Remembering Monty Roberts – when he started The late Queen’s horses at the Royal Mews in Windsor
A feature from the Horse & Hound archives, first published in 1989
Following the news that outstanding horseman Monty Roberts has passed away, aged 91, we dip into the archives to revisit one of his appearances in Horse & Hound. We travel back to May 1989, when Monty demonstrated his methods at the Royal Mews at Windsor Castle with one of The late Queen’s horses. H&H editor Michael Clayton finds Monty “quietly impressive”.
Michael Clayton was Horse & Hound’s third editor, a BBC war correspondent and author of many books. He died in 2022.
Monty Roberts’ “advance and retreat” method uses the horse’s natural curiosity and its need for support and friendship when suddenly left alone in a training pen. He prefers a pen at home with solid sides to aid the horse’s concentration, but succeeded in this country with a lattice work frame with an audience all round at ground level, although this clearly distracted some horses a little.
I attended the Royal Mews at Windsor Castle on a stormy, blustery morning. The Queen had made the magnificent indoor riding school available and she attended this demonstration, having provided several young horses of her own for “starting”. They had just been brought up from grass at Hampton Court paddocks.
Monty says he aims to compress three weeks of “conventional methods” into 30 minutes. An audience including some distinguished and very knowledgeable horsemen waits for it to happen.
My diary of his first demonstration was as follows:
11.38am. Marmaduke, a 16.2hh hunter or eventer type, three years old in June, starts his training. The horse, which has a skewbald head and white body, has a distinctly worried, suspicious look in his eye and patrols the pen nervously, wearing only a webbing headcollar.
Monty Roberts “advances” on the horse: shoos him away and then flaps some webbing long reins to encourage the horse to lunge loose round the pen.
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The horse then stands quietly, perhaps a little tired. Monty puts a hand on its head, strokes its muzzle, and speaks quietly to it. He takes care always not to look it in the eye. He sniffs a little at its nostrils.
Shades of the late Mrs Woodhouse, I thought! But Monty explains later that breathing into the nose does not work with all horses and it is only a minor method of being friendly. It is not a system in itself.
Then Monty walks quietly away from the horse.
The horse tentatively follows him. Monty stops. The horse stops. Monty quietly moves away – and the horse follows him.
Amazingly, the horse is soon following Monty round the pen, without being led.
“We've got join up,” Monty tells us.
“It is my absolute obligation not to let my pulse rate go up one tick”
Monty Roberts
The horse stands quietly without being held while Monty gently pats its back, its girth area and its flanks. He talks soothingly, and picks up all four feet in turn, patting each hoof reassuringly.
“He now thinks I'm his friend, but I'm now going to put a little strain on the relationship,” says Monty.
11.48am. Sean McCarthy comes into the pen and places a saddle, long reins and bridle on a square of canvas. McCarthy leaves. The horse looks most alarmed. It walks up to the tack, puts its head down and blows nervously and loudly.
“It will be interesting to see if he flees, or comes back to me, his new friend,” Monty comments.
The horse goes back to Monty, who pats him “to get back what we had”.
Then, incredibly, the horse stands quietly while Monty puts a numnah on its back. He is impressively deft, quiet and sure in all his movements. If the horse flinches he reassures it with his voice and his soothing touch.
He places a saddle, with stirrup irons at full length, on the horse's back. Then he quietly reaches under its belly and fastens the webbing girth.
The horse suddenly explodes. The stirrups flop against its side. It bucks half a dozen times. Then it stands quietly.
“It is my absolute obligation not to let my pulse rate go up one tick” Monty explains calmly.
Again he pats the horse’s muzzle and talks to him. Then, with great economy of movement, he slips a bridle on the horse, carefully inserting a rubber-covered snaffle bit without fuss. It goes over the webbing headcollar.
“He’s stopped worrying about the saddle. He’s busy thinking about the bridle now,” Monty comments.
He leads the horse a few paces. Then he fastens a strap under the girth to secure each stirrup iron. He loops a long rein through the stirrup iron on each side and fastens it to the ring of the snaffle bit.
11.58am. Making shooing noises, and clicking his tongue, Monty encourages the horse to move ahead on the long reins. Then he flaps the reins on the horse’s flanks and encourages it to walk, trot and canter on long reins round the pen. He quietly halts the horse and carefully makes it rein back one step.
12 noon. Sean McCarthy comes into the pen, wearing a skull cap. Monty Roberts holds the horse by the head and keeps talking to it.
Without hesitation McCarthy pats the horse on the shoulder, and then swings into the saddle. He sits securely while the horse gives three or four small plunges. Monty continues to talk soothingly to it and pats its muzzle.
“He wants to hear your voice too,” Monty says to Sean.
Sean speaks encouragingly and clicks at the horse.
Monty leads the horse a few paces. Then he unclips the lead rein from the headcollar. He uses the headcollar, not the reins, to lead the horse, and explains later that he is always very careful not in any way to hurt nor harm the horse’s mouth.
Sean quietly exerts some leg pressure, and soon has the horse walking, trotting and then cantering round the pen. He keeps his hands high and wide apart. He halts the horse and changes direction.
12.08pm. Sean dismounts. He and Monty make much of the horse, patting it approvingly, and telling it that it has “done a great job, pal”.
They take off the tack and the horse stands quietly by Monty.
We clap and the horse starts and makes off. Then it returns to Monty.
The original feature, dated 4 May, 1989
Normal schooling
“You see, he comes back to his friend. That’s a very good thing,” says Monty with warm satisfaction.
The horse is taken from the ring. We are assured that it will have two more such sessions on Wednesday and Thursday and will be ridden in the open, accompanied by mature horses on Friday. Thereafter its riding groundwork and schooling can continue normally.
Monty tells me he dislikes lungeing on a lunge rein; he thinks it can injure the horse and is not good for its movement. He prefers a limited amount of long reining, and quiet riding at all paces, with the accent on careful and sympathetic handling of the horse’s mouth.
He likes to use a loose school and jumping lane for horses being schooled over poles with a jumping career in mind.
Next Monty “starts” a much more difficult case, a two-year-old chesnut filly with four white stockings, belonging to the Queen. The filly is destined to be a polo pony, perhaps to be ridden by the Prince of Wales.
The filly rolls its eyes nervously and is very mistrustful. Monty admits that fillies can be much more difficult: “they can be crabby and their attention span is much shorter”. This one looks an exceedingly difficult case.
Monty is even more sympathetic and sensitive in his handling. He starts at 12.24pm and goes through the same phases described previously. He is concerned because the filly constantly declines to move away. She tends to freeze, standing with a humped back in a corner. At one stage he scuffs sand from the pen surface with his foot, and flicks it at her to make her retreat. She moves away, quite affronted. Then she comes back all the more readily for assurance.
Amazingly, in six minutes she is following him round the ring and allowing a “hands on” friendship to develop. Sometimes she licks her lips.
“That’s a good sign,” says Monty. “She likes me in spite of her fears.”
At 12.38 he has the numnah and saddle on. He keeps the lead rein clipped on to the headcollar this time, in order to give the filly added reassurance, but he does not get into a tug of war situation. If she moves away he hardly pulls on the rein and lets her move readily. She always comes back.
At 12.54 the filly is long reining but will not move on easily, and needs gentle encouragement to get into a trot. Yet two minutes later Sean swings into the saddle, and quietly rides her round the ring at a walk and a trot, but hardly at a canter.
“That’s enough” says Monty; barely three minutes later, at 12.59, only 35 minutes after the filly started her training, it is all over. She is a baby and will clearly need a lot more careful handling and schooling, but she has made a giant stride forward in her training, and one that could have taken weeks by conventional methods.
“If we press her any more today, she’ll go bad. That’s all we’ll ask,” says the relaxed and smiling Monty.
He says he can do this sort of thing with mules, sheep, deer and even fish. We believe him.
- The original feature was published in Horse & Hound magazine on 4 May, 1989. To access more of the Horse & Hound Archive, visit themagazinearchive.com
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