author, Joanna Cannan, who shared her young readers’ passion for ponies and who
(according to her daughter Josephine Pullein-Thompson) had ‘longed and longed to have
her own pony to ride’ when she was young. Her pony books, which include two sequels
to A Pony for Jean, are distinguished by their humour, and a tone which shifts between
chatty informality and deliberate literariness.
Joanna Cannan passed on her love of horses and her writing talent to her three
daughters and started a pony-book dynasty. Josephine Pullein-Thompson and her twin
sisters Diana and Christine, began writing books in their teens and have continued for
almost half a century, selling 11 million books all over the world. The name Pullein-
Thompson has become synonymous with pony stories and this family, above all other
writers in the genre, can be credited with popularising the pony book.
The early Pullein-Thompson books had an innocent ebullience and lively style missing
in the later ones. They bear the influence of Victorian children’s writers, showing their
human characters receiving a moral education from animals. The books are about
spoilt, bad-mannered children who are not fit to own ponies, learning kindness and
humility through proper horsemanship, or ordinary children who are ‘broken in’ as they
school their ponies. These were the themes of Josephine Pullein-Thompson’s first and
best stories, Six Ponies (1946), I Had Two Ponies (1947), and Plenty of Ponies (1949).
Josephine ran a riding school with her sisters, rode in major competitions and was a
Pony Club District Commissioner, and her zeal to instruct is clear, but her books are
still readable and full of lively and believable children. In later years she concentrated on
less successful adventure stories and a Pony Club series but has returned to more
straightforward stories of horsemanship, like The Prize Pony (1982).
Diana and Christine have not confined themselves to pony stories. Diana, who has
written adult fiction and non-fiction, has found it hard to match her early books, such
as I Wanted a Pony (1946), A Pony for Sale (1951) and Janet Must Ride (1951), although
one of her last pony stories, Cassidy in Danger (1979), is a satisfying return to form.
Christine, who is the most prolific of the three, has endeavoured, more than most pony
writers, to keep her books abreast of the times, notably in the series featuring the show
jumper David Smith. Her hunting trilogy starting with We Hunted Hounds (1949) is also
noteworthy, but has suffered, like others in the genre with a hunting theme, from the
sharp decline in public support for the sport.
With such a huge output, the sisters’ standard is variable, but their love and
knowledge of horses is undeniable. They have joined forces since their first book written
together, It Began with Picotee (1946), to write a series of sequels to Black Beauty.
Another pioneer of the pony book was Primrose Cumming whose first book Doney
(1934) was published when she was still in her teens. Her fantasy, Silver Snaffles
(1937), in which the heroine, Jenny, passes Alice-like through the wall of the stable into
a utopian world of talking horses who teach her horsemanship, successfully bridged the
gap between the talking-horse story and the new type of pony book. Primrose Cumming
experimented more than most with the genre, writing about the great working horses, as
well as ponies. Her best books have a strong sense of the English countryside. The
Wednesday Pony (1939), based on real characters, tells the story of a butcher’s children
and one of the great equine characters in children’s fiction, Jingo, the high-stepping
harness pony who turns out to be the horse of their dreams. The Silver Eagle Riding
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