Ladies of a certain age.....

[Spot_the_Risk]

Blimey, I don't think I've ever done scissors then, but I did half scissors last year... of course on my own, outside our field and therefore on the road, and my horse was actually grazing! If he'd trodden on his reins his world would have ended, he isn't a brave sort but me faffing about on top of him was fine!

 

[DW Team]

my first rugs were anti sweat rug string vest red, Lavenham blue and red rug and green wool lined NZ. Had a roller made from Jute with padded roller. Also had elasticated one which I could thatch the sweat rug with.
Hacking out all day, building jumps from borrowed milk crates and chairs from Mothers kitchen! Playing in the woods building jumps in the woods with anything we could find.

 

[joycec]

Me and my friend thought nothing to going out with our ponies all day with nothing more than a packet of sweets and a drink.

Not just any drink though, it had to be dandelion and burdock.

 

[julie111]

Horrible horrible place - thats one thing from the past that I'm glad is gone.

I couldn't agree more, I still remember vividly some horrible things that went on there!

 

[Echo Bravo]

Well I've still got 2 jute rugs and an old NZ rug and my very old woollen horse rug goes on my bed in winter when it's really cold and I'm as snug as a bug in a rug and 2 yellow string girths 1 blue, 2 red and 2 green and the saddle cloths to match and yes they were a pig to untangle. Happy days

 

[magicmoose]

Well here's a bit of kit that I would be surprised if the young 'uns would recognise!

Packet of Pacers or Opal Fruits for the first one to identify them!

 

[Spot_the_Risk]

Ooh, just remembered the girths from my first riding holiday place (Bush Farm near Saltash, in Cornwall, it's now a livery yard), each saddle had two girths, one was HALF a string girth and the other was a car seat belt which had a buckle stitched onto each end!! I don't remember any girth galls, and I can't work out even now if that was a good or bad system!!! ;-)

 

[keeperscottage]

Littleshetland, my second horse came from Southall market in 1972. I bought her from a dealer who told me she was three and she'd been used in a riding stable for about four months before I bought her in April 1972. Turned out she was only about twenty months old!! She was my horse of a lifetime and I owned her for twenty two years before severe arthritis caught up with her. Loved that horse!

 

[windand rain]

going to shows in the luxury of a fancy hunter lorry only to have to unload the horses at the bottom of each hill then walk them up to the top before reloading at the top

 

[Lottiedots]

I was thinking about this the other day as I have a little picture of me having a canter on my pony. There is me, no hat, a bridle without a nose band, wellies and a huge grin on my face having one of my first canters on my pony. Happy as Larry, we learnt to ride by climbing on the ponies in the field often with just head collar and bare back. Such fun, So much for health and safety!

 

[AdorableAlice]

Well here's a bit of kit that I would be surprised if the young 'uns would recognise!

Packet of Pacers or Opal Fruits for the first one to identify them!

Yorkshire boots

 

[magicmoose]

Yorkshire boots

Yes! Pacers or Opal Fruits?

 

[AdorableAlice]

Yes! Pacers or Opal Fruits?

I have just eaten an entire packet of chocolate mishapes and feel sick. So much for the diet !

I can remember making jumps out of milk crates and old ladders. We also cantered up the tow path and jumped the lock gates. I would not even walk on a horse up a tow path today.

 

[Lottiedots]

oh yes, and driving the farm hands crazy by turning all those lovely newly cut straw bales in the field waiting to be collected into fab jumps!

 

[DustyDog]

OMG, Love this thread such good memories, out ALL day on our ponies, parents had no idea where we were and obviously no mobile phones then. Used to ride down a very busy main road to a garage and tie ponies up outside while we went to buy sweets !! Cantering on every grass verge and galloping wherever we could. Bandaging ponies legs, tails, anything ...thinking it looked good ! Vaulting onto pony's bareback! thing is, we did this for years and never ever had any bad accidents and ponies never got lame or had any health problems....seems very different today! x

 

[daughter's groom]

My friend and I used to ride our ponies out all day over thousands of acres in the Black mountains. No mobile phones either. Nobody had any idea where we were and nobody seemed bothered. Luckily no pony ever went lame or ran off, or we would have really been in the cach. The freedom we took for granted was a privilege no child would have today. Wish I could still ride out without that lack of fear now.

 

[claracanter]

They are starting repeats of Black Beauty on H and C channel!!!

I remember running home from school on a particular day every week to get back in time for White Horses

 

[Spot_the_Risk]

Gah, I was going t say Porter boos MagicMoose but wasn't sure I was right!!

 

[claracanter]

80's for me....... Win a Pony - used to enter that every year, believing that I would ABSOLUTELY win.
.

I remember this. It was run by WHSmith. I too entered every year

 

[olivia x]

I was just watching "International Velvet", the sequel to "National Velvet", filmed in 1978, and notice that the horse was being ridden in red nylon reins!!!!!

 

[dotty1]

Has anyone mentioned 'Horse in the House'??? I an only remember the start when the horse is galloping along the fence keeping up with the school bus waiting for the girl to get out ( I think she was scarred by her first horse being hit by a car??). Can't remember anything else about it...I have a terrible memory!!

 

[Pearlsasinger]

Excellent, I couldn't agree more!! A pony would only ever shy, no such thing as 'spook' (unless talking about ghosts maybe)!

And we didn't fall off just because the horse/pony shied! I certainly wouldn't have dared, RI would have gone mad!

I rode on roads I wouldn't dream of taking a horse on by itself these days. Yes the horse was a bombproof ride and drive cob but still .............. I could go out on the horse in the school holidays up the main road and hardly see any cars, just the occasional bus and a tractor transporter. Most families had only one car, if they had one at all, and that spent the day parked outside the main breadwinner's place of work. Which was a good job as I hacked about 10 miles each way to the farrier's every school holiday.

 

[Cinnamontoast]

I have a string girth

 

[Biska]

I always wanted to have a haircut like Dora's. It was feathered. Mum said no. I hated my plaits with blue spotty ribbons.

I mostly remember the absence of health and safety. Riding bareback and leading 3 more in from the field.
Hats were only worn for 'proper' riding. You couldn't hurt yourself just messing about, or so we thought.
The hats with elastic were pretty useless, the jods had wings. Hair nets and hacking jackets had to be worn for lessons. Yuk.
Shetlands and diddy ponies had those little felt saddles. Perhaps they were ahead of their time with a forerunner of treeless saddles.

No one worried about getting ponies on the bit. How could you ride hell for leather if you were bothered about tucking the little nose at the correct angle ?

Oh Yes!!! LOL

 

[Exploding Chestnuts]

Yes those sweat rugs that fitted on day one and after one use then expanded to fit a Clydesdale, but not any normal shaped Clydesdale.
We used to gallop [probably canter] the working Clydesdales along the canal tow-path, bareback and in a halter when asked to move them from one farm to another. Quite often riding doubled up which must have made it all very unsafe.
I had forgotten all about those plaited coloured reins, quite exotic.
All the riding school saddles appeared to be ex military, and hurt your legs.
I used to ride the Starter's Hack to Hamilton Racecourse [think M8]
There were steam trains, and one of the riding horses was terrified do we had to send a quiet one ahead to check the bridge was clear to cross.
One pair of Cavalry twill jodhpurs which I "dry cleaned" with soap and a nail brush.
Tartan woollen trews were fashionable, I still have a photo of me at the yard with a pair, they seem rather baggy!

 

[FrostyFeet]

Dotty 1-I think I remember Horse in the House (was it Orbit,big bay with a blaze???)but not a great deal about it either!
Have Black Beauty as my ringtone & always blame on daughter. But it's all me 😃

 

[Megibo]

Even just 9 years ago I used to do things with my pony (who I still have) that people wouldn't dream of letting their kids do now!

My mum always says too about all this new health and safety, do's and dont's etc etc they used to hack for hours on end and canter full pelt up the old railway line (easily as hard as a road) with fully shod ponies and says they never had a lame day! These days not many people would dream of cantering a shod horse on a hard surface !

 

[HappyHollyDays]

Reading the posts from the younger folk I think that what we did in the 70's is no different to what the kids were doing in the 90's or 00's or even now. I really think it is age which inhibits our actions and makes us think "elf&safety".

When I was 16 my younger sister was sworn to secrecy about how I got concussion and ended up with a ripped vein having been thrown bareback into a barbed wire fence. Three weeks ago her 12 year old got thrown after the pony bolted across two fields. No back protector on, scuffs on her back and filthy Jodhs and jacket. Between us we concocted a story that she fell over in the gateway having got her wellies stuck in the mud.

Nothing changes, the kids are doing just the same things, it's just us getting older.

 

[MiJodsR2BlinkinTite]

Oh gosh............ so many memories being re-kindled here.

I remember nylon reins and girths; mine were bright royal blue, with a criss-crossed dog-toothed browband to match! Horrendous.

Memories of the Pullein-Thompson books, Follyfoot, Flicka & the "Jackie" series............ fantastic. Plus the Pony Club "Manual of Horsemanship" and "The Care of a Pony at Grass". I remember getting send to the Deputy Headmistress for reading the manual of horsemanship in class. By god was it worth it

Heroes of the day were Princess Anne and Doublet; Lucinda Prior Palmer and Be Fair, Harvey Smith, Eddie Macken & Boomerang; etc etc.

I'm so glad I was of the generation that can remember the dulcet tones of Raymond Brooks-Ward. Unsurpassed.

Complex feeds were unknown; you fed the straight stuff, no messing. "Pony nuts" were a complete innovation. And everything was bedded on straw.

You could get a full set of shoes for £15!!!

Saddles were quite commonly lined with serge not leather; and rigid not sprung treed. Treeless meant living where no trees grew rather than a type of saddle. "Saddle fitters" and back people just weren't around back then; but strangely horses backs seemed healthier than now. Ditto Equine Dentists; horses teeth were rasped (if they were lucky) every so often.

Natural horsemanship didn't exist then; horses were just "nappy" and if they committed the most heinous crime of rearing up, the general advice given was "get off, stay off, and call kennels". And this is exactly what happened.

Horses were rugged far less than now; my first pony never ever had a rug on him all through his life, he lived out 24/7 and was as happy as a jumping bean on it

Oh, and we all pored over the "Jacatex" brochure; wonderful stuff, I had a pair of their riding trousers and they lasted me for ages, and then I'd outgrown them to the extent that they came just under my knees! Fantastic people.

We'd think nothing of hacking 8 miles to a pony club rally/meet/show, and then back again at the end of the day. Only "posh parents" could afford a horsebox in those days, so we'd all get together and hack to things posse-style.

Mobile phones didn't exist then - so if you were out in the wilds where no-one knew where you were, and fell off, then tough, you'd stay there till you were found (or not!). Of course none of us kids thought to be sensible and tell any Grown Ups where we were going or what we were doing, like pretending we were Lucinda PP (or Richard Meade for the boys) and hooning up and down an old disused quarry pit with banks that made the Hickstead Bank look like a grassy hillock By heck if our parents had known.........

And if you DID fall off, you were yanked straight on up again; no matter whether you howled like a banshee or not, it was For Your Own Good of course.

Coloured cobs (like the one I've got now) were only seen either with the local gypsys or towing a cart; it would have raised a few eyebrows to have actually got on and ridden one - let alone go hunting or to a show/pony club rally on it

Riding Instructors were, as a breed, formidable. Obviously all trained by the British Cavalry, and the female version had sticky-out elephant's ear cavalry twill breeches: females wore a headscarf, men wore a flat cap. Both carried nifty little crops which they'd smack against their boots (very highly polished, obviously). I went to a local riding school like this and falling off was just NOT an option.

In those days if you weren't lucky to own your own pony you'd go to the local riding school and lurk - and hope like crazy that they'd let you help out in exchange for an occasional ride, which was like nectar to the gods. Or you'd be allowed to ride a friend's pony, or someone you or your parents knew. We were so lucky in those days because you could ride someone else's pony, or help out at the riding school, without all the faffing about & fear of litigation that there is nowadays. You just daren't offer a local kid a chance to be near a pony now without being insured up the hilt and/or being accused of being a peadophile I feel so sorry for modern youngsters trying to get started.

Us kids enjoyed our ponies, perhaps it was the days of innocence, I don't know, but it felt so carefree and free of all the H&S clutter and fear of litigation that surrounds everything nowadays.

 

[rowan]

Love this posting brings back great memories, my great big brown jodhpurs with wings and my pride and joy my first slimmer fitting white cord jodhpurs use to have to scrub them with ajax to get them clean. Waiting for dad to finish reading the Sunday paper just so I could look at the Jackatex advert selling riding clothes, really showing my age now. Use to go and get ponies out the field riding one and leading one each side right through the village back to the local stables. Being allowed to stay up late to watch the Horse of the Year Show that was on television every night, great days and great to dig out the old memories