A future Queen petted a little pony, and her passion for horses took off
In a new book to mark the Queen Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne, Sir Michael Morpurgo reveals the origins of her lifelong love.
It was during a lunch at Buckingham Palace that the children’s author Sir Michael Morpurgo sat next to the Queen and they talked - and talked - about horses.
Her lifelong passion for them, she explained, began as a child when she stroked the neck of a pony, which felt like “warm velvet”.
The Queen’s words feature in a new book by the former children’s laureate, There Once is a Queen. Published next month, it has inspired parts of the Platinum Jubilee pageant, the climax to four days of celebrations in June marking her milestone 70 years on the throne.
During their lunch in 2016, Morpurgo asked the Queen what had sparked her love for horses. He said: “She mentioned that she’d been riding ponies for some time and then her daddy had given her for a birthday … a horse. She told me how it was to walk down to the yard and there was this horse and she would reach up and touch the neck.”
In his book, Morpurgo writes: “Whenever she went to saddle her horse to go for a ride, she would reach up and lay her hand on his neck, which felt to her like warm velvet.” It is thought the Queen may have been referring to her first Shetland pony, Peggy, a fourth birthday gift from her grandfather, George V. She learned to ride in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace when she was three, and was able to ride alone by the age of six.
Morpurgo, 78, said: “Those were the words she used. She talked very, very movingly about her love for this horse. This was a life-changing moment. From that moment on, horses were going to be part of her life.”
He said that much of their “very relaxed and easy conversation . . . was about horses and Joey [the star of Morpurgo’s book War Horse]. She said she liked War Horse. Apparently it touched her hugely, she really loved the play, and particularly she loved the puppet of Joey. I just feel that when she was with horses, all her troubles fall away.”
Morpurgo described how behind closed doors, a less formal Queen was transformed: “There was a certain moment when I was looking at her and she ceased to be the Queen. I very luckily got to know her briefly, as she stepped out of the fairy tale and became a granny.
“Finding out there is a real person there, who wants to talk . . . that behind all this, there is a rather wonderful granny trying to get out and find a little bit of connection with people [was] a revelation,” he added.
The Queen invited Morpurgo to lunch after reading War Horse, which tells the story of the bond between a boy, Albert, and his horse, Joey, during the First World War. In 2009, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh slipped into the National Theatre to watch the stage adaptation featuring horse puppets. The puppet of Joey, manoeuvred by three actors, was later presented to her during a private visit to Windsor Castle.
In 2012, during the Diamond Jubilee river pageant, the puppet appeared on the roof of the National Theatre, rearing up in salute as the royal barge sailed past, to the monarch’s visible delight.
Morpurgo has met the Queen several times, but their lunch encounter inspired much of his new book, which is illustrated by Michael Foreman. It includes the recurring motif of an oak tree, which in the story is the Queen’s “thinking tree”. She often sits beneath its branches “to work out what her life was for”.
The oak forms a key part of the Platinum Jubilee pageant on June 5, which will be staged in four acts - For Queen and Country, The Time of Our Lives, Let’s Celebrate, and Happy and Glorious - paying tribute to the monarch and telling the story of her life and reign through carnival-style performance.
The 2 and a half-hour, £15 million ($27 million) spectacle through the streets of central London, from Parliament Square to Buckingham Palace, will feature 10,000 performers and will culminate in the royal family appearing on the palace balcony. It will be broadcast live by the BBC and is being overseen by Adrian Evans, who directed the Thames river pageant in 2012.
Evans said: “It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to celebrate this momentous time and say thank-you to the monarch, with people celebrating in their own idiosyncratic ways.”
The first act, For Queen and Country, will feature 1700 marching and mounted troops, veterans and military bands from the UK and Commonwealth, with 200 horses from the Household Cavalry and the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery.
The Time of Our Lives will tell the story of the Queen’s 70-year reign, charting changes in culture, fashion, music and design. A 007 theme will feature James Bond’s cars and love interests, and a “wave of nostalgia” will include the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle from the 1980s and double-decker buses decorated with images associated with the Queen’s reign and carrying celebrities from each decade.
Soft-top Land Rovers will also put in an appearance, alongside Daleks from Doctor Who, jive, lindy-hop and swing dancers, people doing the Lambeth walk and performers on space hoppers and pogo sticks. Evans said: “I hope the Queen looks at the decades piece and there are smiles of recognition, like flicking through the family album.”
Let’s Celebrate will feature more than 2500 performers acting 12 “chapters” of the Queen’s life, with nods to her love of horses and Corgis, and depictions of key moments and achievements from her reign, including the coronation, previous jubilees and the Commonwealth.
It will also feature a giant model replica of Morpurgo’s oak tree on a float, representing Britishness and stability, with maypole dancers performing from ribbons that form a picture of the Queen when pulled together. “It should be an extraordinary image,” said Evans, who revealed there would also be a tribute to Prince Philip. “I think we’ve got him in a beautiful way.”
Details of the fourth act, Happy and Glorious, remain a secret, but it will feature thousands of performers, including choirs and stunts on stages in front of Buckingham Palace. About 25,000 members of the public will move down the Mall to see the Queen and a core group of the royal family emerge on to the balcony for the finale: groups of singers leading the crowds in the national anthem.
Morpugo deliberately omitted from his book any mention of royal family dramas, fearing it would be a distraction.
“I felt very strongly that this is all about her and if I peopled it with the difficulty of family, you’d tie yourself up in knots,” he said. “I hope she’s read it. I haven’t yet been sent to the Tower. I hope she’ll take it to bed the night of the jubilee. She’ll be exhausted. It can be her bedtime story.”
The Times
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