Author: Jane Badger
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Jackie Hance: a remarkable child rider
If you’d been a member of the horse world, or even a casual reader of a provincial newspaper in the inter-war years, you would have been hard put to avoid the name of Jackie Hance. But fame fades, and when I was looking through School for Horse and Rider recently, which was written by Jackie’s…
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Camden Stables – in Search of Horse Ghosts
I originally wrote this post when the bronze statues were still there. I’ve updated it to reflect the fact they’ve gone. I’ve also added in some information about how the horses were shod to tackle the ramp. In most towns and cities, you can probably, if you look hard enough, find evidence of the working…
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Vintage Riding Schools – Heather Hall
This blog initially appeared on my old website, which is gradually being transferred. If you took Pony Magazine in the 1970s and before, you might remember an occasional feature it did called Round the Riding Schools. The sort of riding school that got itself featured here taught you to ride the right way, with instructors…
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A supermarket for horses: the Horse Bazaar of Baker Street
The vast shopping centre is something we’re all used to, but it’s not where you’d go if you wanted to buy a horse. In the early years of the 19th century, it is exactly where you would have gone, particularly if you’d wanted to mix with the fashionable. I must admit that before this week,…
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The majesty that is fancy dress class part 2
Yet more delights from Ponies of Britain magazines …. Here’s part one, if you missed it. Firstly, you have the exhibit where the ponies are definitely bearing more of the load (often literally): Could Humpty actually see? What would have happened if the soldier had dropped the lead rope and the Shetland wall had been…
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Fancy dress part 1
The Ponies of Britain Magazine, of which I have acquired several copies over the years, was crammed with pictures of delectable show ponies, but it did not shy away from the less serious elements of equine life. Fancy dress. Oh, how I love fancy dress. Not that I am any good at it myself, mark…
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BAME books in the horse world
The horse world, at least as portrayed in most horse and pony stories in the UK, is pretty uniform. It’s a world that’s generally white, that’s generally middle to upper class and that is generally female. Not that a preponderance of female characters is a bad thing, in my opinion. The pony book is the…
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You are what you wear …
When I started riding, back in the 1960s, there was a jodhpur hierarchy. And I was at the bottom.
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Railway Horses 1 – Railway Women and Horses
Much of the history of railways is the history of men, but from the outset, women worked on the railways. As with so many other jobs, it was wartime when women came into their own. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, 25,000 women were employed on the railways. By 1944, they…
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Marjorie Mary Oliver and Eva Ducat
Marjorie Mary Oliver (1899–1976) and Eva Ducat (1878–1975) wrote some of the earliest pony books, with stories that focused on children and their adventures rather than telling the story from the pony’s point of view. The three books they wrote together – The Ponies of Bunts (1933), Sea Ponies (1935) and Ponies and Caravans (1941)…