BOOK EXTRACT l BADMINTON HORSE TRIALS AT 75
The world’s most famous horse trials is celebrating a milestone anniversary this year, and to mark it a new book, Badminton Horse Trials at 75, has been written by renowned equestrian journalist Kate Green. In this extract find out how a disastrous Olympic performance prompted the event’s foundation, and how Pippa Funnell took charge in the early 2000s
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, would inspire generations of riders from all corners of the globe. The result, though, was famously underwhelming… the Country Life correspondent, Colonel Henry Wynmalen, was forced to write that the host eventing team “as a whole was not yet impressive”.
Among the spectators at Aldershot were the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort… Much has been made of the Duke’s dismay at Britain’s poor showing in 1948, but [Colonel Trevor] 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”. The Duke proffered his estate there and then, during the picnic.
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. All he had to go on was what he had seen at Aldershot at the Olympics, but he was a natural horseman, a successful a successful showjumper and a hunting a man.
The undoubted star of the show itself was was Captain John Shedden, a bespectacled riding i
