or who are my trainers?
I was born loving horses. I don’t know where it came from; I was born into a completely non-horsey family but as soon as I knew what a horse as I was obsessed. My mother eventually succumbed to relentless pressure and got me some lessons at our local riding stables. The lessons were fairly rudimentary, but I did learn to walk, trot, canter and jump. They also ‘allowed us’ to groom, muck out and generally help out! Once Mum realised that the obsession was deepening rather than the fad fading, the trips to the stables stopped post haste. I then had to find my own way to be with horses. There were a couple of nice enough ponies in a field near our house in North London; I still don’t know who owned them, but I used to crawl through the fence, groom them, and play games with them. I didn’t feed them or ride them- no one ot ask permission – I just loved spending time with them.
Aged 13 and I got my first paid summer grooming job. There was a summer camp run in the grounds of a prestigious North London boys school. Horse riding was one of the activities on offer. There was a large field at the bottom of the equestrian centre land, with 30 ponies delivered from a dealer, a pile of tack, and a dozen young girls like me, working for the princely sum of £15 a week. At lunch time the supervising BHS instructor would let us ride. We all had our favourites. The ponies would go to the sales at the end of the summer. The good ones might get lucky and go to a nice home, the naughty ones would probably go the knacker’s yard. So we all did our best, making sure our ponies would be the good ones. Camp was a good summer job for my secondary school years. I learned to ride all sorts of ponies and make them a bit better behaved under saddle. I had long legs and a sticky seat, and they couldn’t get me off too easily. I hope some of my favourites went on to better lives but I will never know.
In my gap year between secondary school and medical school, I travelled around Australia as an itinerant girl groom. There was an actual agency called English Girl Grooms! First, I worked in show jumping, as that was what I knew best, and then I was recruited as a polo groom. I got plenty of saddle time on spicy horses and learned how to keep competition horses fit, how to feed them and work them for soundness as well as speed. I learned how to stick and ball, and how to school a polo pony. I also learned a lot of first aid, common sense and everyday horse management as I went along. Coming back to the UK for medical school, I continued to scrounge horse time wherever I could. I worked at polo yards in the summer and rode out racehorses and hunters in the winter. I learned more about how to start young horses, and then to make them into good polo ponies.
Medical school and junior training is pretty peripatetic; in the first 10 years I had lived in 8 houses in 3 cities. When I got my registrar training job, it meant at last I could buy a house out of town, get my own horse and go eventing. I wanted to go eventing because I love cross country jumping. But to go eventing we had to “do proper dressage”.
Now I could already school a horse. I had made a couple of very good high goal polo ponies from scratch, teaching them balance, lead changes, the classic stop and turn, all one-handed, and holding a polo stick! In my understanding, ‘on the bit’ meant on the aids, with quick fire responses, light in front, nimble behind, a pony reading your mind. To do proper dressage, apparently your horse had to go “on the bit, in a correct outline”. I started watching “proper” dressage tests. It was around the time Edward Gal and Totilas were wowing the world. “On the bit” obviously meant deep and round, I thought. Look at Gal, he is the dressage world record holder, he must be doing it right.
My first own horse was a beautiful black horse that I named Wise Words. He and I had a great time, but he was “quirky”. He was cheap as chips when I bought him because he had a reputation. He had a tough start, bred and produced at an high level eventing yard. I had to literally catch him in the stable before I could bring the saddle out, and as his main rider I could never reliably catch him in the field, even long after he had retired. He would only tolerate a straight bar Happy Mouth bit, but if you rode him on his terms, he was super light in the hand. I could have him going along beautifully, up and open but we would always get comments like “could be rounder”, “needs to be more over the back”. He didn’t agree; he would throw his head back and open his mouth when I applied too much pressure to his tongue with the bit.
I enrolled with a well-known local dressage trainer to help us get some better scores. It didn’t work. The black horse once spent 45 minutes reversing into the corner of the arena with said trainer on his back, rather than walk forward into a restrictive rein contact. On another occasion, he went up and over backwards, because the trainer was determined to make him submit, to go forwards, with his neck round and his head down. Because the trainer was the expert, you see. He had got on to sort the horse out, to solve a problem that I was unable to solve in the saddle under his instruction. The problem was ‘submission’. The black horse would not submit, and certainly not to pain. I learned quickly enough not to go head-to-head with him; I had to compromise or to find a way around the problem.
He had a bit of thing about ditches which we could never quite fix but we qualified for riding club championships in all the disciplines, we evented up to BE100, we team chased, drag hunted, and hacked thousands of long miles all over Cheshire. After a couple of years, his feet got so bad that I had to take his shoes off and he then did it all much better barefoot, which was his lesson for me. I was mostly just grateful for the privilege of being able to ride my own beautiful black horse.
The black horse and I continued to muddle along in our path of chosen compromise. He taught me lots, we had many great times, and I am truly grateful for the many years I got to be his human. But horses have a way of telling you when they are done with a particular sport. Polo ponies start evading the ride off, eventers start being reluctant to jump downhill. Michael Whittaker always says there is a finite number of jumps a horse can do in its life, before the wear and tear sets in. In Paddy’s case he started to refuse at otherwise simple drop fences aged 18 so I started looking around for another horse.
Cal was a young Irish import. I bought him fresh off the ferry aged 6. I was meant to buy a 161.hh bay gelding to bring on and sell but the grey horse had something about him. Also, it was my birthday weekend, and the next truck wasn’t coming for another 6-8 weeks…
Once I had him vetted and home, I wanted to do right by my lovely new horse. I was a young single doctor with lots of cash, so I paid for top class instruction. And we appeared to be doing well. We won the Novice class at the local Dressage with a whopping 76%. But Cal too had started turning his back on me when I brought out the saddle. And I knew a bit more now, and I adored my new horse and I wanted him to adore me. I didn’t want another horse that hated work…
I started looking around for another way. Classical dressage seemed to offer the most credible alternative. Dressage for the benefit of the horse, rather than the horse just doing dressage. I started looking for a new instructor. There were a few false starts – many people claim to be “classical” but have no theory or substance to base that assertion on. Others did not quite gel from a personality point of view. When doing dressage or doing bodywork, we are making tiny alterations to a horse. I am a surgeon, I can take criticism, but I won’t tolerate confabulation. On that basis, I expect explanations and deep understanding of the theory from my instructor, and, of course, the horse always gets the casting vote.
They say that when you are ready the teacher appears. Sarah, our first barefoot trimmer, was organising clinics with a mysterious lady called Patrice Edwards, and she encouraged me to attend. That first weekend, I saw countless horses change in front of my eyes, from tense, stiff marionettes with dull coats to smooth flowing athletes with coats like shimmering silk, and I felt my own horse change from a crooked, awkward baby to coordinated and completed powerhouse. Cal’s change only lasted for a few steps but I had felt enough to know that this was the work that I had been seeking. Especially since the change was not affected by doing things to the horse but by rearranging me, in the saddle, until I was sat poised in the middle, with the horse flowing through me.
Sarah had come to a life hiatus and couldn’t organise the clinics anymore, so I stepped in. Crucially for a busy doctor, this meant that I could choose the weekends. For nearly six years, I organised and facilitated the Cheshire clinics. We ran four full days of lessons most months, and I prioritised the clinics above all else in my schedule. I had 3 or 4 lessons over the weekend, depending on my funds, but also had to look after Ms P, video if required, meet and greet and park new participants, and generally protect the learning space within the arena.
It was a fabulous education; I calculate that I must have watched and taken notes on about 1200 hours of lessons. The participants were people and horses that I got to know well, so I could follow their training progression and I was fascinated and hungry to learn. We had at least one theory lecture a month, sometimes one a day. We were encouraged as a group to help each other with our homework in between clinic dates. We were expected to understand the theory fully, and to be able to communicate it clearly. It was a true apprenticeship in classical dressage, theory, practice, application, combined with experiential learning. Cal is quite long backed, and as a youngster was huge in front with a comparatively weak hind end, and seeing him happily developing in his body gave me solid proof that this approach was working.
One of Patrice’s long-term mentors was Charles de Kunffy and he was still coming to the UK at that stage, to the TTT as well as to Dovecote stables. It was couple of years before Cal and I were deemed ready to be presented to him even for a clinic lesson, and a bit longer before I managed to secure a coveted riding place on his clinic- I wasn’t a name, we weren’t part of the in-crowd, the local organisers wouldn’t prioritise me over their own pupils, but I did eventually get to ride for him a couple of times. I was the only person in that clinic to get a positive comment about my riding: Charles said I “sat very nicely”, which made Ms P proud.
Charles’ star was already waning in the UK at that time, but I enjoyed an occasional email correspondence with him and filled a good few notebooks with scribbles and patterns from the many hours of lessons that we watched. Patrice and I, and the rest of the clinic group, could then discuss what we had seen and build on the learning in the peace of our own arena, away from the snobbish Gloucestershire dressage queens.
Patrice’s physical strength started to decline, and the long drive north became increasingly onerous. Then came the pandemic and we all went online, but it was never the same. The online technology was equally good for individual lessons, but there was no mechanism for watching and learning as a group. After Covid, Patrice was finished with travelling, although we did manage to attend her residential dressage camps in the New Forest.
And then Arne Koets started visiting the UK more regularly. I had been to audit a few times, but once my knowledge and understanding was sound enough to see what he was doing, and with Patrice out of the picture (she was a possessive trainer), the timing was now right. I knew the theory, the biomechanics, the anatomy of dressage for horse and rider. Arne added the tiny details to find ease and form and function within the mechanics I had learned from Patrice. And with the demonstrations of tango and the beginnings of mounted fencing, Cal and I found the fun and the purpose of dressage again. Dressage is first and foremost for the horse, but it must be for the rider too otherwise we can all get stuck in our squirrel-like brains. And there is no truer expression of dressage than Garrocha, or horseback fencing, or just playing among the small square of pillars.
Arne would ask for the seemingly improbable- canter renvers ovals from the corner to X with a canter TOF at the apex- I kid you not, try it, Fiaschi wrote about it in the 14th Century from memory, it is a thing…..
Patrice was quite Baucher, quite Nuno, and very Charles. Arne is quite medieval- Grissone, Fiaschi, De la Gueriniere. To understand the pair of them and to link them together I had to read them all. And am still doing so.
There are not enough hours in a lifetime to become a master horseperson. And your horse won’t last as long as you, so you will need to two or three, started from scratch to high school, to even ruffle the surface of that knowledge that oral tradition and apprenticeship passed down. It wasn’t for everyone then, and it is certainly not for everyone now.
But the horses tell me every day that if you try a little, if you pause, and breathe, and find that space where dressage is fun and useful and helpful, then they will happily play there with you. And be stronger and healthier and sounder for the effort. Dressage is not what we do for ribbons, or something we do to the horse, good dressage should be done, from basics to high school, whatever level you can achieve together, with the horse’s participation and consent, for the benefit of the horse, full stop. Then you will have your dream horse, and they will last a good long time.
Which was always the point of doing dressage.
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