BRISK DEMAND

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 September 1942, Page 4

BRISK DEMAND

FOR HORSES AND PONIES IN BRITAIN STREET TRANSPORT AND WORK ON LAND. BUSY TIME FOR DEALERS. (By Melita Spraggs in the “Christian Science Monitor.”)) LONDON, July 1. Discontinuance of the gasoline ration for private motor-cars, effective today, means brisk business for the horse dealers throughout Britain recently. Down at the Elephant and Cast.e rooms, one of London’s largest horse repositories, June has been a busy monu . There, Auctioneer Alfred Harris sports a morning coat and one of the lew black silk top hats seen in London these days. From the tub that forms his rostrum, his hammer knocks down horses, ponies and traps at double war prices. Some sale-days nearly 200 horses and ponies change hands. A typical sale would be: To: 1 dapple-grey pony, 15 hands, ago about 14 years, 25 guineas; 1 dog-cart. 20 guineas; 1 set of harness, 10 guineas. Cart-horses have been in steady demand, fetching as much as one hundred guineas. Sellers are mostly coal merchants and contractors, and purchasers are farmers and private owners. Farmers are buying up London horses for work on the land to replace petrol-driven tractors. The horses work well on soft brown soil after having been used to hard city streets.

MANY WOMEN BUYERS.

Women have been prominent among the buyers recently. Since cars have been laid up “for the duration” they have been securing ponies to pull traps and old-fashioned gigs to take husbands to the station and children to school They have shown a preference lor coster-ponies because they are easy ro handle .These are the quick-stepping, stalwart little creatures used by small traders in the East End. They were familiar sights on London streets as they trotted along, harness jingling, pullingsmall carts. Some of these turn-outs, carrying scarlet geraniums and oincr flowers to market, presented a colourful picture ,while others bore more prosaic burdens such as furniture and old junk. Costers take a lot of trouble about schooling their ponies, and the animals not only have perfect manners, but, like most Cockneys, show much keen “horse sense” and sang froid in an emergency. Even the sudden appearance of a tank or a convoy of army trucks in a lane, it is found, fails to upset them.

These ponies from the city are being bought up by provincial people at such a rate that there is expected soon to be a dearth of them on London streets. The supply can hardly keep pace with demand, in suite of continual search for them in likely districts. Before the war the value of these ponies was approximately £25 a piece; now it is 50 guineas.

BUILDERS BUSY.

Coach-builders are busy people these days. Goperness carts and dogcarts that before the war were sold for a few shillings, are worth as many pounds today. Old traps lying about in sheds and stables are being repaired by the coachbuilder and put on the roads again;

Old harness is also being patched up and polished, as there are not enough saddlers in the country to make large supplies of new leather equipment.

Hundreds of blacksmiths have gone out of busines during the auto boom A the last twenty years, and some difficulty may arise over shoeing of horses. The old order changes, even in regard to that usually conservative gentleman, the village blacksmith. Whereas he used always to be “at home” with a roaring fire and a clanging anvil to welcome Dobbin and the children at the old forge door, in these days his smithy sometimes becomes mobile. Mr Arthur Agg, for instance, in the village of Oxendon, Gloucestershire, goes round in a small car to do shoeing of horses and other odd jobs. He covers a large, scattered rural area, shoeing animals, repairing farm implements, in addition to doing plumbing, carpentry and chimney sweeping.

COUNTRY FAIRS.

No less successful than the London horse repositories are the provincial horse fairs held throughout Great Britain. The oldest is the 600-year-o'd Charter Horse Fair held in the streets of the lovely Cotswold town of Stow-in-the-Wold. This Fair, which attracts buyers from all parts of England, was granted a Charter by King Edward 111. in the 14th century, and is recorded to have been held every year since that time.

Horses have been mobilised into the war effort in many ways. Two of them recently were reined in to promote the National War Savings campaign. They pulled a stage coach through London from Pimlico to Haymarket, with representations of Uncle Sam and John Bull on the box. On behalf of a London firm, an air raid warden passenger deposited in a Haymarket bank hundreds of pounds for war savings. Mules, too, are doing their bit. “Dolly” and “Dumbell,” for instance, two mules from Bertram Mills Circus, are pulling the plough on a farm at Chalfont St. Giles. They have been lent to the farmer “for the duration,” and are said to be working as well on the soil down on the farm as they did on the sawdust in the old circus days.