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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Michael Clayton has enjoyed a fascinating career as a professional journalist on Fleet Street – but the highlight of his career was his work as a editor and journalist in the field of horses, and with hunting horses in particular. This is his autobiography in horses: his boyhood work in local stables, his first post as a cub reporter, leading eventually to his appointment as editor of Horse and Hound magazine. Here he talks frankly about his involvement with the Royal family and their horses, his roving hunting brief, the development of new safety standards in riding, and all the key characters of the equine world whom he got to know first-hand. He worked as a reporter of horse-racing, show-jumping, carriage driving (disastrous!) and with almost all the hunts of Britain, Ireland and the USA. Michael also recalls the time of the hunting ban, among other key moments. His account, with photographs, is witty, incisive, pacey and very frank.
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Seitenzahl: 432
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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For Marilyn
Acknowledgement
My thanks to Jim Meads, friend and hunting companion, for providing virtually all the hunting pictures in this book.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Mark Hedges, Editor of Country Life
I was advised before my interview with Michael to talk about hunting and, if he changed the subject, to bring the conversation immediately back to it. This wasn’t difficult, as he spent some time recounting, in vivid detail, a run he had had with the Cottesmore the previous Tuesday. Then he offered me a job on Horse & Hound.
I knew nothing about editing or journalism and could barely type, but I had fluked a job with the most talented magazine editor of his generation. I owe Michael my career.
Michael was a fearsome taskmaster, but one that led by example; despite his absences on ‘Foxford’ duties, he approved every word and was capable of performing any role – legend has it that, during an NUJ strike, he produced Horse & Hound single-handedly.
He had an inspiring energy, writing more, hunting more and uncomplainingly breaking more bones than any person I have worked with; dictating the Monday-morning leader from the casualty ward was a common occurrence. Once, a reader recognised him and, as he lay awaiting anaesthetic, began to upbraid him about an incorrect result.
Horse & Hound, which he proudly referred to as a newspaper, rather than a magazine, was an exciting place to work. Michael was fair, but occasionally terrifying; a note in his spidery handwriting – ‘See me, MC’ – could stop the heart. He had a habit of emerging from his office, proof page held aloft, demanding: ‘Who did this?’ As staff ducked behind their typewriters, he’d murmur: ‘Well, it’s rather good, anyway’. Yet sometimes, instead of delivering the anticipated rocket for a mistake, he would put his philosophical former war reporter’s hat on and shrug: ‘Life how it really is.’ He kept us all on our toes.
Michael’s twin passions for print journalism and foxhunting coursed through his veins. He could have done anything but, fortunately for us, he chose hunting and horses.
Mark Hedges Editor,Country Life
INTRODUCTION
HACKING FOR FUN
For many people nowadays the word ‘hacking’ refers to raiding other people’s mobile phones, allegedly used as an illegal news source.
In the England in which I was born and bred, hacking only applied to riding a horse for fun. You hacked home in the twilight after a good day’s hunting. You hacked your horse across a smiling countryside on a fine morning for exercise. Your horse was simply a hack if it was an ordinary riding mount, and not a grand hunter nor racehorse.
Journalists were referred to as hacks because they put their pens out to rent, like horses in a hireling stabling. For most of my life I have been employed as a hack, and have so much enjoyed hacking about on horses.
Fatefully, I was invited to a lunch in the Reform Club in 1972 which brought me even closer to hacking horses and words. It happened like this….
‘And so I wondered if you would like to take over from me as Editor…’
The words hung in the air only a couple of seconds over the lunch table before I heard a voice say firmly: ‘I certainly would.’
With a familiar tremor in the stomach I realised the voice was mine. I had not guessed the purpose of the lunch invitation from Walter Case, long-serving Editor of Horse & Hound.
And yet, without hesitation I had committed myself to a drastic career change – from BBC international TV and radio reporter to the editorship of one of Britain’s oldest and most conservative weekly magazines; a periodical whose title was used as a joke by the liberal literati. It became best known to the widest public who relished the episode in the film Notting Hill when Hugh Grant posed as a Horse & Hound reporter to interview the girl of his dreams.
When Case made his offer I reacted in the same way you should jump a fence in the hunting field: throw your heart over first. It is the traditional advice to the horseman crossing country, and it usually works well, since a horse responds instantly to boldness from the rider.
I heard myself instantly accept Case’s offer with warm approval; I gave the impression I would have taken over that afternoon if necessary.
Impetuous decision-making can be equally successful off the hunting field, but when it goes wrong it proves the accuracy of Mr Jorrocks’s famous remark that ‘a fall is a h’awful thing’. After a working life chasing hard news in newspapers and broadcasting, would I really find a happy landing in a corner of specialist journalism which my BBC colleagues would consider quaint, or even eccentric? My fellow reporters in the TV News Room already called me ‘Squire’ because of my passion for foxhunting.
Horse & Hound’s longevity and apparently changeless appeal caused more than a few misconceptions, even among its readers. I remembered this two years later when one of Ireland’s leading hunting ladies, Bunny McCalmont, greeted me at her front door by saying: ‘Good heavens! I thought the Editor of Horse & Hound was a little old man with a white beard. Do come in, young man. I’ve got a very exciting horse for you.’
I contributed little to the remainder of my lunch-time conversation in the spring of 1972 with Walter Case. Before he made his offer it was clear that he was retiring the following year with the greatest reluctance.
He told me glumly the management had an inflexible rule that all staff must retire at 65, and he would reach that birthday in 1973, 33 years after he had succeeded as Editor during the drama and bloodshed of bombing in war-time London.
Walter had immediately succeeded the magazine’s first Editor and owner, Arthur Portman, when Portman and his wife were killed in an air-raid which demolished their home in Montagu Square on August 17th, 1940. No-one knew which of them died first, greatly affecting the implementation of Arthur Portman’s will.
Like the magazine’s first Editor, Walter had become entirely consumed by the demands and pleasures of Horse & Hound. It was far more than a job; it was entirely his way of life, and he would miss it sorely, he explained. He was a slight, bespectacled figure, not given to revealing his emotions, but his reserved manner cloaked a steely will. Handing over his precious editorship was probably the most painful task in his life, and I was touched and grateful to be the recipient.
With a pang, I realised that as the elderly magazine’s third Editor I could expect to find myself similarly immersed in a life-style job for the rest of my life. Would that really be enough to contain a restlessness which had already seen me move from provincial journalism to Fleet Street, and then to broadcasting at its most hectic?
I had been a hunter of news for over 20 years, most of it the bad news that makes headlines; latterly I had been reporting a series of wars, and was due to return to Vietnam and Cambodia soon after my lunch with Case.
Perhaps the pressures of such work had increased my passion for the recreations I had enjoyed most of all: riding and hunting. I had read Horse & Hound regularly since childhood, contributed as a freelance to the magazine on hunting matters, and had written my first foxhunting book for publication in 1967. My freelancing paid for the keep of a precious hunter, although the demands of news journalism all too frequently robbed me of hunting days I had planned and anticipated with such fervour.
Before we parted after the fateful lunch, Walter Case hesitated and then murmured: ‘There is one thing I should tell you: Horse & Hound is a real money-maker; far more successful than most people in the horse world understand. It makes substantial profits for IPC; all you have to do is to persuade the management to let you spend it, and I am not pretending that will always be easy.’
I was not deterred: it sounded just like every other publishing management I had worked for in the postwar years of austerity. On the way back to BBC Television Centre at Shepherd’s Bush I began to consider the challenge ahead. I still had to apply formally for the Editorship and pass interviews with the publishers, IPC Magazines, the huge company which I had seen somewhat disrespectfully described in a trade press article as ‘the Ministry of magazines’, owning over 80 titles in an extraordinarily wide range of markets – from the hip modernism of New Musical Express to the conservatism of Country Life and Horse & Hound. The company’s most prominent group was the clutch of leading women’s magazines, led by Woman and Woman’s Own.
Clearly IPC was a highly professional outfit and I would fit in somehow.
Suddenly I cheered up: all doubts disappeared. I was absolutely confident I could convince the faceless magazine moguls that I was entirely the right man to take the reins of their workhorse. I had more than enough varied journalistic credentials, and above all I had something which neither Mr Portman nor Mr Case had been able to offer – I rode the Horse in pursuit of the Hound at every available opportunity, and I was determined to do so for the rest of my life.
Editing Horse & Hound should be fun. And if it wasn’t I would make sure it was thoroughly entertaining for the readers, and for me. I wondered whether there was a cupboard for a spare pair of riding boots in the Editor’s office. There soon would be, I resolved…
CHAPTER ONE
IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS
I once read a psychologist’s view that a happy adult is one who feels he has made his childhood dreams come true. If that is so, my later life at the rarefied top end of the equestrian and hunting world fulfilled many of the dreams, seemingly impossible, which I fostered during my boyhood in a two-bedroomed bungalow in a suburb of Bournemouth during the second world war.
By today’s average standards in bungalow land on the South Coast, we lived in straitened circumstances. My father, Aylwin Clayton, was an electrician commuting for long days by train to Southampton to work on naval shipbuilding; my mother, Norah Clayton, despite ill-health valiantly helped our meagre income by working variously as a typist and a bookmaker’s telephonist.
Hitler was already gaining power, and there was an international economic crisis when I was born in 1934. Vast sorrow and strife was about to engulf the world.
During my wartime childhood, food and clothing were strictly rationed, car travel a very rare treat. Many nights were interrupted when we dashed to our homemade air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden during German aircrafts’ sporadic bombing of the area.
If this sounds grim, for me it was not. We were generally safer in Bournemouth than those living in London and Britain’s major production areas, which were subject to frequent heavy bombing raids.
My normally relaxed South Coast retirement town was not entirely insulated from the war. As an infant I tasted fear when a German fighter flew low over Bournemouth’s Pleasure Gardens firing indiscriminately at children as we sailed our toy boats on the Bourne Stream. My father grabbed me and thrust me into some bushes, sheltering me with his body. There were a few casualties, including a schoolmate of mine.
War over-shadowed my life from the age of five to eleven, and yet overall it was a wonderfully happy childhood. This was due mainly to the sacrifices and devotion of my parents to me, their only child. My father was generally placid, and gladly made time to take me on outings. Mother, who had slim, dark good looks, had a more meteoric temperament, and a strong right hand occasionally. She assured me I could ‘do anything’, and frequently urged me to ‘get out of doors and do something!’
My happiness was also compounded by the wonderful environment of the balmy South Coast at a time when urban development had been abruptly halted. Empty grass fields abounded around our bungalow estate, and beyond lay some of the most delectable rural landscapes in East Dorset.
My parents strived hard to ensure that, despite the shortages, life for me was as normal as possible: birthday parties, bus trips, plenty of pets, and above all freedom to roam far and wide on foot or bicycle, often with a host of neighbouring children. At the time I did not appreciate enough the sacrifices they made.
Bournemouth’s wonderful sea-shore was denied to us for most of the war, the splendid pier blown in half, and the beaches off-limits behind barbed wire, as some form of protection from a German invasion. This ensured my childhood explorations were directed inland. Barred from the sea, at my mother’s insistence I learned to swim in a tributary of the River Avon near Christchurch.
Without the distractions of computer screens and mobile phones, a visit to the Moderne cinema at sixpence a seat was approved by Mother as long as it involved a long healthy walk across a common.
I did not share my parents’ worries that food, clothes and petrol were severely rationed. I cared only about the sweet ration, which was healthily limited. Our nutrition levels were remarkably good; there was no danger of obesity among children in the 1940s.
The war had stopped house building, and our bungalow estate remained right on the edge of deeply rural Dorset. Perhaps it was an inheritance from my father’s family who were originally Quaker farmers in East Essex, but at a very early age I developed a passion for dogs, ponies and farming. My great-grandfather, a farmer and grocer in Dunmow, was a passionate foxhunter, wearing a black coat and avoiding attending meets because hard liquor was consumed.
The possibility of launching a career as an equestrian journalist from our bungalow estate during the war seemed an impossible dream.
And yet this is how it happened….
‘I want to start riding now,’ I said firmly at the age of seven. To my surprise my mother did not give the response to which, in 1942, I had become all too accustomed: ‘We can’t afford it. Wait until after the war.’
We were enjoying a luxury: tea and scones, without cream, in the garden of a cottage café on the bank of the River Stour at Longham, in Dorset, a village of delightfully rural thatch and stone cottages north of Bournemouth.
My demand was prompted by watching an elderly lady, in impeccable riding dress and bowler hat, ride past, accompanied by an equally smart little girl on a pony.
My mother said: ‘After tea we’ll find the stables in Longham and see what we can do.’
By the River Stour at Longham, Dorset, where I decided to take up riding.
We walked up the village’s long winding street until on our right we came to a yard of loose boxes, some with horses’ heads leaning out, much to my excitement. There appeared to be no-one there, so we walked on past a grass paddock where there was a shabby notice-board proclaiming: ‘Longham Riding Stables’. We did not know it, but the lady and child we had just seen riding past did not come from this yard. They were based at the far more up-market teaching and schooling establishment run on the opposite side of the road in Longham by Miss Bush.
On our right was a double-fronted, pink-walled farmhouse with a thatched roof, all in need of renovation, as were so many war-time properties. There was a narrow, dirt path by the side leading into a ramshackle farmyard, lined with wooden loose boxes roofed in blackened cast-iron.
We peered over a water butt into an open back window of the cottage where a large lady with hair in a tight bun, and wearing a capacious pinafore – her garb at all times – was busy at the sink.
‘Mr Brown is milking; if you wait in the yard he’ll deal with you directly,’ she said severely. I do not think I ever saw Mrs Brown smile.
This was not Mr Brown’s wife; it was his mother, the dominating influence on a life virtually confined to the yard, and the riding school. It was far more down-market than Miss Bush’s, but it was available, and just about affordable.
The Brown yard was enjoying a busy war-time because there was an influx of servicemen and women stationed in the area who were hiring his horses.
Bernard Brown eventually emerged from a cattle shed. He was as near the human incarnation of Mr Toad of Toad Hall as I had ever seen: impressively rotund in girth, with a round, red beaming face and small bright blue eyes, under a capacious checked cap which I only once or twice saw him remove to reveal a pink bald head. The eyes were not as smiling as his mouth. He sported the drab cord breeches, brown boots and gaiters which were virtually the uniform of Longham Riding Stables. His fingers snapped a pair of bright yellow braces, and he opened his small, cupid-lipped mouth to surprise us with a light, mincing voice: ‘And what can I do for this young man…?’
Mr Brown was, in the vernacular of today, undoubtedly gay. I was later to be told conspiratorially by a young male stable-hand in the jargon of the 1940s: ‘He’s a queer alright, but he’s harmless…’
I had not the remotest idea what this meant. Sex education was an entirely unknown phenomenon in the learning syllabus of my junior school, nor later at Bournemouth Grammar School.
Bernard Brown welcomed to me to his yard, but I never had to be careful of any homosexual overtures. On rare occasions he would make a mildly salacious remark, such as: ‘You really can’t ride that big horse – not until your middle leg is longer.’
His tragedy, shared by many, was that he lived in a world where his sexual inclination was illegal, and if he had any sex life it had to be entirely clandestine.
Bernard Brown’s yard, a 30 minutes’ cycle ride from my home, was to become my first gate-way to horsemanship, and the hunting field. There were to be no formal lessons, but plenty of instruction and education in the practice of keeping horses, as well as riding them.
‘Yes, you can ride at ten o’clock next Saturday morning; it’s four shillings an hour,’ Bernard lisped. I decided I quite liked him, although I did not understand how such a large, formidable-looking man could speak in such a little voice. I have never ceased to be utterly grateful to dear old Bernard for my first opportunity to become something of a horseman.
My cousin Nina Clayton, who lived with us, and was a year older than my seven years, accompanied me on my first ride from Brown’s.
Nina, somewhat to her dismay, was mounted on an ancient, washy-chestnut gelding named Splash, hideously one eyed, with the vacant eyeball gaping beneath a large swelling.
I was put up on Kitty, an elderly Welsh Mountain pony, almost white, and proving to have impeccable manners.
We wore old trousers tucked into rubber boots, and we were hatless. It was another ten years before I managed to acquire a second-hand velvet riding hat with a peak, and that was so soft that it would have been of little aid in a heavy fall on the head.
In my early teens, in a ‘war surplus’ clothing shop in Bournemouth I bought for a couple of shillings a curious pair of US Army canvas gaiters that fitted down over shoes, and therefore avoided the weighty decision to spend over 30 shillings to buy new leather ankle boots to replace those I had outgrown.
The tan gaiters only needed an occasional scrub, and they served me well as a rider for a few years. It was a big day when my mother bought me English leather gaiters and matching brown boots in a Wimborne agricultural store. They protected me from many an equine foot stamping and kicking in Brown’s yard.
Long before the Health and Safety Act arrived to plague riding school proprietors, Bernard Brown’s establishment suffered remarkably few riding accidents. His horses and ponies never looked in poor condition; he was an experienced feeder, ensuring they were never ‘above themselves’. He was shrewd in matching each novice rider to an appropriately quiet mount of which he seemed to have an abundant supply.
I only ever saw Bernard in the saddle once, in the stables paddock one evening, when he surprised me by riding in the female fashion – side-saddle. He employed two or three men and women who worked in the yard, and escorted groups of riders for one or two hour rides.
A stern, weather-beaten lady in riding breeches, boots and a felt hat, appeared on a large brown horse in the yard, and without a word to us took charge of two leading reins attached our mounts’ bridles. With a pony either side, she led Nina and me out of the yard and up Longham’s main street on a route I was to learn and enjoy.
Past the church we veered left into a muddy bridleway which led to the superb expanse of gorse and heather we knew as Ferndown Moor, but often referred to as ‘Brown’s Moor’ because his animals were to be seen trudging round it seven days a week. There was a wealth of sandy tracks, and Bernard’s horses and ponies knew the routes for an hour’s hack with little direction.
Our instructor occasionally barked at us to ‘sit up’, and to keep our ‘toes up’ and ‘heels down’. We completed a short circuit on the moor at the walk, but when we returned to the lane, we were warned to be ready for a trot.
‘Keep your knees into the saddle, toes up and heels down, and rise up-down, up-down, in the stirrups,’ we were sternly advised, with the added advice: ‘…and grab the front of the saddle if you feel yourself falling.’
Suddenly we were trotting, and I do not recall the slightest problem; within a few minutes I was mastering the rise to the trot quite comfortably, and I was not grasping the saddle pommel, although I earned a sharp rebuke for holding my hands too high. It was sheer heaven.
When I dismounted beaming in the yard I vowed to return the following week, and although four shillings was a considerable hole in our household budget, my mother nobly continued to support my riding ‘lessons’. I cycled to Longham nearly every Saturday and Sunday, and as well as spending my precious four shillings on an hour’s ride, I was eager to muck out stables, make-up beds and heave hay and straw into the boxes. Our enlightened society nowadays forbids children under 16 to undertake such work in a commercial yard, but for me it was a godsend, providing healthy exercise, a modicum of responsibility, and the opportunity to ride lots of different horses and ponies free, whereas children may learn far less through the luxury of owning and riding only one tractable pony kept at home. The horseman’s greatest gift is to be able to mount a strange mount, sum it up immediately, and ride it accordingly. I believe it is vital to ride as many ponies and horses as possible in the early years of riding.
Although I have since read many thousands of words on riding technique, and as an adult belatedly took some lessons from experts, I am convinced that the truly effective horseman needs only to acquire two fundamental abilities: a really safe seat, whether in the saddle or bareback, and a natural aptitude to ‘balance’ the horse at all paces.
Leaping up on ponies and horses bareback as a child, staying aboard when the animal suddenly bucks, shies or accelerates, are vital attributes for the natural horseman.
I learned this at Brown’s yard by regularly going into the paddocks to collect the horses and ponies which had spent the night out at grass. We would fit a halter and vault on to their bare-backs to ride them back to the yard. I did not realise it, but it was a huge boon in helping me acquire a natural seat on any horse.
The all-weather schooling manège was virtually non-existent in most yards in the 1940s, and everyone I knew schooled their horses while hacking out, or occasionally indulged in some jumping schooling over home-made jumps in grass paddocks, weather permitting. I first learned to jump over small gorse bushes on the moors, with uneven take-offs and landings.
I heard my mother explaining to a friend: ‘It’s a bit expensive this riding, but he’s so restless and full of energy that it’s great to get him out of the house to do something he really likes.’
She had unsuccessfully tried subsidising lessons on the piano, and even the piano accordion, to give me some out-of-school hobby, and now settled for horse-riding, fortunately without having an inkling as to the real risks – not least the possibility of her son acquiring a life-time addiction to an expensive leisure pastime.
My biggest debt to Bernard Brown was that he rewarded me with free rides for working throughout weekends and school holidays in his yard. Looking older than my years because of my increasing height, I achieved one of my goals, acting as an escort to visiting adult riders who did not know the routes around the moor. Most valuable of all, I learned something of basic horse-mastership through working in the Brown yard. You don’t allow a horse to gulp down too much water until he has cooled down after a ride; you don’t give a horse chopped sugar beet until it has been properly soaked first. You check a horse’s feet for stones before and after every ride.
Although I was never worried about the perils of riding, I had some anxious moments in the stables. I was secretly scared of a large, dark bay horse, named Ranger, who had a reputation for savaging grooms in his box.
I think this was exaggerated to give me a fright, but Ranger swung his quarters at me ominously when I was alone in his box, and I escaped by jumping above him to swing from a rafter. He was alarmed and shied off to the back of the box, so I came down from the rafters to vault frantically over the bottom half of the box door.
Treating horses with respect in the box is well worth learning if you are to survive a life-time dealing with a powerful animal with hair-trigger reflexes.
One Sunday afternoon, at the age of nine, I led a party of about 15 US servicemen up to the moor, for an unusually spirited ride. By now I sported leather gaiters above short brown boots, and a baggy pair of war-issue cord breeches, well in line with the Brown establishment dress code.
A grinning little man, riding with very short stirrup leathers, told me he was a jockey ‘back home in the States’, and he and his friends repeatedly asked: ‘Say, when do we get to the goddamned jumps?’
By now I prided I myself on being well in control of my mount at a canter, or even a gallop, but I had never jumped anything more formidable than a puddle or a very small bush, and I could only squeak apologetically: ‘I’m afraid Mr Brown doesn’t allow any jumping….’
I often rode a speedy black pony named Spider, who was very handy and taught me far more than any of the human ‘instructors’ in the yard.
I did my best to make up for the lack of jumping by cantering ahead of the soldiers far more vigorously than usual round the moor, even venturing at some pace off the tracks onto the heather where there were hidden holes, and two of the Yanks fell off, which pleased their friends enormously.
One of the best forms of tuition occurred every morning and evening when I was sent to nearby fields to bring in horses and ponies. Jimmy, a recent school-leaver who worked full-time in the yard, wearing the regulation dress adopted by Mr Brown, accompanied me. Jimmy became a good friend, and showed me the best way to leap onto the horses bare-back, and how to ride them with only a rope halter by neck-reining and judicious use of the leg.
It was all tremendous fun, and I simply copied Jimmy and the other grooms.
I was impressed when Jimmy confided proudly: ‘I’m paid an agricultural worker’s starter rate.’ He did not explain how much that was, but I suspected it meant Mr Brown paid him a pittance.
I had fallen off two or three times on the moor, usually when a pony shied, but I was perilously over-confident until, as a ten-year-old, I experienced my first riding accident.
At a sedate walk on the road back to the yard, I was accompanying a lady rider mounted on her own well-bred mare, of rather better quality than Mr Brown’s string, when suddenly the mare wheeled her quarters towards my pony and let fly with both hind-feet, aiming at the heart as horses naturally tend to do in such attacks. The mare was trying to kick the pony, but inevitably one of her feet caught my right leg hard, and I slid off more in shock than pain.
I was sent home in a taxi, my first time on my own in such a vehicle, and my mother examined me remarkably calmly. Our doctor assured me it was only a bad bruise, but put a plaster on the leg. I must have been a particularly pompous child, because I insisted on using a walking stick for at least two weeks, even taking it to Hillview-road Junior School where I was able to describe my remarkable escapade to all and sundry in the playground. It was a wonderful way of boasting that I could actually ride a pony, but no-one would admit to being impressed.
After the plaster was removed I resumed working and riding without a tremor, although I had received my first warning of the Arab proverb: ‘The grave is ever open for the horseman.’
In my first year after failing the eleven-plus (I scraped through at a second attempt), when I was already outgrowing my classmates in height, I fell in love for the first time.
I was not conscious that it had anything do with sex, but I developed a tremendous crush on Bernard Brown’s new lady instructor, in her early twenties a decade older than me.
Her name was Mimosa Robertson but she was always known as ‘Mosa’, and she was far smarter, more intelligent, and decidedly more shapely, than the usual riding spinster who arrived in the Brown yard.
Quite how Mr Brown came to employ a female so overtly attractive, well outside his own taste, I never knew, but I assume he was badly short-staffed at the time. Mosa let it be known she had instructed previously in rather grand yards; she was smartly turned out in the best fitting riding breeches I had ever seen, and she brought a new dimension to the Brown establishment: she wore make-up while riding.
A brunette, with a delicious twinkle in her brown eyes, Mosa was assured and well-spoken; male and female clients liked her, and asked Mr Brown if they could go out on her conducted rides.
From the start, Mosa was kind and pleasant to me, and quietly began to give me some tips about ‘improving my riding’. I thought she was wonderful, and immediately fell in with a secret plan she confided: she intended to leave Brown’s yard quite soon, and set up a new riding school of her own in Bournemouth. Mosa assured me I was to be given entirely free riding in return for working part-time in her yard in the same way.
‘You’re very good at talking to the clients,’ she told me, somewhat to my surprise.
To achieve her ambition, Mosa won financial backing from a new admirer, a wealthy gentleman in Longham. Mosa persuaded him that his niece Anne could benefit from Mosa’s experience by becoming her partner in the new venture which he would finance. Anne, an 18-year-old honey-blonde with blue eyes, was a delightful personality who I liked immediately; another good reason for me to join the new venture as an eager volunteer.
It became most exciting when it was revealed to me that the new riding school was to be much closer to my home, in the former coach-house adjoining ‘The Hollies’ pub in Moordown, a northern suburb of Bournemouth, only just beyond Winton’s busy shopping centre.
We were sure to get plenty of new clients by operating within Bournemouth’s boundary, Mosa assured us. There were only half a dozen loose-boxes and stalls, but she was after quality not quantity of clients, and it was bound to be a huge success.
I was not mature enough to thank Bernard Brown and say farewell properly; I simply transferred my time and affections to the Hollies. It proved to be a financial flop which lasted little more than 18 months, and offered no threat to Bernard Brown’s business, but I benefited hugely, not least because I learned a lot more about life as well as horses.
The Hollies was in an urban, built-up setting. Yellow trolley buses hummed past, amid busy traffic on the main road to Winton and central Bournemouth. We rode through back-roads to Hillview Common where I had played, and found our way on by-ways to Talbot Woods and other leafy areas abounding in outer Bournemouth.
These routes had not seen horses for years, and the hacking was never as ideal as Longham. The Hollies yard had far too few horses to make money in volume, and failed to succeed as an exclusive riding venue.
Mosa and Anne secured contracts to provide horses for visitors in Bournemouth’s cliff-top hotels to ride on the beach, which was allowed in the winter months. With her usual confidence, Mosa led her small string through central Bournemouth’s traffic to the seafront.
We collected a few riders, and then we hacked along the sandy beaches from Boscombe towards Bournemouth pier. It was here that I received my first jumping ‘lessons’, simply by following Mosa over concrete groynes jutting from the beach into the sea, and copying her style. It was a great progression from hopping over furze bushes at Longham.
‘Hold on, and kick,’ was the entirely correct equestrian advice she shouted, and I did just that, usually riding our only pony in the yard, a splendid strawberry roan mare who was far more attractive than her name: Stoodgie. She had the intelligence and self-preservation instinct of all good mares, and she taught me far more than any other pony I had yet ridden.
Keeping your horse on the bit, and using your legs, was the staple advice which has since taken me over a myriad of obstacles. Stoodgie would take me into fences with confidence and verve, a huge slice of luck at this stage in my self-taught equestrian career. Later we won pony races together, on the Flat or jumping over straw bales at speed which no-one in those days regarded as dangerous, although it certainly is.
I was an avid reader of riding instructional books, starting with staid but sound tomes on the ‘elements of riding’, but my enthusiasm was fired up most of all by a Christmas present of the 1947 edition of The Horseman’s Year, edited by Lt.Col. W.E. Lyon. It was a marvellous survey of the current top-level of English riding.
All the contributors were male, with a heavy accent on racing and foxhunting; I was thrilled by the map of the ‘Fox-Hunting Countries of Britain’ printed on the fly leafs. John Hislop wrote on bloodstock and racing, Lt.Col. Jack Hance on the leading 1947 horse shows, Sir Archibald Weigall on ‘The Cult of the Cob’, and showjumping was surveyed by Lt.Col. Sir Harry Llewellyn, who was to partner the great Foxhunter in winning a gold medal in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
Harry Llewellyn and Foxhunter, among my boyhood heroes.
Thanks to these gallant military horsemen, early postwar equestrianism was already surging ahead, and I gazed fascinated at the monochrome photographs of their activities, especially the showjumping riders, mostly men at that time, and often in military dress, soaring over obstacles which impressed me greatly, one of them no less than 5ft 3ins, nowadays a very modest leap.
An untypical picture of a junior girl rider, Pat Moss, captioned as ‘very much at home on Hairpin of White Cloud’ was a pointer towards the future glory of British showjumping in which women riders would play an increasing role.
Soon I was hooked on jumping anything I could find suitable, from gorse bushes on the common to piles of logs in the small paddock adjoining the Hollies yard. My voluntary work at the stables, somewhat to the detriment of my formal education, increased well beyond the scope of anything I had done at Longham.
Pat Moss “very much at home on Hairpin of White Cloud”
Mosa was increasingly preoccupied by other interests; she acquired a new boyfriend, the son and heir of a Moordown garage firm, who responded by purchasing a would-be point-to-point horse. I was still a devoted worshipper of anything and everything Mosa did, and followed her dictates unquestioningly. She was always fun, and I realised later, a sexy girl with intelligence and drive, well ahead of her time when many women were only just emerging from lives chained to dull domesticity.
Although I was well short of the necessary experience and competence, I was sent off daily into the Bournemouth traffic to exercise the hopeful point-to-pointer, which I believe never won anything. The big, powerful chestnut, well above my weight, although I had long legs and arms by now, gave me some nasty frights by jinking about on the roads, and once nearly ditched me over the edge of the bridge at Longham where I had hacked from Moordown to the farrier, old Harry Gray, who plied his trade in a small stone forge just above the river bank.
I reverted to childhood and cried afterwards on the delightful Anne’s shoulder. She gave me a comforting kiss, and conveyed my fears to Mosa who relieved me of the point-to-point exercising role. Otherwise I was increasingly busy as escort to the Hollies’ small but interesting groups of riders, who often liked to stop for a drink at pubs on Sunday mornings.
I was called upon sometimes to ‘teach’ complete novices to ride, especially the mysteries of rising to a trot. It became clear even to me, as an eleven and twelve-year-old, that the stables was soon in decline. I was increasingly left ‘in charge’, as the partnership was otherwise busy with boyfriends.
A few other volunteers helped out, including a riding housewife, but I was often attempting tasks well beyond my riding experience and capacity. However, I seemed to be successful in chatting to the clients, and learned something of the art of making people feel good in situations where they were in physical peril.
It was the equestrian version of sink or swim, and somehow I swam, surviving hazardous experiences of which my mother was blissfully ignorant.
She liked Mosa and Anne after they took the trouble to come to my 11th birthday party where they were even more admired by my father and an uncle.
Mosa gave me my first ever copy of Horse & Hound, selling then at sixpence. I thought the text was a stodgy read, although I trudged through it, but I was entranced by the ‘Horses for Sale’ at the back, and spent hours fantasising over the ones I would buy.
Mosa increasingly took in less suitable mounts, including an Exmoor pony mare called Molly who proved totally unreliable, and bolted with me along Winton’s main road, back towards Moordown, weaving her way deftly in and out of cars stopping in alarm, and eventually charging into the dark recesses of the Moordown Trolley Bus depot where she came to a halt with her muzzle stuck over the back platform of one of the yellow trolley buses. I prayed she would not board the bus.
Somehow we were still together, she had not fallen on the bus depot’s slippery cobbles – probably because she was unshod – and I slid off, to lead her back into the yard by the pub in a state of euphoria at still being alive.
The proximity of the Hollies’ lounge bar was proving a negative influence on her business, since some clients were inclined to spend more money and time there than on the horses.
Inevitably, the yard folded, presumably when Anne’s uncle declined to meet further mounting debts, and the rent of the coach house. Nothing daunted, Mosa quickly re-sited her venture to Bournemouth council’s small yard at Northbourne, recently vacated by the council’s cart-horses. This was a far more rural setting, with ample grazing to be rented nearby, and it was closer to my home.
Now I rode Mosa’s half dozen horses and ponies more or less at will, since there seemed to be very little formal riding school activity, just occasional Sunday morning pub tours on horses. Sadly for me, Stoodgie was sold to a local grocer’s son, but I formed a better partnership with the dreaded Molly, even though she jumped over a hedge and set off across country with me when confronted with an Army tank near Kinson.
It was too exciting, but it taught me to sit tight, and I never resorted to the foolish policy of baling-out.
Most unwisely, I taught Molly to ‘shake hands’ for tit-bits, and she became a dangerous nuisance, by striking out with a foreleg when not required. She lived out in a paddock near the Council yard, and was a devil to catch. My father nobly joined in the fray when eight of us used ropes to trap her in a corner one day after I had been unable to retrieve her for several weeks. She was pretty wild at being captured, and while I was grooming her she kicked me hard in the buttock, fortunately with her unshod hind feet.
I rode several very large horses off grass, including a dreadful bright bay gelding which was a confirmed shiverer, and would nap at electric pylons by repeatedly rearing nearly vertical. It was all useful experience, and somehow I survived the hazards as most young riders generally do, with resilience and luck, if not much technical skill. I frequently rode bareback for hours on end, mainly because I could not unlock the saddlery room at the Council yard.
My jumping improved because Mosa’s old hunter mare, Honey, who survived the move from the Hollies, proved an excellent coach. I erected some poles on drums in the field next to the yard, and jumped Honey regularly on summer evenings, again deriving my instruction from horse rather than from human.
Mosa’s next surprise was to announce that she was about to marry Arthur Rowbotham, a navigator for BOAC – and thereafter, with his backing, she would run a riding school at Lilliput, the upmarket suburb between Poole and Sandbanks, nowadays one of the most expensive addresses on the South Coast.
Arthur was a Yorkshireman, but nothing like the stereotype of that ilk: he was cultivated, with a great sense of humour, and although he did not ride, he went to great pains to back his new wife’s continuing desire to make a success of a riding school.
They were exceedingly kind to me, and invited me to their Catholic church wedding in Bournemouth, followed by a jolly reception at what seemed to me a sophisticated hotel in Old Christchurch road where I tasted sherry for the first time, and talked far too much about my illusory prowess as a rider.
Now I cycled over ten miles each way from Northbourne to Lilliput to ride Mosa’s horses, and found the journey well worthwhile.
Still riding hatless, I was put up on a fiery chestnut thoroughbred, only 16 hands, who ‘needed some work’ before he was considered fit for the school’s clients. He had an old girth gall, which was to become cancerous, and this probably accounted for his irascibility: he bucked me off three times one afternoon when I tried to test his jumping, on each occasion landing me head first in a huge forest of nettles.
Then I took off his saddle, and without a girth, he was much better behaved. For weeks I rode him bare-backed out on rides, which included the shore-line at Sandbanks, and adored his quality and style. Despite veterinary treatment his girth gall never recovered, and eventually he was put down.
At Sandbanks Mosa and I made friends with one of the first great equestrian eccentrics who would enliven my life with horses, Mrs Louie Dingwall. She was credited to be the first lady racing trainer, and she was certainly a pioneer, training her horses on the sandy beaches at Sandbanks from her yard behind the bus garage in Panorama Road where she ran her own private bus service, the Rossmore Flyer, for more than 40 years. She taught me a valuable lesson, that a true enthusiast does not look askance at the antecedents or wealth of a fellow addict who shares the same passion. She seemed to recognise that I at least had aspirations to be a horseman, and already had a passion for horses.
‘Come in. Look at the horses,’ she would beam. We watched several rolling happily in a sandpit, and inspected her string at close quarters.
Louie would ride them fearlessly on the old chain ferry from Sandbanks to Studland where there are miles of beach and heathland.
‘Come and ride out one morning?’ she invited with a smile.
I did so just one morning, and for the first time I ‘rode short’ in a light saddle on a thoroughbred racehorse, fortunately a remarkably benign and quiet animal which the kindly Louie selected for me. We hacked quietly along Sandbanks beach soon after dawn, with the waves gently lapping the shore on a summer’s morning, and a light mist clearing over the expansive green waters of Poole Harbour, behind us on the other side of the Sandbanks spit.
‘Sit quietly, and stand in the stirrups’, said Louie, on a horse in front of her small string of perhaps four. I copied the other riders, and we cantered along the sand remarkably sedately. The horses behaved impeccably, although I had heard stories of Mrs Dingwall’s racehorses occasionally appearing in front of a bemused holiday car driver on the Poole road.
If this was not heaven it seemed remarkably like it, I thought, secretly immensely proud to be there at all. Riding out with the Dingwall string was the greatest compliment my outsider’s route to horsemanship had so far achieved, and probably totally unwarranted, but I was secretly proud of it, and grateful to the big hearted lady for the rest of my life. It was my first indication that horsemanship could open the door to acceptance in a wider and far more exciting world.
I made several other visits to the Dingwall yard, but I was also immensely busy trying to ‘help out’, which meant gain free riding, in Mosa’s riding school in Lilliput.
During a short holiday in Sandbanks, the Labour politician Sir Hartley Shawcross and Lady Shawcross arrived one day arrived at the yard for a hack. I, a gangling and talkative youth of 13, was given the task of ‘showing them the way’. They were charming, and probably to his surprise I ventured to compliment Hartley, later Lord Shawcross, on his role as chief UK prosecutor in the Nuremberg war trials. He said he was glad I had taken an interest, but replied tactfully that a ride on the beach was perhaps not the best place to discuss it.
His second wife, the delightful Joan Shawcross was a bold and highly competent rider, and 20 years later I reminded her of our first meeting when I met her again frequently in the hunting field in Sussex, and in Leicestershire. I admired her as a dashing rider with the Quorn, and with the highly exciting Mid-Surrey Farmers’ Drag Hunt. In the 1967 season I would enjoy one of the most exciting short hunts in my life in company with Joan when we were among a very small group who broke away from the sedate Eridge mounted field to jump an awkward place off a road, and cut across country on a quick five-mile point behind their huntsman John Cooke.
Hartley was opposed to his attractive wife hunting because of the risks, and tragically she died not in the hunting field, but in an accident while exercising horses with another rider in 1974. The other horse fly-bucked high in the air, and with a metal-shod hind foot gave Joan a fatal injury; it was a shocking, but very rare example of the ultimate penalty of horsemanship.
Later in life I would know others who have died in disastrous falls, and all too many who would become permanently paralysed as paraplegic victims of riding accidents.
Such risks never entered my mind as I embarked blithely on my own lifetime with horses. Riding across country is far more a state of mind than it is a scientific technique.
Through ignorance, naivety, or downright foolishness, I started my horseman’s life armed with supreme confidence, and an impregnable belief that no real harm could ever come to me once I was in the saddle, no matter that I wore neither a hard hat, nor such new-fangled devices as back-protectors, which are rightly now de-rigeur for many.
Such confidence, misplaced or not, communicates instantly to the horse or pony under that saddle. For the rest of my riding life that relationship, and huge slices of luck, saved me from the fate of which the Arab proverb gives all too prescient a warning.
Working as a voluntary groom in riding schools as a boy was fun, but it did not persuade me that a career ‘working with horses’ was a good way forward. My mother impressed on me at a very young age that it would be far better to earn a good salary in some other occupation rather than slave in a stables to be near horses all the time.
Far better to ride the horse, than muck it out, I decided. I have never regretted that decision, and I have often gently advised mothers of horse-mad children to think carefully before encouraging children to take up a ‘career with horses’.
Grooms are not generally the best-paid manual workers, and you need considerable financial backing to open your own yard. In my youth there was all too much exploitation of young people’s enthusiasm through rewarding them a pittance to work for long hours in stables. I am sure there are some worthwhile jobs as grooms in top competition yards nowadays, but parents should beware. Horses are wonderful animals, but their care is demanding and risk-prone. It’s surely preferable to earn a good income outside the horse world so that you can afford to buy your own horses, cared for by others?
My motto has always been: ‘Don’t put your daughter on the stable yard Mrs Worthington.’
