Beverley is back! Beloved Karoo mannequin’s forced adventure comes to a happy end

Two construction workers, who have admitted to taking Beverley, the famous mannequin from the Doornberg farm dam near Nieu-Bethesda, quietly returned her to friendly waters on Sunday.

Quentin Potgieter and Morné van Zanten, who took Beverley, were seemingly playing a prank. 

“I am very happy she is back,” Beverley’s creator, Nieu-Bethesda artist Ryno Greeff said. He said that in the past week, Beverley’s story travelled around the world. He was interviewed by radio stations and newspapers from as far away as Canada.

“I honestly had no idea Beverley was so famous,” he said.

Greeff first found Beverley in a second-hand shop and created a playful installation in a farm dam on the Doornberg Road outside Nieu-Bethesda.

Here, she became a landmark sighting, and people even drove to the dam to swim with her. Beverley’s dam is on the way to Greeff’s well-known stone-art installation, the Stonefolk of Ongeluks Sloot.

Read more: Bring Beverley back — Nieu-Bethesda grieves loss of beloved dam mannequin

“We knew people were the ‘moer’ in [with] us, but it just motivated us,” Van Zanten said with a laugh on Tuesday. “We wanted to do something big. We didn’t just want to put her back. That would not have been any fun at all. When we saw how the story was spreading, we thought we could get publicity out of this.”

Beverley’s ‘publicity tour’

Potgieter said they really tried their best to make Beverley’s “publicity tour” as effective as possible. “Also, we look forward to our next road trip with Beverley,” he said.

Van Zanten said that at first people were angry, but after they returned Beverley, the anger subsided.

Potgieter said he had worked on a wind farm for the past year near Steytlerville and had come to know the area very well. The two now work near Noupoort on a solar energy farm. Van Zanten previously worked in Steyterville and De Aar.

Van Zanten said they went to watch rugby in Nieu-Bethesda two Saturdays ago. “It is a very pretty town. We used to go there often,” he said. “We knew about Beverley in the dam, so we thought we would pull a prank,” he said. “Our plan was to put her in another dam.”

However, they were running a little late for the rugby, so they loaded her into the car and left her there. 

“After the rugby, we forgot about Beverley and one of our friends drove off home with her,” he said. “So on Monday, she was with us here in Noupoort.”

Potgieter said: On Monday, we saw the story go viral. So we decided that we can’t just stop there. We must take it further. We discussed a few suggestions and exchanged a few ideas on what would work best,” he said. 

“Our goal was to get some marketing for the Karoo towns. The people and the hardworking communities rely on visitors. We got to know the area and we knew there were very special little places that many people missed because they were in a hurry to get from point A to point B.

Van Zanten said they had made a lot of friends over the years with people who ran shops and pubs, and it was clear how dependent they were on tourism. I really wanted to make people aware of the beautiful towns in the Karoo.

Town trauma turns to celebration

“We were very upset,” Greeff said about Beverley’s disappearance. “But I guess all is well that ends well. They could have thrown her in a ditch somewhere,” he said.

Also read: Bring Beverley back — Nieu-Bethesda grieves loss of beloved dam mannequin

On Monday morning, the Karoo town was filled with joy after a post on the town’s WhatsApp group that Beverley and her dam had been reunited overnight. 

“I was very happy and relieved to hear she is back,” Greeff said. He said that as snippets of her adventure reached Nieu-Bethesda, he heard that the men who took her wanted to “introduce” her to mannequin Joe, who can be found in Steytlerville, 194km away.

“I realised that I saw Joe there at the hotel the other day,” Greef said. “We were sitting next to him. But I heard some bikers had really roughed him up.”

“We think Beverley is an independent woman,” Juliette Illingworth from Nieu-Bethesda Tourism said. “She doesn’t need a boyfriend.”

“We are happy that she is back where she belongs and that all ended well,” she said. 

Judy Mulder from Thamela Farmstall just outside Jansenville alerted Illingsworth to the Beverley sighting. The kidnappers had stopped at her store to buy meat.

“She was wearing a beautiful dress and they even bought her a pair of Crocs,” Mulder said. “When she arrived in the bakkie, she was wearing a seatbelt. You could see they treated her well,” Mulder added. “They called her Bev.”

The men had T-shirts made with the slogan: “Nieu-Bethesda weet nie want ons weet nie.”

Mulder said that at a time when they were waiting for the rain to come and struggling with water, Beverley’s road trip made her happy. “I heard they wanted to introduce her to Joe in Steytlerville, but it didn’t work out,” she said. DM