Perfect on parade

There may not be the usual Trooping the Colour this year, but a new crop of horses is keeping the Household Cavalry as busy as ever

- ELEANOR DOUGHTY 

It’s 6 am, and former point-to-pointer Trooper Lois O’Hara is down in The Life Guards stables at Hyde Park Barracks mucking out. With 250 horses to feed, groom and exercise, there’s a lot to do. By lunchtime, she’ll have ridden three times – first on one of the Household Cavalry’s fully-trained horses, before exercising two of the regiment’s young horses, the ‘remounts’, those that are waiting to show the world just how magnificently they can behave on parade. After 12 years working in racing, she joined the Army in 2019, as the second female soldier in the regiment’s 361-year history. “I can’t seem to get away from horses,” she laughs.

The past year has been a strange one for the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment (HCMR). Usually, the soldiers and horses work towards a succession of parades, including HM The Queen’s Birthday Parade, more commonly known as Trooping the Colour, in June, alongside the five regiments of foot guards, and The King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery. But when the national lockdown was imposed in March 2020, the cavalry was locked down, too. The state events were canceled, the majority of the horses were sent to grass in Melton Mowbray, and the soldiers engaged in Operation Rescript, building hospitals, testing the public, and providing humanitarian support to the government’s COVID-19 efforts. All the while, Queen’s Life Guard, the daily duty at Horse Guards on Whitehall, was still taking place, albeit in a socially distanced manner, with the few horses left.