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
