About the author
Dudley Alexander wrote at least two children’s pony books. He may well have written more but only Foal o’ the Foam and Spray appears in the copyright libraries. If he wrote others for the Shirley Press, who don’t appear to have submitted his Beautiful Horses, perhaps they have sunk, unmentioned.
I’ve been able to turn up almost no biographical information on Dudley Alexander. The one thing I know (other than that he loved horses) is that he was an engineer. In the preface to The Beautiful Horses, he writes: ‘I write this in my office, surrounded by the usual bric-a-brac that an engineer lives among; tools, bits and pieces of metal, drawings, etc. But all the time I feel that there is an everchanging row of heads looking at me from behind inkpots and round the sides of ledgers …’
Finding the books
Neither are easy to find.
Links and sources
Preface of The Beautiful Horses
Bibliography
The beautiful horses
The Shirley Press Ltd, Church Street, Southampton, 57 pp, illus John Board (undated and appears in none of the copyright libraries)
This is actually quite a difficult book to sum up. It’s a series of experiences in horse heaven, where the narrator goes from time to time, and meets its equine inhabitants: tiny horses no more than four hands high; horses who have suffered, and horses who have not.

FOAL O’ THE FOAM AND SPRAY
Arthur H Stockwell, Ilfracombe, 1958, illus D Vaughan
A colt tells his story about growing up.