And with a single bound

-
and just one dozen riding lessons, they cleared ooh, say 5 feet? Who needs Photoshop? This ad appeared in the Christmas 1931 review of The Institute of the Horse, one of the precursors of the British Horse Society.


I don't know if the riding school portrayed actually was the Cadogan Riding School. If it was, it was ferociously glam. It reminds me of the glorious Marshall Street Baths in Soho, where I used to swim when I worked in the West End. It always felt like swimming in a ballroom – not that I ever have swum in a ballroom or indeed been in a ballroom at all as far as I can remember, but it was a world away from your average municipal bath.

The Cadogan Riding School (according to Joyce Bellamy's Hyde Park for Horsemanship) had 200 horses and 60 ponies, which seems an amazing number of equines to fit into central London. The Cadogan wasn't the only central London riding school either: there were schools in Gloucester Terrace, Queen's Gate Mews, Radnor Place and Connaught Mews, to say nothing of the riding schools in Hanwell and the Finchley Road, and the positive glut in Richmond, Wimbledon and Putney: nine, including an offshoot of the Cadogan.

Clapham Park Riding School laid claim in Riding Magazine, 1939 to 'the largest covered school in London'. The Riding School was at 11 Grove Road, Balham, London SW12, and a quick look on Googlemap shows something large and industrial there now. There are still riding schools in London, but only two now in Central London. It's a miracle there are any there at all, but Ross Nye and the Hyde Park Stables are still there; both just a tad more expensive than the average out of town stables, but then I don't imagine their overheads are particularly small.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rollkur and the blue tongue

-
I've been meaning to write about this all week, but reading the exclusive in Horse and Hound about the controversy tipped me over the edge. For my non-horsy readers, rollkur is a training/warming up technique used by some dressage riders. It basically involves riding the horse with its jaw pulled in virtually to its chest, in order to increase suppleness. Patrik Kittel , a Swedish competitor in Odense was videoed riding his horse in this way. If you watch the video , you'll see the horse's tongue hanging out - blue. It takes a while before the rider notices this. When he does, he stops, puts the horse's tongue back in, and carries on. There are two things which bother me about this. Firstly, I am fully aware large sections of the dressage world, and some of its brighest stars, consider rollkur perfectly ok, but the FEI guidelines state this practice should only be for short periods, allowing the horse to rest. Patrick Kittel apparently rode the horse for two hou
Read more

Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes

-
Image
My friend Louise sent me this picture today. It's from a children's book with the rather wince-making title For The Wee Ones. I thought, when I read that (because I read the message before I looked at the picture) that the picture was going to be a typical winsome production from the school of artists who think (or who are paid to think) that the child is a thing sent from God and a blissful thing. They had obviously never met a child, and certainly not mine. I should have known Louise better. The artist responsible for Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes slipped this one past the editors. Just look at the poor, broken Mother Rabbit. She knows she has not the faintest chance of being listened to, and poor thing, she is stooped in the way of a mother to whom this is just the lastest in a long line of horror; with nothing good to come. And Archibald is obviously the spawn of the Devil. Just look at those eyes. He'll have the bed after he's finished the bedclothes
Read more

Dick Sparrow - 40 Horse Hitch, and Neil Dimmock's 46 Percherons

-
Image
Here's a clip of Dick Sparrow driving 40 horses. It's an amazing sight, particularly when the shot changes to show the team from the rear and you get the great incongruity of modern American corporate architecture as a background to the wagon and horses. I love the anticipation in the video: the sense of something amazing being just round the corner is palpable. Thanks to Christina Wilsdon for telling me about this world record 46 Percheron hitch (alas just stills) but you get the idea.
Read more