Category: Riding Schools
Health and Safety – who needs it?
By Janet Rising Warning! This feature contains descriptions of mild peril, personal risk and unhealthy scenarios! The older I get, the more fond I grow of Health and Safety. There is only darkness at the end of the tunnel; I’m grateful to have lived this long. No, really, I can recall numerous occasions with horses…
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…
A visit from the Ministry for the Future of British Sport and Recreation
Janet Rising © 2022 Have you ever wondered in what direction the horse world is going? Janet Rising, author of My Horsy Life, looks into the future in this story, and sees something radically different. I have to say I have some sympathy with turning out horses as much as possible, though that’s not necessarily…
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…
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…
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…