Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

A couple of weekends ago we went to Apethorpe: until quite recently this was a large and unknown house unless you lived in Northamptonshire and knew through the local news of its chequered history - I didn't realise until we came that the Borstal to which one of my acquaintances was sent was probably here, nor that Porterhouse Blue was filmed here. For years, we had seen tantalising glimpses but never seen it properly. Now that English Heritage have bought it and spent a huge wodge of money on it to stabilise it, you can visit it, albeit only in the summer, and if you want to go you'll have to hurry, as the season en ds on 5th September . It is the most absolutely enchanting house. OH and I decided that if we had a spare £50 million (£5 million to buy it, another £12 million to carry on restoration, plus the rest to meet the enormous annual running costs and no doubt vast programme of annual maintenance) we'd buy it like a shot. It's the sort of house you'd never...

Mary Gernat was probably one of the most prolific cover artists of the 1960s, and her sketchy, energetic style is probably familiar to nearly every child who bought a paperback book in the 1960s. The range of titles she provided covers for was wide: from Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s, Mallory Towers and The Mystery of... series through countryside stories like Monica Edwards to Malcolm Saville’s adventures. It’s probably fair to say she is better known as a cover artist than as an illustrator, although she did illustrate many children’s books: as illustrator of Sheila McCullagh’s Pirate and other early reader series, her illustrations were probably an intrinsic part of many children’s early reading efforts. She had a very distinctive, sketchy style, which was well suited to situations full of action. I am particularly fond of her cover for the 1960s Armada printing of I Carried The Horn, which I think wonderfully captures the awful tension of the moment. Mary Gernat was good at capturing ...

Stanley Lloyd is probably better known for his illustrations for Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series , for which he did all the first edition illustrations than he is for his work on pony books. His background was, however, thoroughly horsy. He was the brother of the artist Thomas Ivester Lloyd, and uncle of John Ivester Lloyd . John's The People of the Valley was a real family affair, with John writing the story and Thomas and Stanley between them doing the illustrations. The majority of Stanley Lloyd's published work featured horses. He started his career doing magazine illustration for The Detective Magazine , and later for Woman’s Magazine , but his most iconic illustrations are those he did for Primrose Cumming’s Silver Snaffles. Knight, when they republished the book as a paperback, cut the illustrations entirely, but they are one of the things that made the book so magical for so many readers. When Fidra Books reissued Silver Snaffles, all the original illustratio...

Janet Rising: The Word on the Yard (The Pony Whisperer 1) Hodder Children’s Books: £5.99 Information on Janet Rising I had a bit of time to spare before I caught the train back from Edinburgh recently, so I wandered into Waterstones. I already had a couple of charity shop finds to read - Dervla Murphy’s Through Siberia by Accident, as well as, lick lips, Sherbatov’s The Arabian Horse in case I finished that, so I wasn’t short of reading matter. There’s always something though in the publishing world that slips you by , and in Waterstones I found the first of the The Pony Whisperer series by Janet Rising. Normally I know what’s coming out, but this one completely sneaked under my radar: probably because the most recent Pony Magazine I’ve read recently has been from 1969. Janet Rising, the author, is the editor of Pony Magazine (though if she’s the same person, she also contributed a couple of short stories to the Annual in the 1970s), and I imagine the book’s been promoted t...

The 1963 Pony Annual decided to give its readers a few ideas to go on for their own fancy dress classes: Lieut Col C E G Hope, the editor, was often asked for ideas, so wrote an article with illustrations from the 1962 Ponies of Britain Show (and you will know from my previous blog post just what comedy gold that was). I looked at this one for some time in bewilderment before it occurred to me to look at the caption and I could think of nothing whatsoever that this could represent, except possibly something to do with flying as the human seems to have flying goggles. Any ideas? And would those ideas have included an Abominable Snowman? For this is what Miss A King and Shadow (who was only two) were. This was described as "a severe test for a young pony." Looking at it, I can see that Shadow was the Abominable Snow Pony but I still can't work out what his owner was. This next is from Horse and Pony Illustrated, 1955, and is proof that the sixties weren't the only decad...

By special request from Vanessa, because they made her laugh - here are the other Fancy Dress photos from the Ponies of Britain Magazine, 1970. I think she could probably do with a laugh, after all the work at the Fidra Gallery (which now I've seen it I can tell you is fantastic - well, well worth a visit) and having a guest, ie me, over the weekend too. I'm afraid the cream has already been blogged, but here are the rest: Mrs E H Parsons - I'm assuming this is the pony book author E H Parsons - and yes, she did, she really did, sew every button on herself. The pony is Garth Remus, one of her famous pair of New Forest ponies, once lent to the Queen. For this effort (the costume I mean, not the lending) she was Very Highly Commended. This is the Millfields Riding School, Newmarket - "yet another winner .... with a Tyrolean group complete with genuine imported Hafflinger ponies and the whole party in authentic national costume." They won the Winifred Spooner Challe...