Badminton Horse Trials at 75

   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...