THE HORSE LISTENER

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CANDIDA BAKER ponders the question of what makes a ‘horsey’ person. Sometimes, she finds, it’s just in our DNA.

I’m looking at an old newspaper clipping online, and there’s my surname staring out of the screen at me.

The newspaper is the York Herald, dated the 7th August 1888, and a Mr. F. P Baker is listed as having won best mare and foal in the Cleveland Bay class at the Wetherby Agricultural Show in Yorkshire.

There are pages and pages of results from similar shows, and my greatgrandfather’s name is liberally dotted throughout.

Here are a few things I remember. I remember - just - being put on the back of a horse by my father, who was acting in the film The Moonraker. I still have the photo, and sometimes I wonder if my memory is because of the photo, but I don’t think so, I think that it is a true memory.

I was always told by my parents that I was first put on a horse when I was 16 months old. We passed a farmer on the road, riding his horse home, and as I cried ‘’Orsie, ‘Orsie’, my Dad stopped the car, and asked him if he would mind if I sat on his horse. Apparently every time they took me off I cried. I remember being in hospital with tonsillitis and my father visiting me to read me Black Beauty. I loved it so much that I was determined to learn to read so I could read it to myself, and by the time I was six, I was doing just that. It was followed, as I grew older, by Silver Snaffles, The Wednesday Pony, Champion the Wonder Horse, Crin Blanc, Tam the Untamed, My Friend Flicka (and all the ensuing sequels), The Silver Brumby (and all the ensuing sequels), and well, you get the drift.

I grew up understanding that my Dad loved horses, and he rode them well. He wasn’t, however, always a gentle horseman, and some of my earliest lessons in how I didn’t want to be around horses came from him. He was that generation of ‘tough’ horsemen, and by the time I was a teenager I could see that that the toughness itself often produced the opposite effect of the goal he desired.

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‘I remember - just - being put on the ‘ back of a horse by my father, who was acting in the film The Moonraker.

I also knew that his grandfather, my great-grandfather, Frances Baker bred Cleveland Bays from his home at Ingmanthorpe Grange in Wetherby. I’d grown up with a Victorian painting of a somewhat out of proportion Cleveland Bay apparently done by a journeyman painter on his rounds of the northern shires, which hung near our dining table, and I always loved it.

I imagine that my grandfather, born at the Grange, must have been a rider as well, because my Dad and his brothers, who were born and spent their early years in Bulgaria, all rode almost from the time they could walk.

By the time I was five all I wanted to do was be with horses. If someone had turned me out in a field to live with a herd, I’m sure I would have been quite happy. As I grew up there was a collection of difficult ponies – I have a very distinct memory of lying on my back being dragged across a field by one stirrup by one of them - then my beautiful Arabian-cross-Fell pony who could buck and bolt with the best of them, and then a stint in France working for a showjumper, where I was known as The Cowboy for my ability to stay on, but also for a rather serious lack of technique.

Anywhere I travelled, I rode, sometimes in the strangest places - in Kathmandu in 1975 on a ride up the road they were building directly into China; on a

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polo pony in Lahore in Pakistan; on a racehorse in New Zealand. In Australia I mustered fly-blown sheep on a property near Moree, cantered a quiet Quarter Horse on my own on endless flat avenues in between rows of sugar cane up near Roma and rode numerous horses that people told me with evident delight – after I’d ridden them, that they’d thought I’d be bound to “come a gutser”. Once I was settled in Sydney I used to go on regular wilderness rides, and they are still some of my best horse-riding memories. Galloping with brumbies in the Barrington National Park; swimming through rivers; climbing over rocks and descending down mountains I would never have imagined a horse could go down, let alone with a rider on its back, were joyful times, and it’s my belief that the horses loved these adventures too. Gradually, over the years, I picked up more jumping technique, and some dressage – I became, I suppose, the human equivalent of an ‘all-rounder’ (and if my children are ever thinking of selling me, that’s definitely the category I should be put under, although to be honest, at my age I’d probably be a giveaway to a kind, loving, forever home.)

As a few more horses came my way, I discovered I had a bit of a talent for

understanding why a horse wasn’t happy, or performing to its best, and also I was a stickler for teaching a horse manners. Starting with some training from Adam Sutton, I devoured horsemanship lessons from everywhere, and began to create a training system I was happy with.

When my son was ten, and competing with his Arabian at Pony Club and in Ag Shows, we bought my daughter her first pony, a Shetland gelding known as Sally-the-Boy. (That’s another story). We moved to the Northern Rivers, and in our first year here Anna won the undersix leadline class on Sally. She was interviewed for the Northern Star, with Sally proudly sporting the blue ribbon, and told the reporter that she didn’t like the heat or dust but it was nice when her mummy got her pony ready for her.

Jumping ribbons, riding and pleasure ribbons, leadline ribbons, they all mounted up over the years, until almost too quickly the children were grown, my son was doing his own horse stuff, and my daughter, never a fun of mud, rain, heat, dust and cold, chose a different career path.

As a child I never had the opportunity to compete at any gymkhana or in Pony Club, or at any show, and I have to say I loved those late show years.

So when Dannii Cunnane was writing the breed story on Cleveland Bays for this issue, and wrote that a group of gentlemen in Yorkshire had banded together to save the breed from extinction, I suddenly thought of my great-grandfather.

What would we do without google? A couple of questions, and there he was – on the Committee of the newlyformed Cleveland Bay Horse Society. Not only there he was, but one site I found was full of old programs from local agricultural shows. Second place for his mare and foal in the 1889 Wetherby Agricultural Show; first place for his yearling filly; winner of best foal for hunting purposes at the Long Marston Horse & Foal Show also in 1881. And it goes on, wins and places reported all through the 1870’s through to the 1890’s – with even the occasional placing at a Royal Show.

I wish now that I knew more about my great-grandather. I’d love to time travel, to sit down and talk to him about his horses, why he loved Cleveland Bays so much, about his breeding program, and his competition life. But at the same time I feel as if some dots on the line of my life have been filled in.

Whatever kind of horse person I am, it was, it seems always in the blood.

‘ ‘ I discovered I had a bit of a talent for understanding why a horse wasn’t happy, or performing to its best ...

Candida Baker runs a Facebook page, The Horse Listener. She is also the President of Equus Alliance APRIL 2019 - HORSEVIBES MAGAZINE 33