Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

Pony Magazine ran a win a pony competition in its early years. The competition stretched over some months, with new elements to complete each month. Here is one of them - I thought it might be fun to see what we could spot now (and was also wondering if there were many things we would miss simply because things have changed: it's probably much less likely I'd have thought that we would know as a matter of course what happened with driving setups). I haven't yet dug up the answers, I have to admit.

The ultimate dream for many a pony mad child was getting a pony, and some lucky souls achieved it by winning one. Judith M Berrisford's fictional Jackie did it in Jackie Won a Pony by winning a competition in Horseshoes Magazine. People did it in real life too: Pony Magazine, in its earliest days, ran Win a Pony competitions, which required some dedication. It wasn't a question of whipping a quick essay off or doing a few questions: you had to enter twelve separate competitions over a year. Here's one from September 1950, in which you had to complete the story by filling in the blanks with names from the list of well known horses and ponies supplied. This is the winner (or at least I assume it is: the competition presumably ran into 1951). Carolyn Brown won Mr Murphy, and this is a photograph of them, reunited, in 1958. Dragon's Win a Pony competition in 1966 was rather less taxing: matching attributes to characters was all that was required. The competition w...

Thanks to Susannah Forrest too for telling me about the plethora of Win a Pony competitions there have been. Newspapers did it: the Evening Standard, The Reveille, and the Sunday Express, besides Horse and Pony and Pony. I've found a mention of The Sun running one. Retail companies did it too. I would love to have seen the Milky Bar Shetland, and the Heinz Beans skewbald, the Kerry Gold Butter palomino, and the Sugar Puffs pony. Susannah also reminded me about the TV ad which W H Smith ran to publicise their competition in the 1970s. It showed a girl posting her form, only for a neigh to sound from the post box after she'd turned away. This does ring a bell, despite the fact that my sister and I were not supposed to watch ITV, which was the only source of TV ads in the 1970s. We used to watch it illicitly, one of us close to the telly just in case, ready to switch to virtuous BBC1, and the other with an ear cocked in case we heard Mama coming down the hall. Pony Magazine got v...