PBOTD 28th May 2014: George Rutherford Montgomery - The Capture of the Golden Stallion

-
There are some series that sum up my childhood for me, and G Rutherford Montgomery's Golden Stallion is one. Like so many of my childhood favourites, I first met them in our local library. The library didn't go in for gaily coloured dustjackets: the children's section was filled with ranks of uniform series, dustjackets long gone, and if I remember any colour, it's blue-grey. The Dr Dolittles were grey, the Chalet School a faded blue. The library was a very far cry from the bright children's libraries of today, but I don't remember being bothered by the lack of colour on the outside of the books. There was plenty inside.



The Golden Stallion series is one of those that manages to combine the wild and the domestic. Hero Charlie lives on the Bar L Ranch with his family, and he catches a beautiful wild stallion, Golden Boy. Although Golden Boy is broken in and ridden, he spends much of his time running wild on the ranch with the Bar L mares, which always struck me as the best of both worlds. Golden Boy is an obliging sort of stallion, and is usually happy to be ridden and leave his mares.

This is one of those series I badly want to collect again, once I've cleared some space. I do like the original dustjackets by George Siguerre, which were the same ones Hutchinson used when they published the series in the UK. They were reprinted in the 1970s with rather pedestrian jackets by Lion.

~  0  ~



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