Pony books in the 1970s

Only have the number of new pony books were published in the 1970s as in the 1960s.

Reprints

Plenty of titles were still appearing, but many of them were reprints. The Jill books appeared in a new guise with covers by W D Underwood. Pullein-Thompson titles appeared regularly throughout the 1970s. Towards the end of the decade they had a new feature: the photographic cover. Changing the cover was a quick and easy way to make a book appear up to date, even if the book itself had originally seen the light of day in the 1940s. The quality of the covers was variable. Some took little notice of the actual content (there’s no grey show jumping pony in The Summer Riders).

The thrill of the pony adventure

Of those new books which did appear, many were pony adventures. Perhaps this was in response to a generation more likely to watch fast-moving adventures on television than read a book. Even authors like the Pullein-Thompsons moved away from the instructional model of story, and began to write adventure stories.

The Pullein-Thompsons’ adventure series were all fast-moving and readable, but without the depth of some of their previous work.

Josephine Pullein-Thompson wrote Race Horse Holiday (1971), and her exciting Moors series (1976–86) Christine Pullein-Thompson added to her Phantom Horse series. Phantom Horse was published in 1955, but had four books were added in the 1970s and 1980s. Christine also wrote the Pony Patrol (1977–80) and Black Pony Inn series (1978–89).

Socially conscious?

The 1970s were tough economically, with much industrial unrest. I remember the three-day week, when the country experienced rolling power cuts during the miners’ strike. We huddled into one room with the paraffin lamp my father had bought as an ornament, but which did valiant service while we had no electricity. I was not supposed to read by paraffin lamp because it was bad for my eyes. I used to creep as close as I could to to get enough light to read the book hidden on my lap, but it is remarkably difficult to be surreptitious when the entire family is in a small room and they want the light too.

Christine Pullein-Thompson made an active, though not always successful, attempt to reflect changes in society. Throughout the 1960s she had written stories about working class children: her David and Pat series, Janice and Mick and the Riding School series.

Her Riders on the March (1970), and its sequel They Rode to Victory (1972), are the stories of a group of children from a comprehensive school who battle the loss of their riding school to development. Although more successful than her earlier For Want of a Saddle (1960), where the characters’ real achievements in entering the world of the horse are obscured by their melodramatic swoops of emotion, the books are still an uncomfortable read. Christine Pullein-Thompson was at her best when writing about characters with similar backgrounds to her own, as in her I Rode a Winner (1973), which tackles another feature of 1970s life: the rising divorce rate.

Beyond the pony book dream: Follyfoot

As the optimism of the 1960s gave way to the grittier 1970s, one author wrote a series which took a (sometimes grim) look at life beyond the pony book dream.

What happened to the pony once he was too old for gymkhanas? To the horse when he was too old to race? In 1963, Monica Dickens had written Cobbler’s Dream, an uncompromising and at times bleak adult novel about a home of rest for horses, Follyfoot.

In the early 1970s, a television series called Follyfoot took the characters, and some of the storylines from Cobbler’s Dream, and developed it into a series which still has devoted fans today. Monica Dickens wrote four books – the Follyfoot series – to tie in with the television programmes, telling stories of the cruelties, both unthinking and deliberate which the human race visits upon the horse, and another series, World’s End, about the struggles of a family to survive on their own with little parental input.

Neither series features comfortable middle- class children and neat pony adventures. The difficulty of surviving without a steady source of income is a theme of both series, as is the mistreatment of animals.

The Adventures of Black Beauty

Television looked to literature for another series, The Adventures of Black Beauty, but this was not a dark look at the horrors the Victorian horse experienced. Black Beauty was now living a blissful life with a country doctor and his family, and he became an equine action hero. Whatever was wrong, Beauty would sort it out, together with his human friends. I loved it. That theme music transports me, every time.

It was another, and a kinder, gentler, world, filled with certainties, where good always triumphed and the bad were punished.

This world of certainty was a long way from my experiences as a grammar school girl whose school went comprehensive when she was half way up it. My school was combined with the girls’ secondary modern. The two schools had a long tradition of loathing each other, and the new comprehensive regime celebrated the union of the two schools by introducing a no discipline experiment. We were to discipline ourselves. Except we didn’t, and it was chaos, and hell for those like my younger sister, caught up in the maelstrom of bullying that swept the school.

School brought in a new deputy head of whom we were all terrified, but who restored order.

Thank goodness for Black Beauty.

Jinny and her wild Arab mare

Patricia Leitch’s Jinny was at school in a comprehensive system that had settled down, though that didn’t mean to say she enjoyed it. The one thing Jinny liked at school was art. The Jinny books (1976–88) combined mysticism, a teenage heroine completely in tune with her readers, and a wild Arabian mare. It was an intoxicating mix, and one which is attracting new readers today. The Jinny series came after Patricia Leitch had written fifteen books, perceptive and often amusing, with her Dream of Fair Horses being a tour-de-force, examining what it really means to possess a horse.

Patricia Leitch looked at the passionate need some girls have to possess a horse. Throughout the series Jinny crashed up time and time again against her need to say “It’s mine,” when she has to share her world with both people and animals.

In Leitch’s hands, the pony book became something more than a simple girl-gets-pony tale. It became an examination of what getting that pony really means.

Patricia Leitch produced a series where its readers saw themselves; their passions and insecurities, and where so many of them fell in love with a chestnut Arab mare.