About the author
Antonio P Fachiri (1880–1942) was born in New York in 1880. He was educated at Yale, which he left in 1903, leaving for London to work at merchants Ralli Brothers. He went on to work as a director of companies with interests in British Columbia and America.
He entered wholeheartedly into English equestrian life. According to Country Life, who published some of his articles, he became ‘captivated by England and English methods’, which he apparently found more genuine than American ones. He retained enough interest in American horsemanship to write articles for Country Life on horses in California and Virginia.
Fachiri benefitted from the surge of interest in horses in the 1930s. Country Life, in its review of his first book, Riding Along – a Book for Horse Lovers of All Ages (Arthur Barker, 1935), put the new enthusiasm for horses down to the car, rather ironically. However much cars might polish the roads and make them unsuitable for hunting, owning a car meant riders could drive out of town and be at a livery stable in half an hour or so (how times have changed). Country Life felt the book met the needs of a new generation of children who didn’t have the easy access to horses of previous generations. The Daily News was underwhelmed. Mr Fachiri, it said loves horses with an enthusiasm that is above price, but not above clichés.
Pamela and Her Pony Flash was published the next year by Arthur Barker, having originally appeared in serial form in the Daily Mail from January–April 1936. The last two chapters of the book, in which Pamela goes hunting, did not appear in the Daily Mail version. Did the Daily Mail feel it wasn’t appropriate? Or was it simply a case of Fachiri needing to add chapters to bulk out the book a bit from serial form?
Pamela was, says the author in the introduction, a real person who was lucky enough to ride at Olympia in 1935 at the age of ten.
The book opens with Pamela’s rather unhelpful father, who could buy a pony, but doesn’t particularly want to. When she asks for a pony, he chucks her under the chin, and says, “Daddy is not rich any longer; he’ll buy you that pony when times are better. I hope that times soon will be better.”
Pamela is sympathetic. Poor Daddy. Poor Daddy goes off to golf, and admits to his cronies he is not really poor at all. One of them tells them he ought to be ashamed of himself. It does the trick. Eventually Pamela does get that pony, and off the book goes, taking Pamela from her earliest riding lessons to hunting.
Riding Magazine reviewed Pamela in September 1936. ‘Full of common sense,’ they said. If it is possible,’ they wrote, ‘in these days for a child to find the written word in riding instruction a pill that sticks in the throat, Mr Fachiri’s little pill is quite lost in strawberry jam.’
Pamela had a colour dustjacket by Molly Maurice Latham (M M Latham) and chapter decorations I assume by the same illustrator. Apart from those, it was illustrated with black and white photographs.
Finding the books
Pamela and her Pony, Flash, is reasonably easy to find without its dustjacket, as is Riding Along.
Links and sources
You can see the dustjacket for Riding Along at the New York Library digitised collection here
Country Life, 20 April 1935
Country Life, 23 November 1935
Daily News (London), Wednesday 17 April, 1935
History of the Class of 1903, Yale College
Riding Magazine, September 1936
Pamela and her pony flash
Arthur Barker, London, 1936. Front cover MM Latham. Illustrated with many b/w photos (Sport & General)
Pamela longs for a pony. After her father is spoken to sternly by his golf club cronies over his unhelpful attitude, Pamela is then promised if she learns to ride properly, she will have a pony.
The book follows her from her earliest days at riding school through receiving Flash as a present, to competing at Olympia.
