There aren’t many web resources on Pat Smythe; it’s best to rely on the books she wrote at the height of her fame and her later autobiography, Leaping Life’s Fences. British Pathé has come up trumps however, and you can spend hours there looking for footage of all the showjumping greats from Stroller to Mr Softee. Here’s Pat jumping Prince Hal at the 70th National Horse Show in New York in the 1950s, receiving her OBE in 1956 (I think the vicar accompanying her is her brother) and training for the Olympics in the same year. She’s winning at Hickstead on Flanagan in 1962 (although I think the first horse shown might be Scorchin) and taking part in an educational documentary called The Young and Healthy with Tosca. I suspect this last film was the inspiration for Harry Enfield’s Cholmondeley-Warner…
Update: the Express ran an extract from this chapter which you can read here.
This post relates to a chapter of the book If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of an Equine Obsession. If you have any questions to ask about the content, please fire away in the comments. The main online index for the book is here.