Vintage Horse Books for Christmas

Of course we always wanted model horses for Christmas.  But a really good horse book was also acceptable!

Looking through some late 1950s-early 1960s issues of The Horse Lover's magazine, I found an interesting ad for horse books.  

The seller offers fiction and non-fiction books, so there would be "something for everyone" who was a horse lover.

If I'd had $3.00 to spend back then, and a little foresight, I would have gotten the Crabbet Arabian Stud book by Lady Wentworth.  It sells for about 15 times that amount now.  

I first saw a copy at the British Library in London earlier this year; I think it came from the estate of Lady Wentworth herself. And closer to home here in the US, there's at least one copy of The Crabbet Arabian Stud available to researchers at the W. K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library at Cal Poly Pomona!

Let's see what else was available in the way of Christmas horse books around 1960:

Justin Morgan Had a Horse, by Marguerite Henry. A classic in every sense of the word.  And the foals looked so soft in the illustrations by Wesley Dennis.

The tiny black-and-white illustrations bring back some memories....

And one more, just for fun:  Bluegrass Champion, by Dorothy Lyons, also illustrated by Wesley Dennis.

Here's hoping you get some good horse books to go with your model horses for the holidays!  And if you don't, seek them out at used book stores, online, at thrift stores and estate sales.  Read them, read them again, then share them with a kid who likes animals.

Rideable Toy Horses for Christmas

Today is #NationalDayoftheHorse, and of course there is much discussion of this on social media. Some wonder why December 13th would be the National Day of the Horse, as opposed to some other day, but to me it doesn't matter.

That's because we can use today to underscore the importance of giving and receiving horse-shaped objects for the holidays!

I mean, who doesn't want a horse or a pony for Christmas?  But not everyone has the money or the space to take care of a real horse.  For us, there was always the rideable toy horse, often called a hobby-horse, with roots that stretch back hundreds of years.  

This morning I went on the venerable Newspapers.com website to look for early examples of horses and Christmas.  The earliest reference I found, in my cursory search, was a clipping from the Newcastle, England Weekly Courant in December 1773.  The paper published a list of books for children available for the holidays.

One of the books was titled "The Hobby-horse, or Christmas Companion."

The Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle, January 1, 1827, published a long article of rural Christmas traditions. One of them involved a make-believe horse.

"At Abbot's Bromley, in Staffordshire, a curious custom prevailed till lately called "the Hobby Horse," on Christmas Day, when a person carrying between his legs the figure of a horse, made of thin boards, danced through the streets," it reads in part.  

The unknown Englishmen who participated in this tradition -- though they may have had deeper cultural reasons for riding stick horses through the streets at Christmas -- have much in common with American kids more than a hundred years later, who also knew the joys of the wooden stick horse.

Handmade stick horse, circa 1952.

Store-bought stick horse, 1960.

I found hundreds of articles and advertisements for rocking horses and spring-mounted horses for Christmas, dating back to the late 1800s.  Here's an ad in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 18, 1869.  (Note that the ad above it, is for a pony for sale at Christmastime.)  

The spring-mounted horse was still in fashion in the 1950s and 1960s, when a generation of kids enjoyed riding Wonder Horses and similar toys.  You could buy them through mail-order department store and automotive store catalogs, as shown in the photo at the top of this post, or by visiting the store in person.

Show of hands: how many readers had a Wonder Horse or other similar riding toy?  No helmet, no seat belt, no elbow or knee pads.  And all the adventure we could imagine.  That's because during that era, the cowboy and his horse were our heroes.

Toys related to cowboys and their horses were ubiquitous back then.  There was a lot of creative advertising promoting rideable toy horses, too.  

It should not be lost on us that not only is this toy "just like the Lone Ranger's Silver" (that's what the ad says!)-- it also holds the weight of a person up to 175 pounds.  

Guilty, guilty, guilty, Mom and Dad.  

Of course, not everyone's parents could afford a bouncy horse for Christmas, or had the skills to craft one out of wood.  For us, there were other options. 

Why didn't the lumber store advertise this utilitarian object as a sawhorse, an essential tool of the construction trade?

Maybe the owner of the lumber store that ran that ad, just before Christmas 1959, knew that the most important part of getting a rideable horse toy for Christmas wasn't just the nature of the horse.  Our enjoyment was as big as our imaginations. 

Model Horse History's Computer Connection: Ada Lovelace

December 10 is the anniversary of the birth of Englishwoman Ada King, better known as Ada Lovelace. Most people who honor Ada Lovelace remember her as a forerunner in modern computer science.

Ada Lovelace

But when I think about Ada Lovelace, I remember the Hagen-Renaker "Ferseyn" Arabian stallion, designed by Maureen Love.

Hagen-Renaker "Ferseyn," next to a photo of the real stallion.

Yes, there is a connection between this "first lady of modern computing" as she has been called, and one of my favorite model horse designs.

Ada King, an Englishwoman born in 1815, is widely acknowledged as being responsible for helping to develop the earliest prototype of a computer. She was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, the renowned poet.

You can read more about Ada's life here:

https://findingada.com/shop/a-passion-for-science-stories-of-discovery-and-invention/ada-lovelace-victorian-computing-visionary/

When Ada's husband William was made Earl of Lovelace, she became Countess Lovelace. William and Ada had a daughter named Anne.

Lady Anne Blunt

Anne married a writer named Wilfrid Blunt. You can read more about them here:

https://www.crabbet-heritage.com/lady-anne-by-liz-archer

Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt traveled in the Middle East in the late 1870s-1880s and brought Arabian horses back to England, establishing the Crabbet Stud.

Lady Wentworth and Skowronek

Their daughter Judith, also known as Lady Wentworth, sold a number of the descendants of her parents' Arabians to breeders all over the world, including one W.K. Kellogg. The American cereal magnate had established his own Arabian horse ranch in Pomona, California.

Mares and foals at the Kellogg Ranch

Two of the horses Kellogg bought from Lady Wentworth were the gray stallion *Raseyn (gr. 1923, Skowronek x Rayya) and the bay mare *Ferda (b. 1913, Rustem x Feluka).

*Raseyn with artist Gladys Brown
(later Gladys Brown Edwards), holding her portrait of him

*Ferda

And *Raseyn and *Ferda were the parents of Ferseyn.

The real Ferseyn (photo courtesy Western Livestock Journal)

In the mid-1950s, Maureen Love, working as a designer for the California pottery Hagen-Renaker, sketched Ferseyn and created the mold that became the ceramic Arabian stallion that so resembles the real horse. Maureen was introduced to Ferseyn through Gladys Brown Edwards, the artist and author whose name is most often associated with the Kellogg Ranch and the Kellogg Arabians. Gladys worked at the Kellogg Ranch as a secretary for many years. Her correspondence shows that she not only designed dogs for Hagen-Renaker, but that she also introduced Maureen Love to the Arabians owned by former Kellogg Ranch manager Herbert H. Reese, including Ferseyn and another Kellogg stallion, Abu Farwa.

"Ferseyn" was first issued by Hagen-Renaker in 1958.

In 1971, Breyer leased the mold and produced the Classic Arab Stallion.

Breyer Classic Arabian Stallion, chestnut

Breyer CAS in gray, next to the slightly larger Hagen-Renaker "Ferseyn"

The real stallion Ferseyn was also the inspiration for at least two other Hagen-Renaker molds: the "Abdullah" Arabian stallion, first issued in 1956...

Large (1956) and small (1968) "Abdullah" Arabians, courtesy Hagen-Renaker Online Museum

And the "Bedouin" Arabian horse with rider, first issued Fall 1956.

Courtesy Hagen-Renaker Online Museum

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Gladys Brown Edwards' letter about Hagen-Renaker and Maureen Love is part of the collection at the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library. W.K. Kellogg and GBE's correspondence with Lady Wentworth are on file there as well.

https://www.cpp.edu/~library/kellogg-arabian-horse-library/index.shtml

You can find out more about the Crabbet Arabians and their legacy here:

https://www.crabbet-heritage.com/

Shout Out to the Braymere Custom Saddlery Blog!

Our fellow model horse enthusiast Jennifer, who writes Braymere Custom Saddlery's most excellent blog, just featured a slightly updated version of my article on  pre-1960 model horse collectors in the news.  It's fun to be a guest blogger from time to time.

Check it out!

https://braymere.blogspot.com/

Heavy Metal Horse: 1947 Abbotwares Western Horse Radio

I don't collect metal horse figurines. So many of them are so cool, but my shelf space is limited and they don't always mix well with the fragile ceramic horses because of the sheer weight of the metal!  One good "seismic event" and there goes the herd....

But last week at an antique mall I spotted a large, multitasking metal horse at an antique mall that I thought would look nice if displayed away from the other, more fragile model horses. So, after haggling about the price a bit, I brought it home.

My new equine collectible is an Abbotwares Western horse radio.  Abbotwares was a Los Angeles-based firm that produced and marketed decorative metal radios in the years just after World War II.  The company made several variations on this theme of horse-in-Western-tack, as well as versions showing two racing Thoroughbreds with jockeys, a rearing horse with a cowboy, a hula girl, and Lady Godiva on top of the tube radio base.

Ad for Abbotwares horse radios, Fort Worth, Texas Star-Telegram, 

7 March 1948. They were not cheap!

It is huge, and it weighs close to 10 pounds. I photographed it next to the iconic Breyer Family Arab Stallion to show the scale.

The saddle on my Western horse radio is separate from the body of the animal.  (Other versions of the Western horse radio have a horse with molded-on saddle.) The original reins were lost, so a previous owner substituted an old costume jewelry necklace (minus the clasp).  The radio is true to its pre-transistor day, with vacuum tubes and other post-war elements.

I plugged it in cautiously, and was pleased to find that the radio does seem to work (once the tubes have warmed up), but not too well. Expert help has been summoned, and I know that someday soon the Western horse radio will be functional as well as decorative. (Although there's nothing wrong with being merely decorative.)  

The online archive of Billboard magazine shows an ad on page 77 for Abbotwares radios in the November 15, 1947 issue -- just in time for Christmas in that year. The Western horses seem to be somewhat smaller than the example I found.

https://books.google.com/books?id=fiAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA4&source=gbs_toc&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

As you scroll through the pages, you'll see that the Western horse radio was being marketed in the same publication as other items that combined technology with decoration: juke boxes, gumball machines, coin-operated radios, slot machines, pinball machines...all signs of the times.

And maybe if I'm very lucky, when I turn the dial on the old Western horse radio, I'll find a station that plays music from that era...maybe even a song sung by Gene Autry.

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For more information on metal horse figurines, I recommend books by Carolyn Martin:

http://www.metalhorsefigurines.com/

"Family of Champions" by George Ford Morris

(A version of this post originally appeared in 2014 in my other blog, The Estate Sale Chronicles.)

We've talked before about the importance of equine art in the life and research of model horse collectors.

I found a somewhat hidden treasure at an estate sale back in 2014.  In a bedroom closet, in a box, underneath a bunch of mass-produced prints "suitable for framing" (that no one ever bothered to frame), was an old matted picture of three horses: a stallion, a mare, and a foal. They were extremely well-drawn.

Even though I'd  never seen this particular work before, the name of the artist popped into my head almost before I could think:

George Ford Morris.

And indeed the picture was signed, in pencil, on the lower right, next to the colt.

The picture is a lithograph called "Family of Champions" by American artist George Ford Morris (1873-1960).  Morris has been described as the foremost American equestrian artist of his time.  He was mostly self-taught; his original art today commands serious prices.  One blogger notes:  

In his day there was no finer American equestrian artist than George Ford Morris. By painting horses, riders and their owners, Morris captured on canvas the ever-changing world of "Town and Country" Americana.

Even though many breeds were represented in his work, George Ford Morris is perhaps most associated with the American Saddlebred horse.  And this picture of the "Family of Champions" is an early 20th century equine equivalent of an official court portrait of William, Kate and baby George.

The stallion in the lithograph was the famous show horse and sire Bourbon King, a chestnut American Saddlebred stallion foaled in 1900.

Here's a photograph of the real-life Bourbon King.

The gray mare was Princess Eugenia, foaled in 1909.

Here she is, in real life.

George Ford Morris took this headstudy of Princess Eugenia.

And the chestnut colt was King's Genius, foaled in 1924.

King's Genius grew up to be quite a handsome fellow, a champion show horse and sire of champions.

Before I found this lithograph at the estate sale, I'd never seen any of George Ford Morris' work in person, although I have spent many hours looking at reproductions of his art in books.  You can click on some of the links below to see other works by this talented 20th century artist.

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Here's a blog page with some of GFM's art:

http://upon-a-white-horse.blogspot.com/2012/10/george-ford-morris.html

Here's a link to an art gallery website with a short biography of George Ford Morris:

http://www.crossgategallery.com/artist/georgefordmorris.html

Ed and Sheri Alcorn have a wonderful website with pictures of many pieces of art they own by George Ford Morris.  It's also a very useful resource for information on ceramic animals produced by Hagen-Renaker, Inc.

http://hagenrenakerhorses.com/GeorgeFordMorrisHorses.html

Here's an article on the history of the American Saddebred:  http://www.asha.net/Breed-History