Banbury Cross

THE impressive thing about Banbury — he was seldom called by his full name except in horse-show programmes — was that, like certain well-known baseball pitchers, he was an iron man. Richard Sheahan brought him over from Ireland in ’22 or ’23, and, at the first sight of him, you knew you had to buy him.

He was an Irish cob, gray, almost white, standing fifteen-two or thereabouts, with a bright brown eye, a wide forehead backed up with brains, and hindquarters to jump over a house. He was close-coupled and strong, a great deal of horse for his cubic content. And there was something endearing about this brave little creature, half pony, half horse, which made everyone on the place regard him with a peculiar affection. Every groom’s face would break out in a smile when I asked, ‘How’s Banbury to-day? He hit that wall in Shirley terribly hard.’ ‘Oh, sure, he’s as fine as can be. It was the stones in the wall that got hurt.’

He was ridden, almost exclusively, by my huntsman, Fred Armstrong, and for long years it was a race for Martha Doyle to keep ahead of the pair of them, Fred pretending to pull and haul and swear at the little horse, and Banbury going all out like a gray locomotive. Sometimes I was annoyed and said, ‘Fred, I’m hunting the hounds and you’re whipping in. I don’t want you to get in front of me.’ He would say, ‘It’s that Banbury; he pulls till it’d break your back.’ ‘All right,’ I would answer, ‘there’s a nice one-eyed mare in the stable, and Gayley, who goes very well except when she goes sideways. You can ride either of them next Wednesday and rest your back.’ ‘Oh no, sir, I’ll put a curb on Banbury; I’d rather ride him.’

Banbury loved hounds and was never really happy unless he was with them. He was an excellent hunter, but the sloppiest jumper, the most incorrigibly knock-’em-down horse at any obstacle, I have ever known. Always he kept his feet and went on happily, no matter what appalling wall or unbreakable post and rail he had demolished. He had iron legs. Sometimes we would go back over the ground and gaze with awe at the great boulders which Banbury had squandered with his knees. And never a mark on them, never a day when he was sick or sorry.

This was an interesting phenomenon, which defied all the maxims in the book, but it was a habit which did not make for a confident ride and it did pile up a lot of damages and complaints from farmers. Whenever — no that’s not fair — but often, when Banbury crossed a pasture, the cattle seemed to know that the way would be cleared to greener meadows, and we would come back to find them standing, like Ruth, ‘amid the alien corn.’ I don’t want to give the wrong impression — Banbury could and did jump beautifully again and again. It was only when he was bored or when he yielded to a spirit of mischief that he became really destructive. He was essentially a humorist with iron legs, but most of the time he kept his exuberance under control.

Of course we tried all the tricks, collected schooling over low jumps, gradually raised, throwing a rail at his front legs as he rose — everything we knew. Bless you, what did a rail more or less matter to Banbury Cross? He must have chuckled to himself as he watched our absurd efforts to educate him.

So at last the better minds of the household and stable and kennels went into a huddle and evolved a hellish plot which would teach Banbury the salutary lesson that he must, he MUST pick up those forelegs. Down below the kennels we constructed an innocent-looking brush jump about four feet four in height. At the very top, cunningly concealed behind sprigs of pine and fir, was a large telegraph pole, securely fastened at both ends, immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar. A suicidal young man in the stable volunteered to ride Banbury for a fall, and on the appointed day we all gathered at some distance from the jump to await developments.

Now Banbury was not afraid of any obstacle in the world; in fact I think it was largely to show his contempt for barriers that he knocked them all down. I would say that he rated a brush jump as beneath his contempt; a sheep hurdle was made of matchsticks for him; a stout post and rails was a challenge; stone walls he simply pushed over with a science all his own. He respected big ‘chicken coops,’ though on several occasions he turned them over, thus effectually blocking the way to any followers. So, when he saw himself confronted with one of those really laughable brush jumps, a gleam came in his eye, he pawed the ground, and shouted ‘Ha, ha!’ among the captains.

The suicide put him at it, and Banbury, ears forward as if he were the most careful horse in the world, cantered at the jump and as usual tried to brush through the top two feet of it. The suicide shook loose from his stirrups and, with his hands on the horse’s neck, flung himself cleverly to one side and landed on his feet, quite unhurt. Not so Banbury. As he breasted the telegraph pole, an expression of astonishment was clearly discernible on his face. Then in a slow, majestic arc, as though tied by the forelegs to the jump, he turned a complete somersault, landing flat on his back.

He lay there for a while, feebly kicking, then scrambled to his feet, shaking his head as though he were saying, ‘There is something wrong, something very wrong, with this picture.’ He wandered around, going nowhere, still shaking his head and wondering what had hit him. Suddenly my wife whistled to him and called out, ‘Come here, Banbury!’ He looked up, saw her, trotted over to her, and put his head on her shoulder, seeking comfort in his bewilderment.

We had been laughing uproariously at the whole performance, but when we saw poor Banbury, like a hurt child, go to those understanding arms, and saw my wife pet him and brush the earth and leaves from his face and ears, none of us wanted to laugh any more. I heard a groom behind me say, in a hushed voice, ‘’E’s like a ’uman being, ’e is!’

For quite a while this lesson tempered the destructive tendencies of the little horse, and, whenever he forgot to remember, he would be taken down and merely shown the brush cum telegraph pole jump below the kennels. Then he would wheel and gallop as fast as he could go to the stable and clamor to get into his familiar box with its rustling straw. For the next week or two he would clear everything by a foot or more.

One other incident will illustrate the spirit and — to me — the charm of the horse whom everybody loved. It seemed a waste of energy that so strong and willing an animal should do no useful work during the summer. So he was broken, quite easily, to harness and taught to pull a rake during the haying season. I think he enjoyed it thoroughly. The rattle of the rake behind him was music in his ears. He marched proudly, turned sharply, and stopped short when told to. It was like a little boy playing at being a soldier.

The old country road to Shirley comes past our foxhound kennels and after a while reaches the stable paddock and the stable, then swings to the right past apple orchards, and so on. For some reason, on this summer morning, Banbury’s work had been temporarily halted, and, still harnessed to his hayrake, he was tied to an apple tree, behind the stable and away from the paddock. Fred Armstrong, as it happened, was walking the hounds along the Shirley road for morning exercise. In his white kennel coat he strode along, whistling that little birdlike call so characteristic of him and calling from time to time, ‘Come along, Coop! Come along, Coop! Gently, Challenger! Have a care, there, Chorister.’ His littlest son, Jackie, no bigger than a pint of milk, whipped in from the rear, rating on the laggards and cracking a portentous whip. It was an idyllic summer scene.

But Banbury heard the whistle and the voice and perhaps the rustle of hounds passing on the soft road. At any rate, he lifted his head and whinnied. Then, deciding that he would do no more servile labor on that day, he broke his halter and, with the rake behind him, took the shortest road to his beloved hounds. This involved jumping into the paddock and out again into the road. At the point which he chose for the ‘in,’the paddock fence was at least six feet high. Nothing daunted, Banbury took off, hayrake and all, crashed the two upper rails, and, as his harness parted with pistol-shot noises and the hayrake subsided with a death rattle, picked himself off the ground, smiling broadly, crossed the paddock, and jumped through a five-foot fence into the Shirley road. In an instant he was with hounds, sniffing at Trinket, snuffling at Warrior, playfully kicking — very slowly — at old Rambler, and ignoring the young entry as beneath his notice. He trotted carefully through the pack till he caught up with Fred, and then walked along beside him in his rightful place, proud as a peacock and snorting with glee.

He could, on occasion, when his virtuosity as a destroyer was not in question, perform extraordinary feats. Once I laid out a horse-show ring surrounded, until the rail could be built, by one strand of stout manila rope about four feet high. The jumps were to be more or less permanent, and I wanted to be sure that they were properly spaced, so I asked one of the grooms, named Malcolm, to bring a horse down and try them out. He arrived, to my astonishment, mounted on Banbury Cross. ‘Farewell rewards and fences!’ I said to myself. I explained to him that he was to take the brush jump first, then the stone wall with the rider, next a post and rails, followed by a white gate. Then he was expected to turn down the middle of the ring for an in-and-out of post and rails and repeat the process.

Malcolm nodded and trotted to the end of the ring. As always, Banbury went at his jump like Heatherbloom or Great Heart, but when he hit the brush jump there was a positive explosion of evergreens. As the cloud of pine, spruce, and fir slowly settled, you expected to see an army of bare-legged Scots appear carrying Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. My heart bled for the stone wall — so carefully and painfully constructed. When Banbury had finished his work, it looked like a village in the war zone after three years’ intensive bombardment. The post-and-rails jump was not solid, so it merely disintegrated without great damage, but Banbury smote the gate, hip and thigh, and highly expensive carpenters were later called in to construct a new one.

Having destroyed four jumps, Banbury decided to go home and, taking a firm hold, began to run for the corner of the ring. (If I seem to square a circle too flippantly, it is because I don’t know the proper geometrical expression for this contradiction in terms.) As I said above, there was one strand of rope, four feet high, pinch-hitting for the rail around the ring. As they passed me, I murmured, ‘Good-bye, Malcolm. You were a good boy.’ Not at all. Banbury cleared that almost invisible death trap with a foot to spare and disappeared into the woods beyond. When Malcolm brought him back some time later, the rider was pale and shaken, but Banbury was quivering with happiness. I doubt if he had ever had more fun in his life.

‘That was fine, Malcolm,’ I said. ‘You proved to me that the intervals between jumps were exactly right. But I think in the show we ought to have a special event—“Rope Skipping for Hunters” — or something like that. You can ride Banbury Cross and Fred can ride the blind mare and — ’

‘Excuse me, sir!’ said Malcolm. ‘My grandmother is very ill and I promised I’d go down to Medford to see her the day of the show.’

Nowadays our stable is full up with some twenty horses; most of them are good, some of them are better than others, and a few are relics whom we cannot bear to destroy. They whinny when they hear us coming, bearing sugar; they paw in their stalls and glare ferociously. They caper and prance in the paddocks; and they and we know that they are touched in the wind or bowed, in some way incurably afflicted. But among them all there is, to me, not one horse of the color and character and quality of Waynefleet or Martha Doyle or Banbury Cross. ‘All, all are gone, the old familiar faces’ — but I cannot and never could forget them. And of them all no image shines more brightly in my memory than that of the little graywhite horse with the iron legs and the sense of humor.