Side-saddle maker

Rob Jenkins on making side-saddles, and balancing antique with innovation

- Rob Jenkins

I grew up with horses. I had ponies and a 16.3hh hunter and did a bit of everything. We lived in the New Forest - you could go out the front gate and ride all day. I probably had the most fun on my New Forest pony, Murphy. He'd do anything - canter through streams and jump gorse bushes. I rode till my late teens, then it was girls and motorbikes.

You never lose that love of horses, but I have enough contact with them through my work; I love watching them move.

I was lost as a teenager, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Then I went to a saddler's - Glenn Hasker in Hampshire – with Mum, looking for a saddle, and the workshop was right in the middle of the shop. You could walk all the way round it.

Seeing someone sitting, stitching, with all the tools, piqued my interest so I made enquiries and Walsall was the place - it's saddle town - so I enrolled for a course and stayed for three years.

Someone brought me a sidesaddle to repair back in the mid 1990s and I couldn't do it and gave it back in bits - even though I'd trained as a saddle-maker! Not long after, someone else brought one in and I thought, if people want to resurrect these saddles, I need to find out more.