Category: Equine nostalgia
The Cadogan Riding School: Horace Smith and the Queen
Horace Smith, who ran the Cadogan Riding School, taught Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret to ride. If you want to skip straight on to that bit, click here: Horace Smith and the Queen *** You would struggle to see a horse in central London today, but in the early decades of the 20th century, things…
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…
’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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
You are what you wear …
When I started riding, back in the 1960s, there was a jodhpur hierarchy. And I was at the bottom.
How (not) to run a Win a Pony competition
Remember those Win a Pony competitions that got everyone so excited? When I was editor of PONY, we thought it would be a great idea to revive it…
If you were a pony-mad child in the 60s and 70s
(With more than a nod to Horse and Hound, who have done similar things for the 80s and 90s.) Elephant-ear jodphurs were still a thing. The Jacatex page in PONY Magazine was something you poured over for hours at a time, trying to work out if there was some way you could magic together the enormous amount…