It shouldn’t happen to a Horse & Hound reporter…
It would be hard to make up the tales of mishap and misfortune that the H&H reporters have encountered on their quest for a story, says Jennifer Donald
“THIS wasn’t in the job description.” Many a time has a Horse & Hound writer muttered those words; because behind every tale of sporting triumph on the pages of this magazine, there’s at least one intrepid reporter who may not be having the time of their life. Don’t get us wrong, we count ourselves unbelievably fortunate to call this our job, but when there are unpredictable horses, hit-and-miss technology and ankle-deep mud to contend with, life as a Horse & Hound journalist doesn’t always go to plan…
The prospect of sending a blank magazine to press is every editor’s worst nightmare, but one that Lucy Higginson faced during her 12-year reign at H&H.
“Back in the day, our photographer Trevor Meeks had all his film stolen after crosscountry day at Badminton,” she recalls. “My blood literally ran cold when he told me, and of course the used film was of no value at all to a thief. I even asked at the Beaufort Hunt supporters’ tent if any of their members had found an abandoned bag of film on their land!
“The only answer was to descend on the photographers’ desks in the press tent the next day and negotiate with two trusted freelancers to buy a batch of their images.”
Remembering to press record when interviewing riders is another basic skill to master, and finding a blank, or inaudible, file is another reason to bring any writer out in a cold sweat.
“After Paul Tapner won Badminton in 2010, he did a really good interview but there was nothing on the tape. Ouch,” says H&H writer Catherine Austen. “We had to do it all again — he was very nice about it, but I felt a bloody idiot…”
Even the trusty pen and paper method can’t always be relied on, as showjumping reporter Penny Richardson found out.
“At Horse of the Year Show [HOYS] when it was at Wembley, I was in the old Foxhunter bar by the collecting ring — not drinking, just coffee — and had all my notes in my programme,” she says. “I put it down for a moment, turned round and it had gone and so had the notes. It was the final day and I had the entire HOYS report to write that evening. I had to run round re-interviewing everyone.”
WHETHER you’re trying to distinguish between Michael and John Whitaker, or you’re in hot pursuit of a blonde ponytail in the hope it’s Zara Tindall, sometimes your prospective interviewee isn’t immediately recognisable.
H&H’s current magazine editor, Pippa Roome, was trying to find a last-minute showjumping columnist at the World Equestrian Games (WEG) in 2010.
“At the end of two long weeks, I was pretty desperate and exhausted,” she says. “I knew Dermott Lennon had been world champion so had ridden in the final four horse-swap, so could talk about that.
“I Google imaged him to see what he looked like, then scoured the stands until I found him. I asked, ‘Are you Dermott Lennon?’ The bloke next to him laughed. Dermott gave me an odd look and pointed to his hat. It said ‘Dermott’ across the front.”
OUR assignments for H&H do take us to some breathtaking locations with opportunities to try many new challenges. But features editor Madeleine Silver recalls one particular visit to the Wiltshire yard of natural horsemanship guru Gary Witheford.
“He made Rachael Turner [H&H’s news writer] put on a rope halter and then made me use a lunge whip to encourage her into the trailer,” she says. “Whipping a colleague who was pretending to be a horse was not something I imagined I’d be doing when I signed up for this job…”
If every H&H employee had a pound for each time someone mentions the film Notting Hill, or asks if H&H actually exists, we’d all be cruising on our superyachts by now. But sub editor Martha Terry was sucked into a particularly surreal situation when “interviewing” the horses from War Horse.
“They seemed to think it was a genuine spoof à la Notting Hill and that I wasn’t a real reporter, and that H&H wasn’t a real magazine…” she says.
‘It took me a good hour to notice I had been legged up onto a different bay horse’
hunting editor catherine austen
H&H’s hunting editor Catherine Austen has reams of tales from out in the field, but one incident left her literally dazed and confused.
“I was bucked off at the first fence with the South Durham and knocked myself out,” she explains. “I was legged back onto a bay horse and kept going, concussed and with fractured vision — it took me a good hour to notice I was on a different bay horse.
“After hunting all day, I set off down the A1 to London and didn’t notice until I got to Newcastle that I had been going in the wrong direction…”
It’s not just horses we have to contend with — dogs, too, can be an occupational hazard.
“The first time I went to interview Michael Whitaker, the whole yard was deserted,” says Penny Richardson. “Then I heard lots of people shouting ‘Penny!’ I kept saying, ‘Hello’, but they continued shouting. Next minute, a Jack Russell appeared and attached itself to my jeans, so I had to walk dragging it along. It transpired that this was Penny and they weren’t shouting to me at all.”
Lucy Higginson says she’ll never forget one canine encounter at Badminton.
“I was doing one of my much-valued stints on the H&H tradestand with a name badge on my coat,” she says.
“One lady jumped forward when she saw my badge: ‘Lucy? You’re with the magazine?’ ‘Yes!’
I replied enthusiastically.
‘Well, I’m afraid a large
Doberman has just done a large poo right outside your stand and I expect someone will want to move it…’
“You can’t really pass on jobs like that, so armed with an H&H carrier bag, I removed the steaming turd myself... Although I did mutter,
‘I bet [former editor] Michael
Clayton never did this…’”
WHILE we travel the world in pursuit of equestrian sport, it’s safe to say geography isn’t every H&H reporter’s strong point.
Catherine Austen leapt on a bus in Aachen one year, thinking she was heading straight for the showground.
“After about 40 minutes I remember thinking that it was further away than I had expected — and found myself about to cross the Dutch border without a passport,” she says.
Freelance writer Ellie Hughes, as a rookie reporter, was very excited to be heading to Kentucky to cover the CCI4*.
“It was a big deal and I was keen to make a good impression,” she says. “Unfortunately, when booking with a wellknown economy hotel chain, I hadn’t appreciated that there are two Lexingtons in America — one in Kentucky (where
I was intending to go) and one in Virginia (where I was not intending to go, but accidentally booked).
“Not only did I arrive, tired from a long flight, at the hotel I thought I’d booked to find out there was no room for me, but I’d also organised for 500 magazines to be flown out to the hotel in the wrong state. Whoops.”
Former hunting editor Polly Portwin recalls one day visiting the East Essex Hunt when her husband Guy accompanied her, following in the car.
“We met in the grounds of a very smart house and although there wasn’t strictly any parking at the meet, the generous hosts allowed
Guy to park there before we moved off,” she says. “I thought nothing more of it until Guy called saying, ‘I need a tractor, now!’
“Somehow he had driven into a ‘wet patch’ on an otherwise perfectly dry and immaculate lawn and had pretty much buried the vehicle up to the axles. Despite the mess, the kind host volunteered to tow him out with his 4x4, which then also proceeded to get stuck. It took a third vehicle to clear them both. The aftermath was described to be ‘like a scene from the Battle of the Somme’.”
WELLIES, a robust coat and a sunhat are the staples of every H&H reporter’s wardrobe — we won’t let a sea of mud get in the way of a good story. Pippa Roome succumbed to the elements at a very, very wet Haras du Pin at WEG 2014.
“I fell over in the mud outside the press room and spent the day running about with a lot of mud on my backside,” she says.
Driving correspondent Sarah Radford admits to a “string of wardrobe malfunctions” while out on the front line.
“I ripped the crotch of my jeans at Royal Windsor and didn’t realise until I’d spent an entire day on the bank opposite the crowd
repeatedly squatting to take snaps...” she says.
And Sarah was once mid-interview when a wasp flew up her sleeve.
“It stung my armpit,” she says. “I was forced to strip in the lorry park to release the offending insect.”
Deputy chief sub editor Polly
Bryan, engrossed in videoing some lap of honour footage at
Royal Windsor, turned to pick up her bag to find it had vanished.
“After a bit of panicked enquiring, it turned out someone had reported an abandoned bag and it had been whisked away as a security risk,” says Polly. “Obviously the heavens opened at that exact moment and my umbrella and coat were in the bag. I had to sprint to the other side of the showground in the pouring rain to locate it before the next class started.”
WE are all paid to write for a living but, whether it’s an unfortunate typo or a clanger of a headline, sometimes a comedy of errors can slip through the net. One of our all-time favourites came from former H&H news editor Amy Mathieson when writing a web story about an amazing new piece of tack.
“Girth is scientifically proven to improve performance,” screamed the headline. Cue much sniggering in the H&H office.
Freelance writer Andrea Oakes saw coverline gold when she mistakenly heard a dressage winner revealing she was a full-time nun.
“Turns out she had two children,” she says. Writer Steph Bateman recalls her best typo coming from the British Carriage Driving Championships where Matt Were was recovering from a broken leg but had had the cast taken off early so he could compete.
“He told me he ‘felt every bump out on the marathon’ and writing it up overnight I missed off the ‘p’ and had him ‘feeling every bum out on the marathon’,” she says.
BEING dispatched to foreign soil can bring some unexpected hazards — a watertight insurance policy is essential paperwork for every globe-trotting journalist.
Our team covering the Olympics in Rio last year certainly didn’t expect to have a near-miss with a stray bullet in the press room. And in Atlanta in 1996, Kate Green and photographer Kit Houghton were fired at by a parking attendant with a gun.
“He was annoyed by Kit not waiting for him to operate the car park barrier,” says Kate, who actually remembers the day fondly. “We were thrilled because a shop assistant saw our accreditation labels and said: ‘Gee, are you two athletes?’ We’re still not sure what sport he had in mind.”
‘Armed with an H&H carrier bag, I removed
the steaming turd’
former editor Lucy higginson