Badminton Horse Trials at 75

By Kate Green and The Duke of Beaufort

In 1949, the 10th Duke of Beaufort started Badminton Horse Trials with the idea of better preparing British riders for the Olympic Games after a disastrous showing on home ground the year before. His legacy is the world's oldest and most prestigious horse trials, which has captured the imagination of riders worldwide and in 2024 celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary.

Badminton is still an Olympic proving ground as well as a captivating place where dreams can be made or shattered, and the one all riders want to win. The centrepiece remains the cross-country course, a spectacle that draws thousands of spectators and is an imposing challenge for riders, no matter how experienced they are, in an egalitarian sport in which men and women compete on equal terms and the amateur can take on the Olympic gold medallist.

This superbly illustrated book celebrates those riders and their horses, from Sheila Willcox's hattrick in the 1950s to New Zealander Mark Todd who came out of retirement to win three decades after his first victory; from the golden era of Richard Meade, Captain Mark Phillips, Lucinda Green and Princess Anne, to twenty-first-century heroes and heroines, including William Fox-Pitt, Pippa Funnell, Andrew Nicholson, Michael Jung, Oliver Townend and Rosalind Canter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kenilworth Press
• Release date: Apr 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781910016497

Kate Green

Kate Green has been an equestrian journalist for three decades, reporting on four Olympic Games and working in the press office of numerous major events. She has written twelve books, including the 'Little Book of Burghley' and autobiographies with Mark Todd, Pippa Funnell and Mary King. Kate was editor of 'Eventing' magazine for ten years and is deputy editor of 'Country Life'. She lives in west Somerset.

Book preview

Preface

What They’ve Said About Badminton

‘I watched the first ever Badminton in 1949 as a child. It made a deep impression on me and inspired me to take up the sport. Badminton has an atmosphere second to none; it is the most prestigious event in the world and has always been the one to win.’ Richard Meade, 1972 Olympic gold medallist

‘Badminton was always an event which inspired me more than any other. It had an almost mystical effect on me and each of my horses seemed to unfurl their particular brand of genius there.’ Lucinda Green, record six-time winner

‘Badminton invariably separates the wheat from the chaff.’ Country Life reporter Elizabeth Johnson, 1976

‘Badminton is like no other course. You’ve just got to kick on.’ Bruce Davidson, 1995 winner

‘Just to compete at Badminton is a dream; it’s the most important competition there is.’ Nicolas Touzaint, 2008 winner

‘This means everything to me. Every second of this year has been focused on this moment.’ Paul Tapner, 2010 winner

‘This is it. I’ve been waiting so long and the feeling is unbelievable.’ Andrew Nicholson on winning Badminton after thirty-three years of trying

‘The three-day event is a wonderful thing for the whole estate; it brings a good deal of prosperity to the surrounding area.’ The 11th Duke of Beaufort

‘I’d rather ride around Aintree backwards than go round here.’ Dave Dick, Grand National-winning jockey and father of competitor

‘It’s crucial that we keep the five-star tests. They’re the closest competitions we have to the original all-round tests and are what the sport is all about in that the rider who judges it best should win.’ Mike Tucker, competitor and BBC commentator

Little girl to mother: ‘Mummy, who lives in that big house?’ Mother: ‘Mr and Mrs Badminton.’

‘What advice would I give the other riders? Please withdraw.’ Andrew Nicholson, perennial cross-country pathfinder

‘When I won for the first time in 1985, I thought: I’m really going to savour this moment and I certainly did. Next day at home over breakfast with all the support team, we just relived it minute by minute.’ Ginny Elliot, three-time winner

‘Badminton IS three-day eventing. It always has been and always will be.’ Ian Stark, three-time winner

‘Frank Weldon WAS Badminton and his cross-country course always had one unjumpable fence. Everyone would want to ride there if they didn’t get any nearer than 20 metres to the fences, but once you get up close and really see them, you know it’s Badminton.’ Lorna Clarke, competitor twenty-two times

‘It is so steeped in tradition and has such a world-renowned status that we’re all dying to win it and write our names in the record books.’ Blyth Tait, three-time runner-up

‘All those millions of people who would like to win Badminton and I’ve done it. I can’t believe it.’ Mary King, dual winner

‘When you compete at Badminton, especially for the first time, you think: Wow, I’ve made it. It’s the aura of the place.’ Chris Hunnable, former competitor

‘There isn’t a big event of this kind anywhere in the world that isn’t basically modelled on Badminton, because that’s where it really started. It’s a masterpiece of organisation.’ Mike Bullen, former competitor and judge

‘It’s a surreal experience passing underneath the archway that separates the stable area from the rest of Badminton. The stables are so calm, almost unnaturally so on Saturday morning, that seeing all those crowds is quite extraordinary.’ Clissy Bleekman, former competitor

‘Badminton is Badminton and things happen here that wouldn’t happen anywhere else. Galloping between the rows and rows of people, it’s easy to lose concentration.’ Oliver Townend, 2009 winner

‘When it goes well, the feeling will last with you for ever.’ Tina Cook, who has completed Badminton seventeen times

‘Your success on NZB Land Vision was reported in the Waikato Times as the stuff of dreams. In order to attract further awareness of your achievements, I moved a Notice of Motion congratulating you in Parliament.’ New Zealand MP Tim Macindoe after Mark Todd’s 2011 victory

‘Is this the greatest sporting comeback of all time?’ Times leader on Mark Todd’s 2011 victory

‘My family and I agreed that we would treat this as a normal competition, but now I can realise what it means. It is a special moment, when you think of the history and tradition and all the great riders who have won it before.’ Michael Jung on winning the Grand Slam in 2016

‘No one has a bloody clue what you go through just to get a horse here.’ Piggy March, 2019 winner

‘It’s been a childhood dream ever since I came here on my aunt’s shoulders and watched Pippa Funnell win – and I wanted to be Pippa Funnell winning Badminton.’ Laura Collett, 2021 winner

‘Of course I’m going to give it a crack. I’m not just here for a cup of tea.’ Andrew Nicholson

   CHAPTER ONE   

How it All Began

In 1948, the Olympic Games came to Great Britain, and with it came the sport of horse trials. It was the first Games since Berlin in 1936 and that it took place at all in a time of post-war rationing was a triumph of human endeavour and a fillip to a country demoralised by war. For the fledgling sport of horse trials – or eventing, as it would come to be known – it was to be pivotal, but not with the glorious result the British equestrian cognoscenti might perhaps have anticipated. However, this weekend in August 1948 was to prove the catalyst for a sport in which Britain would lead the world and a competition, Badminton Horse Trials, that would inspire generations of riders from all corners of the globe.

The three-day event, or Military, had been part of the Olympic movement since 1912, but the accolades had so far eluded Great Britain, a country that held a rather vague notion of this three-phase sport as being a niche occupation for Continental riders who were keener on prancing around doing dressage. Still, confidence was high for a decent showing on home ground by the home side, surely a nation of natural horsemen nurtured in the hunting field and in a country with a strong cavalry tradition and an ethos of Corinthian spirit.

The result, though, was famously underwhelming; by the end of the dressage, a phase that tended to elude many gung-ho British riders in the early days (Britain was unable to produce a team for the Olympic dressage contest), the Country Life correspondent, Colonel Henry Wynmalen, was forced to write that the host eventing team ‘as a whole was not yet impressive’.

The Dutch-born Wynmalen, a master of hounds, knew what he was talking about; he was, as horsemen were in those days, an all-rounder; he had been classically trained in France, was well known as both a bold and an empathetic rider and wrote respected books on equitation. His preview of the competition explained to uninitiated readers that the original aim of three-day eventing was to show what ‘a really first-class military horse, or officer’s charger, should be able to perform; incidentally, it shows what the most sanguine hunting man might expect of the hunter of his dreams.’

Wynmalen was also a joint-organiser, with Brigadier ‘Bogie’ Boden-Smith, of the 1948 Olympic competition at the army base at Aldershot, Hampshire. In his opinion, Britain was well eclipsed by the European countries of Switzerland, France, Sweden and Denmark (the Netherlands fielded a lame horse), closely followed by the USA. ‘The Spanish and Portuguese-speaking nations … have still some way to progress … The Turkish horsemen were rather disappointing.’

After two-and-a-half days of dressage came the big day: endurance. This expression is not used today, both for its connotations of struggling, tired horses, but also because the endurance section bears no comparison to today, having been vastly reduced to only one element, the cross-country course itself.

2. The 1948 Olympic champions Captain Bernard Chevallier and Aiglonne on the cross-country at Aldershot.

In the 1948 version, however, the total mileage was 20.5 to be completed in 1 hour and 50 minutes. The day began at 6 a.m. – a heatwave was feared – at Tweseldown racecourse, now a regular fixture in the domestic eventing calendar. First there were nearly 4 miles of roads and tracks to be ridden at around 9 mph, followed by a twelve-fence steeplechase course of just over 2 miles, to be ridden at 660 yards per minute (the maximum time allowed was 5 minutes 50 seconds); all but one of the forty-six starters completed it and Britain’s Major Peter Borwick riding Liberty was one of only five riders to gain the maximum 36 marks for a fast time. Next was another roads-and-tracks section, 9 miles of it, followed by the cross-country phase, which remains the centrepiece and pivot of the sport today.

Teams then comprised three riders – the sport reverted back to three riders from four several decades later at the Tokyo 2020 Games – and all three needed to complete the competition to register a team result. However, Britain was down to two men when Major Douglas Stewart’s horse, Dark Seal, went lame on the roads-and-tracks.

The 5-mile cross-country course on Barossa Common behind the Royal Military College at Camberley had a time allowed of 18 minutes; in today’s money, that would be extraordinarily long (the optimum length/time is rarely more than around 4 miles and 11.5 minutes nowadays, even at the highest levels, and most Olympic tracks are shorter than that). The ease with which the field completed the course, however, took everyone, including the organisers, by surprise. ‘Many riders, of many nations, were brilliant; they were, in fact, so good that it almost made things look too easy,’ wrote Wynmalen.

It had, perhaps, been watered down; the foreign technical delegates from the International Equestrian Federation (FEI) had requested seven fences be reduced in size and only one increased. Like the 2022 world eventing championships in Pratoni del Vivaro, Italy, the course included a daunting drop from the top of a steep slope, beside which a fascinated crowd craned their necks; unlike the Italian version, the 1948 fence probably didn’t include the modern-day technical addition of narrow, angled fences at the bottom. There doesn’t appear to have been any water to negotiate on the course, but there were several fences with ditches towards them – the second fence was a ditch to a bank with rails on top – and numerous upright obstacles, plus a 3-feet-high, 4-feet-wide timber stack.

3. A new sport: a British audience’s first taste of eventing, at the 1948 Olympics.

Borwick was, according to Wynmalen’s report, ‘flawless’ on the cross-country course, but the high rate of clear rounds made the tribulations of Britain’s third team member, the ‘courageous’ Brigadier Lyndon Bolton riding Sylvestre, seem more unfortunate: he fell off twice, albeit achieving a fast time.

Technical glitches are nothing new in the sport and, on the final day, the showjumping course had to be altered at the last minute. Four riders were eliminated for going the wrong side of a flowerpot; Wynmalen blamed the curse of Friday 13th, and the fact that he and his co-organiser were overworked. The best three teams were the USA, Sweden and Mexico; the individual accolades went to France, USA and Sweden. Britain’s Borwick and Bolton finished seventeenth and twenty-seventh respectively.

As with all sports, post-championship analysis quickly turned to how to do better next time; in Wynmalen’s words, ‘dash across country’ had been expected to ‘save the day’ even if the technicalities of the dressage phase were lacking. (This was to be the leitmotif of the British team for many years.) A pithy letter to Country Life, from a Major C. Lestock Reid, suggested that ‘We British are very slow to learn, but surely it should be dawning on us by now that it does not pay to start preparing for the next war only when the first shot is fired. Similarly with sport. The next Olympic Games are fixed for four years hence. Is it not time we started scientifically to train men and horses to take part in them?’ Unbeknownst to the writer, however, a plan had been hatched virtually within minutes of the cross-country ending.

Among the spectators at Aldershot were the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. The 10th Duke – known as Master from the young age at which he was given his first pack of hounds – was a vice-patron of the British Horse Society, a vice-president of the FEI and a judge at the Olympic showjumping competition in which Britain finished third in the Prix des Nations. He walked the Olympic cross-country course and, according to an account written by Colonel Trevor Horn, who had been a team selector and starter and was accompanying the Duke, he was ‘very much impressed at the varied nature of the jumps’.

4. No hat, no worries – and no groundline or spectator roping either.

Much has been made of the Duke’s dismay at Britain’s poor showing in 1948, but Horn’s account of the subsequent picnic beside the ducal Land Rover relays, without sensation, that ‘During lunch the Duke said it would be an excellent idea if a competition on something of the same lines could be held each year so that a team might be trained for the next Games in 1952.’ In a letter to Country Life, the Duke confined himself to writing that he hoped funds would be available for future training and that ‘our horsemen will be given the opportunity of showing their mettle regularly in international competitions’.

The Duke proffered his estate there and then, during the picnic. The Badminton estate, which is recorded in Domesday as ‘Madmintune’, has been the principal seat of the Dukes of Beaufort since the dukedom was created by Charles ll in 1682; the 1st Duke was Henry Somerset, 3rd Marquess of Worcester, whose great-great uncle had bought the manors of Great and Little Badminton.

Hunting has long been part of the Badminton tradition, with hounds kennelled there since 1640 and bloodlines traced back to the mid-1700s. The Duke of Beaufort’s Hunt is one of the oldest packs in Britain; hounds are paraded in the arena on the final day of the horse trials and can often be heard ‘singing’ in kennels during the event. Members of the hunt are still very much integral to the organisation of Badminton Horse Trials, with many of them stewarding, fence-judging and so on. It’s a big weekend in the local calendar, and a financially rewarding one for many businesses.

The Duke asked Trevor Horn to help run the horse trials. He was appointed director and tasked with appointing a British Horse Society (BHS) Committee, under whose auspices this new competition would be held. The members were the Duke as president, plus BHS chairman Colonel the Hon. Guy Cubitt, ‘Bogie’ Bowden-Smith, who had competed at the 1924 Olympics and trained the 1936 British team, 1948 team member Peter Borwick, Charles Cornell, who would be finance director, and Lieutenant Colonel ‘Babe’ Moseley, as assistant director. There would also be a Local Committee.

Horn, who was also Badminton’s first cross-country course designer, spent much of the winter of 1948–49 riding, driving or bicycling around the Badminton parkland measuring out the five endurance phases – he famously planned it out on the top of the grand piano at his home, Luckington House, in the village adjacent to the Badminton estate. All he had to go on was what he had seen at Aldershot in the Olympics, but he was a natural horseman, a successful showjumper and a hunting man. The track started below the stables, looped out across the Luckington Lane and back, over the Vicarage Ditch – an obstacle that still causes a shiver up the spine among today’s riders, however conversant they are with it – and finished along Worcester Avenue.

A Colonel Wooldridge was hired as the first event secretary; the Duke of Beaufort’s head forester, Mr Chappell, built the fences and Babe Moseley took over the running of the stables and ordering of forage. Horn paid the owner of the village sweet shop 2s 6d an hour for typing and the rest of the administration was done by the BHS office in London.

Horn also spent much time courting the newspapers who, fortunately, were intrigued, cooperative and rather more receptive than they are today, even if there was some initial confusion about what sport was taking place; some people assumed it was a badminton contest, which is unsurprising, considering Badminton House’s association with the early days of the racquet sport – in 1863, officers had played a version of it there and it is thought that this is how the sport of badminton acquired its name.

Posters presciently advertising ‘The Most Important Horse Event in Great Britain’ on April 20th to 22nd, 1949, must have helped to clarify matters, as a crowd of around 6,000 turned up, 1,000 of whom watched, slightly suspiciously, the dressage, sitting on straw bales around the arena in front of the house. They paid 1s to come in on foot, or £1 per car. The entry fee for competitors was £2 (to be returned to the competitor if they completed) and the first prize was £150.

During the previous hunting season of 1948–49, news had filtered out about this new-fangled competition. Biddy Wingfield-Digby was sitting around beside the covert on a quiet day’s hunting with the Sparkford Vale when someone mentioned that the Duke of Beaufort was going to run a ‘three-day event’. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Well, it’s three phases of dressage, cross-country and showjumping.’ ‘On the same horse?’ ‘Yes, it’s going to be all about the cross-country and that will be quite challenging.’

Lady Viola Apsley, a former MP who was disabled following a hunting accident, previewed the event for Country Life in no-nonsense terms, describing this new sport as being in the spirit of international jousting but ‘without the roughness and the risk’. ‘We know that we have some of the best horses and riders in the world, but as a nation we are prone to remain individualists,’ she wrote, urging the riding and hunting community to support this new venture.

‘We shy off submitting to necessary discipline and are slow starters. This new competition gives a lead at the moment when it is most needed. It is now up to those who love good horsemanship and the traditional field sports of this country to support the venture.’

Five of the twenty-two entries were women, even though they were not then eligible for Olympic teams; the most successful was Vivian Machin Goodall, fifth on Neptune. Biddy Wingfield-Digby ended up pulling up before the cross-country phase because her horse had seized up with azoturia (muscle cramps) – hugely disappointing, but character-building. Captain Tony Collings, an influential horseman whose star was to be tragically extinguished five years later, led the dressage phase, which many onlookers regarded as ‘circus tricks’. His mount Remus was described as a ‘grand-looking, short-coupled horse’ but one lacking a turn of speed and pace; they eventually finished sixth.

The cross-country was a day of trial and error and suffered from torrential rain. There was none of today’s strict timings and radio control (the final scores could not be issued until nearly midnight), nor was there any roping – riders could literally take their own line, and so could spectators, who were allowed to wander at will. Reg Hindley, riding Stealaway, had the misfortune to be obstructed by a spectator in a bowler hat and took a crashing rotational fall over a hedge; he suffered a wrenched shoulder but, in the gung-ho spirit of the age, carried on.

The ground was slippery – Lieutenant Colonel Leech and Lucky Chance survived a 10-yard slide intact to finish eventual fourth – and the first water jump, which had a 3-foot 6-inch rail in the water, caused some trouble. One of those who fell foul of it was