Changes through the ages

Horse management has unquestionably revolutionised over the past 14 decades – but is it always for the better? Catherine Austen charts the changes

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WE know that the lives of people in Britain have changed immeasurably over the past 140 years. Has it also been the same for horses? The greatest difference must be that there are far fewer of them. It is estimated that there were more than three million horses in the UK in late Victorian times; now it is understood that there are well under a million. Much of that reduction is because we now keep horses purely for leisure and sport, whereas in 1900 at least one million of those were working animals, employed on farms, in public transport, in coal mines and to deliver goods.

Horses were essential for personal transport, either ridden or in harness. They were part of daily life for almost everyone, whether they lived in the countryside or in the towns and cities. Although the lives of working horses were often brutally hard, as anyone who has read Black Beauty – published in 1877 – will know, horses in general were well looked-after and greatly valued.

“People had a working knowledge of the working horse,” says trainer Sir Mark Prescott. “Joshua East made a fortune from Hackney cabs – in the end he had a monopoly – and he said to all the operators, ‘I will provide your horses, but you must rest each horse for three months a year, and if a horse goes lame, I will give you another one.’”

The two World Wars changed everything. According to equine welfare charity Brooke, the last London bus drawn by horses ran on 4 August 1914 – the day Britain declared war on Germany. While the British Army had around 25,000 horses in 1914, that number would swell; by 1917, the Army employed more than 368,000 horses on the Western Front alone.