Perhaps it was no coincidence that Moorland Mousie was published in the same year
that the Pony Club was established with the express aim of ‘interesting young people in
riding and sport and at the same time offering the opportunity of higher instruction in
this direction than many of them can obtain individually’ (The Pony Club Year Book
1994:68). This started a trend for stories of instruction thinly disguised as fiction with
young riders being taught the finer points of horsemanship, like ‘Golden Gorse’s’ Janet
and Felicity, the Young Horse-Breakers (1937), and Riders of Tomorrow (1935), by
Captain J.E.Hance, former captain and riding master of the Royal Horse Artillery.
Captain Hance had served in India and was one of the many military men who came
back from the Empire imbued with a passion for horses. They were immensely
influential in all sports and organisations involving horses, including the Pony Club, and
introduced Indian words like ‘gymkhana’ and ‘jodhpur’ into the language.
It was adolescent girls who were most receptive to this new obsession for horses and
the emergence of the girl rider changed the character of the pony book. The focus of
attention shifted from the pony to the pony owners and early books like The Ponies of
Bunts and the Adventures of the Children Who Rode Them (1933), and their sequels,
lively true stories, written as fiction and illustrated with black and white photographs,
reflected the new trend. But the book which did most to influence the formula was a
classic story originally intended for adults by its author Enid Bagnold. Despite this,
National Velvet (1935), has always been read by children, particularly after the
enormous success of the film version in 1944. The plot has all the motifs which became
familiar in countless pony books: the pony-mad girl who cannot afford a pony wins an
unmanageable horse in a raffle, loves and trains it and eventually comes first in a major
race, the Grand National. Although it has been criticised for its caricature of a working-
class family, National Velvet was among the first books to put into words that passionate
yearning for horses by adolescent girls which characterises the genre:
‘I tell myself stories about horses’, [Velvet] went on, desperately fishing at her shy
desires. ‘Then I can dream about them. Now I dream about them every night. I
want to be a famous rider, I should like to carry despatches, I should like to get a
first at Olympia, I should like to ride in a great race, I should like to have so many
horses that I could walk down between the two rows of loose boxes and ride what I
chose’.
Bagnold 1935:71Another pony-mad girl echoed these sentiments more prosaically in a book published in
the following year. Joanna Cannan’s A Pony for Jean (1936), now regarded as the
pioneer of the new type of pony novel, was written specifically for children, and owed
much to E. Nesbit in tone and humour. Like National Velvet, it concentrated on the
pony-owner rather than the pony, telling the story of Jean Leslie, ‘nearly 12’, who moves
to the country when her father loses his money, and is given a neglected pony, ‘The
Toastrack’, by her horsey cousins who regard her as hopeless as her mount. Jean learns
to ride by trial and error, nurtures and trains the pony, romantically renamed Cavalier,
and wins the jumping class at the local gymkhana. It is the prototype for hundreds of
pony books and is still one of the best of the genre. It had the benefit of an experienced
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