Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

Can't see this gymkhana game being given programme space in the Prince Philip Cup.  This photograph shows Lady Margaret Drummond Hay and her partner "at a difficult stage of the bun-eating, water-drinking and cigarette lighting competition in the Ladies' Gymkhana at Ranelagh," sometime in 1936.  This event was, strangely, absent from every pony book description of a gymkhana I ever read.

Anyone who's read Diana Pullein-Thompson's I Wanted a Pony  will remember Augusta going to see her cousins ride in a show, "a very posh affair with expensive cups, presented by rich and well-known people."  Augusta has to watch the show with her aunt, from the car, which is parked by the ringside.  Augusta escapes from the stuffy car, to her Aunt's ire:  "Aunt Margaret... said that I was  a queer little girl - standing amongst the crowd with the sun in my eyes, when I could be sitting in the car for which she had paid five shillings to park at the ringside."  The show, in fact, sounds rather like the Fifth All-Children's Blairavon Pony Show, for which I have an immaculate and beautiful schedule, preserved in the pages of a Riding  magazine from 1938.  Here it is:

If anything cried out to be televised; it must be this. and some brilliant photographs here .