• U.S.

Sport: Jumping Jubilee

5 minute read
TIME

In his skirted scarlet coat and beaver hat, the perennial herald of the National Horse Show, Ringmaster Dutch White, blew “Pop Goes the Weasel” with many a false squawk on his coaching horn and another Manhattan social season commenced last week. It was more than a New York occasion. Dutch White’s tootling this year opened a Golden Jubilee. Horses from Ireland, Canada, Sweden, Kansas and Czechoslovakia, riders from five nations (attracted also by last month’s Chicago Fair horse show—TIME, Nov. 6) were at Madison Square Garden to participate.

Though it was the National Horse Show Association’s 50th anniversary, it was only the 48th show. In 1890 when the old Madison Square Garden was being built and again in 1914 at the beginning of the War, no shows were held. Preceding, as it has survived, Stanford White’s tower, the first horse show was held in Gilmore’s Garden, a name applied to the old Harlem Railway Terminal as soon as the tracks were torn out. Dutch White was at that horse show too (he rode a Belmont mount then) and he has been at every horse show since. So has his assistant, lean, wrinkled Eddie Bauchard who trotted round the galleries in 1883 telling the gentlemen that smoking was forbidden. Nowadays he goes the circuit from Florida to Toronto, from horse show to horse show calling horses into the ring. Eddie Bauchard is as familiar to horsemen as Announcer Joe Humphries is to prizefighters. Impressive Reginald W. Rives, treasurer of the Association and amateur coachman, is another famed oldtimer. Treasurer Rives has spent much of his life looking and acting like a character in one of the sportin’ novels of Robert Smith Surtees.

The service of international horse shows toward improving the breed and supply of work horses is not nearly so great as its admirers insist. The only work horses showing at the National last week were the eight mountainous Clydesdales of Anheuser-Busch’s famed advertising team. Most numerous and most popular of modern show classes are the jumpers. Anyone who knows a martingale from a bridoon knows that show jumpers are seldom good mounts for the hunting field, that not one steeplechaser in 100 is fit to enter a show ring. Steeplechasers are notoriously slovenly jumpers. Show horses spend too much time popping neatly up and down over fences to have either the speed or the stamina for a long day in the field.

Some 40,000 people attended the show before the week was over. They saw the mink coats and top hats of the box-holders. (The evening sessions of the Horse Show and intermission at the Opera are two occasions when by venerable tradition a New Yorker’s topper remains glued to his head.) Few spectators passed the wooden gates at the end of the arena or went down the chute to the heart of the show, the long underground stable where 300 of the most expensive horses in the U. S. were stabled. Here was quiet confusion: row upon row of high whitewashed boxes, horses in the aisles being saddled, unsaddled, sponged, strapped, blanketed. Huntsmen in pink, officers in bright uniforms arguing with sweat-shirted trainers. A girl in a grey bowler anxiously powdering her nose while a colored boy made ribboned garlands of the mane of a five-gaited Kentucky mare. Vets bandaging a swollen hock. But no noise. Show horses are nervous as witches. Here and there in the line of stalls, an owner had taken an extra box and turned it into a little tent with walls of bright felt to display his tack, his trophies, to entertain his friends. Here they sat ’round little tables sipping cocktails in the warm, ammoniated atmosphere.

Three famed horses were missed at last week’s Jubilee. Seaton Pippin, greatest hackney mare in the U. S., was retired by her owner, Mrs. Paul Moore of New Jersey, after a record string of blue ribbons. Illness broke up the famed grey hunt team of Mrs. John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney. Eagerly awaited, discreetly advertised was a battle between the Whitney greys and the hunt team of Mrs. Bernard F. Gimbel and her daughters Caral and Hope for the Haskell Cup. Shunted east from the Chicago horse show, two of the Whitney greys came down with pneumonia on the train. Last week they lay shivering in the Whitney stable, wrapped in blankets and dosed with hot whiskey. The Gimbels won the cup.

What most people came to see was the military jumping of the international teams. Five nations were represented: the U. S. (two teams), Canada, Sweden, Irish Free State, Czechoslovakia. Plunging around the course, knocking over obstacles with gusto worthy of a better cause, the four red-legged Czechs were deplorable. Coming steadily to the front after three days of hard riding was the Irish team of Captains Dan Corry, Fred Aherne, Cyril Harty. For the last event for the International Jumping Championship they needed a fourth man. Down among the stalls was a smart little groom, Private William Finlay of Ballanamore, County Cavan. He buckled on his shoulder cartridge belt and rode with the Captains, the first horse show he had ever ridden in in his life. Private Finlay lost his cap at the second jump but the Irish team won. While the band played “The Soldier’s Song” it was Private Finlay who rode out of the ring with the cup in his hand.

“It was the proudest moment of me loife when they handed me that mug,” said he. “There’s no sport in the wurrld like ridin’ horses.”

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