The blog.
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The beginnings of Polocrosse
I’ve written earlier about the National School of Equitation, and its contribution to the sport of polo and women’s sport. This wasn’t the NSE’s only contribution to sport: it was also where the modern sport of polocrosse began. The origins of polocrosse had become rather obscured until relatively recently, as the NSE’s contribution was forgotten…
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Lights! Camera! Action! The joys of the photo shoot.
by Janet Rising For many years I taught riding. I also used to run riding school pony weeks – five full-on days of being responsible for up to 12 youngsters and ponies. This was a nerve-shattering responsibility, and I was constantly on the lookout for danger signals and opportunities for accidents in order to nip…
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Pony Tales and Puffin Books III
Eleanor Graham retired as editor of Puffin Books in 1961. Her place was taken, briefly, by Margaret Clark (who was responsible for publishing Tolkein’s The Hobbit, a book of which Eleanor Graham had had a dim opinion). Although Margaret Clark had been promised the Puffin editorship, she was shunted sideways, as Allen Lane, Penguin founder, met…
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Pony Tales and Puffin Books II
Puffin Picture Books to me had it just right. Their illustrations were things of simple beauty. They weren’t in any way child-like, quirky, or hitting a particular, temporary, zeitgeist. The illustrations of the only Puffin Picture Book I had as a child (Henry Wynmalen’s Riding for Children, found at a Methodist missionary society jumble sale) gave…
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Pony Tales and Puffin Books I
When I wrote Heroines on Horseback, I looked briefly at the impact that the development of paperback publishing had on the pony story. I was looking then at publishers like Armada, the paperback arm of Collins, whose business model was to produce paperback versions of books children wanted to read, in an often standardised and abridged…
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’tis the season to be…
Janet Rising joins the blog again for a voyage around Christmas past. And present. (You’re welcome.) ~0~ If you’re one of the people who always insist, ‘Oh it just doesn’t feel like Christmas until we’ve been to Olympia,’ then clearly you’re on a hiding to nothing this year, what with the famous event having fallen…
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Do write in and tell us what you think…
‘Would you like to write something for my blog?’ asked Jane. ‘If you did, perhaps you could make it something to do with Pony Mag, as I’ve got lots of old copies to illustrate it with.’ Piece of cake, I thought. And thought. And thought. Nothing much came. So I dug out the five or…
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The Saving of the Railway Horse
If you travel on the railway now, you’d never know that the horse had been an essential part of its workings. The stables are gone: demolished or converted. The huge provender store at Wellingborough, which kept thousands of horses in London fed, is no more. There are no horses working in the shunting and goods…
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The Jinny Books by Patricia Leitch (2)
After the Gold Horseshoe edition of the 1990s (which you can see, along with the earlier editions, here), there were no completely new Jinny editions for another 20 years, but there were compilations, and a partial hardback series. Hardbacks The Jinny series’ true first editions were in paperback by Armada, so if you look for…
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The Jinny Books by Patricia Leitch (1)
Patricia Leitch’s Jinny books are Marmite: you either love or loathe. I only met the first two, For Love of a Horse and A Devil to Ride as a child, because the others all happened along once I had supposedly grown up. But I love them. It took me decades to catch up on them…