‘Like family’: the story behind the Queen’s lifelong love of horses

After more than nine decades of faithful service, it was fitting that the Queen chose equine companions to mark her 96th birthday. With fell ponies Bybeck Nightingale to her left, and Bybeck Katie to her right, the photo in her Platinum Jubilee year was a taste of the celebrations to come. A Gallop Through History – an equestrian display featuring more than 500 horses (including the two newly pictured) will run next month, followed by the Epsom Derby on the Bank Holiday weekend.

“The horses are her: they are her life, they are her family,” says Katie Jerram, a show rider and producer who has been riding the Queen’s horses for almost two decades. “She’s an incredibly knowledgeable lady regarding her horses, which gives me immense pleasure.”

The monarch’s love affair with horses began as a toddler, when footage shows her pulling a toy horse behind her – she had 30 of them, and one of her favourite games was to harness her nanny in a pair of red reins with bells on. A first riding lesson followed at the age of three and her affection was such that, for the future Queen’s fourth birthday, she was given Peggy, a Shetland mare, by her grandfather, King George V.

Riding regularly throughout her teens – reportedly not washing her hands after stroking her father’s two top Flat horses as an adolescent, so as to preserve the smell – she began breeding horses more than 60 years ago and now owns more than 100, including Shetlands and Highlands at Balmoral, and Fells at Hampton Court.

Thoroughbreds, meanwhile, are bred at the Royal Stud in Sandringham. The Queen has a handful of trainers on rotation at any one time, with horses looked over by Terry Pendry, her faithful stud groom and manager, and John Warren, her racing manager. Pendry, a “royal favourite,” has often been pictured riding the grounds of Windsor with the Queen, including on her 73rd wedding anniversary in 2020. He calls the Queen “a fountain of knowledge in all things equine, you might say a living encyclopaedia”.

Pendry was among those chosen to form the monarch’s COVID bubble, when lockdown restrictions were imposed two years ago, such is their closeness. Indeed horses have remained a constant through any tumult in her reign; she has ridden regularly, well into her nineties, which Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, has described as “incredible”.

“A fountain of knowledge in all things equine, you might say a living encyclopaedia.”

Over the past decade, the Queen made “the decision to start riding native ponies,” Pendry has said, including Emma, one of her favourites, as they are “a little closer to the ground, so to speak”.

Nowadays, the Queen describes herself as more of “a rather fair-weather rider”, although she maintains a relationship with her horses in other ways. Jerram visits Windsor Castle regularly, with four horses at a time in tow – including Barbers Shop, “a very special racehorse bred by the Queen Mother”. Jerram was atop the homebred gelding in 2017 when he became the first Supreme Champion to be crowned at Royal Windsor for 15 years, which she describes as “the most memorable, enjoyable day I’ve had in my life”. On visits, Jerram rides for the Queen in the indoor school and, at the end of each session, the monarch produces a paper bag of cut-up carrots to share out among the four-legged visitors. “They love their treats from Her Majesty,” she says.