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Marjorie Mary Oliver & Eva Ducat: Ponies and Caravans

Author	Oliver, Marjorie Mary
Publisher	Jane Badger Books
Series	Bunts

Marjorie Mary Oliver & Eva Ducat: Ponies and Caravans

Oliver, Marjorie Mary

Although published during World War II, in this book the only dark clouds are little ones, and they soon blow over. There’s a journey down to Dartmoor to buy some of the best Dartmoor ponies in the country. The charmed world in this book has a particular poignancy when you realise its earliest readers were living a life of rationing, bombing raids and the threat of invasion. Ponies and Carvans must have seemed like a glimpse into another, and kindlier world.

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Categories: 1940s, eBooks

Description
Meet The Author

Reviews

This trilogy is gorgeous. Beautifully written. Swallows and Amazons with ponies instead of sailing dingies. (MD)

Of its time in writing style the book starts with a very appealing cover and then there’s a good mix of characters and an interesting storyline. This is the third book of a trilogy but each can be read as a stand alone story, and of the three I personally like this one the best. Recommended. (Dawn)

Available in eBook

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Also by these authors in this series

The Ponies of Bunts
Sea Ponies
Ponies and Caravans

Publishing history
Country Life, London, 1941 (with Eva Ducat)
Country Life Junior Library, London, date uncertain
Jane Badger Books, 2020

Bob and Phyllis Russell go to stay with their uncle, a vet who lives near Bunts. They sleep in a caravan a grateful patient left in their uncle’s garden. At nearby Bunts, Miss Fairfax and her sister Miss Margaret learn that all of Sir Thomas Whishaw’s stud of Dartmoor ponies is to be sold – the best Dartmoors inEngland, and what they’ve wanted all their lives. Neither can leave their farms, so Jenefer and Diana and John take a caravan, and the Russells and their caravan, and go to the sale.

Earlier editions

Author: Marjorie Mary Oliver and Eva Ducat

Oliver, Marjorie Mary

Marjorie Mary Oliver wrote some of the earliest pony books: books which focused on children and their adventures rather than telling the story from the pony’s point of view. The books also broke new ground by being illustrated with photographs. These have a huge period charm today, showing as they do a world where it was perfectly acceptable to ride in your swimming suit with no hat.

The books themselves are charming. I am particularly fond of Sea Ponies, which is perhaps the most intense evocation of a lost world. The Hook Hollow series have wonderful Stanley Lloyd illustrations, and some exotically named children who have straightforward holiday adventures. These really are wonderful escapist reading, reflecting a world which possibly never really existed, though we all probably wish it had.

Marjorie Mary Oliver wrote her first three books with Eva Ducat. Oliver was born in London, and started her career training to be a ballet dancer. She left that (apparently rather abruptly) 'to live among horses'. She broke in and trained horses until she was married, and her own children lived among horses in much the same way as the characters did in her books.

Marjorie Mary Oliver’s books were so popular in America that she went on a lecture tour there in 1950.

I have been unable to find any biographical information about Eva Ducat.

Finding the books
Sea Ponies is the hardest of the books to find, and is almost impossible to find with its dustjacket. The other titles are all reasonably easy to find as long as you don’t mind copies without dustjackets; The Ponies of Bunts and Ponies and Caravans are hardest to find with dustjackets, but not horribly expensive when they do turn up.

The Bunts series
The Ponies of Bunts
Sea Ponies
Ponies and Caravans

Hook's Hollow
Riding Days in Hook's Hollow
Horsemans Island
Lane of Ponies

Moor series
Menace on the Moor
Mystery at Merridown Mill
The Riddle of the Tired Pony

Links and sources
Dustjacket of A-Riding We Will Go
The British Library
Many thanks to Henry Sotheran Ltd for the picture of Sea Ponies.
Thank you to Amanda Dolby for her help with the pictures.