THEIR ponies were cheerful little shitlands. The children – mainly girls – grew up to manage careers and families and anything else that needed sorting out. The adults ran around picking up cast shoes and fallen riders and the pieces generally. Yet in this joyous chaos of wrecked marquees, ruined lawns and inevitable bramble thickets there is one person missing. Unseen in the cartoons, Norman Thelwell himself is the bemused, non-horsey dad, looking on with fond bafflement at our inexplicable obsession with all things pony.
This year is the 100th anniversary of Norman Thelwell’s birth and the 70th birthday of the spherical yet mercurial beast universally recognised as the Thelwell Pony. Thelwell, living in the Midlands at the time with his wife and young son, had started drawing cartoons for magazine in the 1950s. He writes in his autobiography, , how he was struck by the daily struggles of two young children with their ponies in the field opposite his studio: ‘As the children got in 1953 struck an instant and universal chord, although Thelwell recalled his surprise at the response: ‘Suddenly I had fan mail. So the editor told me to do a two-page spread on ponies. I was appalled. I thought I’d already squeezed the subject dry.’
