The Beginning...
Horses chose me before I could choose them. There's a photograph of me at three years old, already on the back of one, and I don't remember a time when that felt anything other than completely natural.
Regular riding started at six, when my family moved from Oxfordshire to Dorset. By eight, I was spending summers at Abergwynant Farm in Wales — earning my keep, sharing a staff caravan, and riding anything Mr Jones put me on.
Early Instinct...
I didn't know the word dressage then, but I can remember wanting Suzie — a black mare I was rarely allowed to ride — to be on the bit. The instinct was there before the vocabulary.
What followed was an education no college could have designed. Moving countries at least twenty-six times before the age of sixteen meant I rode thousands of horses of every breed, temperament and level of cooperation.
Mentors...
At fourteen I was riding at the Aramco Corral in Saudi Arabia — four or five horses a day under the watchful eye of the legendary Miss Rosemary Beeton, who was British and horsey to every ray of Saudi sun. She took me sufficiently under her wing that I spent six months with her sister's farming family in Suffolk when I returned to the UK.
Racing years...
Back home, a broken leg, a motorbike, and the intervention of racing trainer Gill Duffield led me — somewhat circuitously — to Cheveley Park Stud in Newmarket, and then to James Toller's flat racing yard. Head Lad Tony Scane taught me to break horses alone, without assistance. That knowledge has never left me.
Qualifications
I spent the 1980s in racing and the 1990s producing horses for Lord Roborough's family in Devon. Then back into education — an HND in Equine Studies at Duchy College, my British Horse Society Intermediate Instructor qualification, and the highest marks in ridden exams three years running. The classroom was a battle. The arena was not.
Lion
The horses I'm most proud of are the ones nobody else wanted. Bought for hundreds, sold for thousands — not because I was clever about money, but because I was patient about horses. Lion was perhaps the finest example: bought as a bolter, sold six years later and competed by his new owner to Elementary and Medium dressage level. He fulfilled every dream I had for him.
Goose
Tiger Tor began properly in 2004, when my parents bought two and a half acres at Woodman's Corner. It became a place where difficult horses could become exceptional ones. Goose — competing here at Intermediare 1 — was bought for £4,500 and sold in September 2020 for £45,000. That sale gave me the resource to develop Tiger Tor's dressage programme into what it is today.
Frog
After all these horses, Frog was my dream horse. The one I was never able to sell, not even for a million pounds. Pammy Hutton of Talland Equestrian Centre confirmed what I already knew — that she was of international calibre. I lost her in August 2020, found in the field with a broken leg. That loss changed everything, and spurred Tiger Tor into the next chapter.
I'm still looking for that feeling. That's rather the point.
