Alice Hayes was a British horsewoman married to an army vet, Horace Hayes, who wrote many books on horsecare in the nineteenth century. She travelled widely with him in the course of his work, and rode a great variety of often difficult horses. The most wiley, perhaps, wasn’t a horse at all: “The most awkward …
Category Archives: Mrs Hayes
A (Not So) Short History of Women Riding Astride
I enjoyed talking about the history of sidesaddle on Countryfile – it was my first experience of TV and everyone was incredibly friendly and easygoing. We did a few takes of different parts of the interview and it was hard to know whether to embellish what I’d said each time or to say the same …
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Riding Philosophically, Riding Culturally
Hello folks, I haven’t been such a great blogger lately because I’ve been working on The Next Big Thing – actually the Two Next Big Things. They’re books two and three, the first of which will be underway this spring, and the second needs whipping into shape so that it can be rolled out sometime …
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Women, Horses and World War One
(Look on this as a kind of missing chapter from If Wishes Were Horses.) Part two of this post will be available here from 2nd June 2014. When I wrote If Wishes Were Horses I tried to take the story of girls and ponies from Lascaux to My Little Pony as neatly as I could. …
If Wishes Were Horses: Jeunes Filles Bien Elevées
I loved this chapter and had far, far to much to write about, some chunks of which may appear here if not used elsewhere. Meanwhile, enjoy the slideshow. The books came largely from Archive.org. J. Collinson and Sons rocking horses. A website maintained by Nannie Power O’Donoghue’s biographer, Olga E. Lockley. The brilliantly titled Unprotected …
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If Wishes Were Horses: Nerve
Alice Hayes on nerve: “No lady can enjoy riding, or become proficient in that art, unless she has good nerve. … Luckily, the large majority of girls who learn to ride possess abundance of nerve and pluck, an excess of which is often a danger to safety in the hunting field. … It is the …
A Word of Warning
“Every girl who is learning to ride, naturally desires to establish a feeling of friendship between herself and her mount, because she knows that he can get rid of her off his back any time he likes; but she should remember that a horse, like a servant, is always ready to take a liberty, and …
Riding in the Kaiser’s Berlin
I cannot help thinking that the Germans are more devoted to riding than any other Continental nation. I have not hunted in Germany, as I was there only during the summer; but I sold a good hunter to a German Count who was a fine horseman and a Master of Foxhounds. He told me that …
First Sidesaddle Lesson: Not Quite “Posed Audaciously Like a Wing”
My Christmas present this year was an hour’s sidesaddle lesson at the Pine Lodge School of Classical Education in Norfolk, with top teacher and judge Sarah Walker. Aside from actually buying me a pony, this was probably The Best Gift Ever. Not only did I get to try a style of riding I’ve been curious …
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The Myth of the Wild Zebra
The Chronicle of the Horse interviewed a Texan woman called Sammi Jo Stohler who has schooled her zebra to jump: “As I was training horses, I kept hearing, ‘You can’t train zebras, they’re untrainable.’ I said, ‘Why?’ To say something is untrainable implies that it can’t learn, and we all know that if they couldn’t …