Category: Horse history
-
To Make a Star on a Horse
If your horse didn’t come fully equipped with facial markings, this was not a problem for the 17th century horse (or at least, for the horse’s owners. Most of these methods were a problem for the horse). A whole sheaf of recipes existed, the object of which was to provide a permanent star, not just a…
-
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…
-
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…
The National School of Equitation
Every now and then I like to write about riding schools: principally I think because it’s where the bulk of my equine experience lies, and I’m fascinated by what the riding school means to other people, and what the riding schools themselves were like. With this particular riding school, I found a story I wasn’t…
-
The blacksmith’s, Roxby
I came across the photograph below in a World War II copy of Riding magazine from Jan-March 1943. If you’re wondering about the unusual dating, Riding was then down to four issues every year because of paper shortages. At its foundation in 1936, and through to the early years of the war, it was a monthly publication. As…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…