals are usually young, from wealthy backgrounds, paid to play on the same team as their wealthy patrons. And Jack admits polo is a “very, very expensive sport”. He once told an interviewer “if you want to play competitively in outdoor polo, you’ll spend at least one hundred thousand pounds a year.” As a professional, ninety five per cent of his income goes “back into the horses, the grooms, the lorries and everything else”. He regards it as “pretty much a sport of passion”.
Jack has played the majority of his polo in London, Paris and San Tropez. This life of sport has seen him traversing the world – last year he came to Barbados to spend Christmas, then he flew to Austria, then later Switzerland, on to India, back to Barbados and then off to Spain again, all to play polo.
In 2006 he won the Snow Polo Championships in Switzerland, Aspen and Moscow all in the same year, a unique feat he claims has not been accomplished by anyone else.
Little wonder he moans “I am tired of living out of a suitcase” and he looks forward to the day when he can finally settle in Barbados.
“This is my home” says Jack who was born in England and raised in Barbados along with his sister, international model Jodie Kidd. He expresses a strong affinity to the place with which his grandmother, the late British aristocrat Janet Kidd, first fell in love in 1953.
Jack relates the story of a beloved grandmother – daughter of British newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook – who stopped at Barbados on a cruise and returned three years later to purchase the extensive property on the West Coast. In 1956 she developed Holders’ House, the second house to be built on the Sandy Lane estate at that time.
The house looked across the plantation’s sugar cane fields that covered the Holders estate and Janet Kidd converted those fields into the impressive, existing Holders Polo Field. Holders House has gone on to become favoured accommodation for royalty and a host of internationally recognised personalities.
“My father was just getting into polo and my grandmother did not want to look down onto sugar cane. So she thought ‘let’s turn this into a polo field.’ It was a welcome feature, providing the oportunity for Sir Charles Williams who saw the opportunity to move the polo club from inferior facilities at the Garrison Savannah to the new Holders’ grounds built by Janet Kidd.
“Within a year, my grandmother donated the field to the club,” Jack said.
Jack Kidd is now age 37, and “at the end of my career now”. Though he continues to play professionally he claims to have “quietened down”.He considers it is time for a change. “I will try and focus on doing something else that might make me some money, not cost me money,” he says.
