JPT Article: Noel & Henry

The Noel and Henry series of five books was written over eleven years, starting with Six Ponies in 1946 and ending with Pony Club Camp in 1957. Six Ponies, republished by Fidra for the first time since the 1970s, was Josephine Pullein-Thompson’s first solo novel. It was published the year after It Began with Picotee, the novel she wrote jointly with her sisters Christine and Diana. Josephine Pullein-Thompson wrote 31 pony books (32 including It Began with Picotee), but the Noel and Henry series is her best known, and possibly the best loved.

It illustrates the shift in attitudes to riding and schooling that took place in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. British horsemanship in the 1920s and 1930s aimed mostly at becoming successful on the hunting field: dressage was despised and the backward seat whilst jumping was standard. Evelyn Radcliffe in One Day Event sums up prevailing opinion:

But Evelyn does not, to the unknowledgeable, appear a bad rider. Her ponies usually do what she wants them to do but it is done by strength and force of character rather than finesse. Josephine Pullein-Thompson was well aware that Evelyn’s point of view could lead to success of a sort, but she believed it would not succeed against riding which truly considered the needs of the horse. There was proof of this in the performance of British riders of the period against Continental opposition: they were hopelessly outclassed.

Although there were British works on training the horse which took a more sympathetic and constructive line (James Fillis’ Breaking and Training was published in 1902, and the Weedon Cavalry School adopted (albeit adapted) Captain Federico Caprilli’s theories on the forward seat in 1910) these views were still not widely accepted in Britain.

Eventually the members faded away, and although the Club was wound up, Wynmalen remained a friend, and the sisters continued to ride and train according to his theories. Major Holbrooke, the mentor and instructor of the Noel and Henry series, is perhaps an idealised version of Wynmalen, used to expound the theories of equitation the Pullein-Thompsons taught (and they taught with some success: the South Berkshire branch of the Pony Club, which they taught, won the first Pony Club Inter-Branch competition in 1949). Although Major Holbrooke petrifies some of the Pony Club members - “already hot, tired and cross with the members for riding so badly, [he] exploded with wrath” -, he is never less than fair, and is always willing to work to improve the members’ horsemanship.

The real move forward came in the 1930s. Piero Santini, a pupil of Caprilli, wrote Riding Reflections (1933) and The Forward Impulse (1938): the two together being the first texts published in English to give an accurate reflection of Caprilli’s theories, rather than the English adaptation. British riders were starting to realise that there was another way, and in 1938, Henry Wynmalen wrote Equitation, a book Anne Grimshaw, in her survey of British horse books describes as “in no small way responsible for the gradual realization that dressage and careful schooling on the flat were beneficial to horses used in other fields, including hunters.”

The Pullein-Thompsons read Santini’s The Forward Impulse, and Wynmalen’s Equitation, which, they stated in Fair Girls and Grey Horses, “instantly became our bible”. They adopted the forward seat, and Henry Wynmalen’s theories. Wynmalen lived close to their house in Oxfordshire, and they managed to persuade him to instruct them and the Riding Club they had started; however he was a ferocious roarer, and reduced many of the Riding Club to tears.

This need to expound theories does mean that the Noel and Henry series are sometimes alarmingly technical: much more so than the average pony book - Ruby Ferguson’s Jill series is far less so - and to the reader who has no acquaintance with horses at all some of the descriptions of what to do with your pony must seem virtually impenetrable. Major Holbrooke’s instructions to Christopher Minton in One Day Event are a particularly good example:

“Look at the marks you can gain in the cross-country. A good hunter [horse] can more than make up any marks he may have lost in the dressage; he’d be more free-going than all these wretched over-collected animals....”

“I know that to the unpractised eye he [William] looks right. His nose is in, his neck is pleasantly arched, he is shortened. But it isn’t right. You’ll find that out when you come to your more advanced work, Christopher. You’ll find that you’ll go on two tracks in your serpentines, that you’ll lose your impulsion when you’re intentionally on two tracks, and that the horse’s paces will never develop.”