AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP RYDER-DAVIS, PROFESSIONAL VET & SECRETARY OF THE SUFFOLK HORSE SOCIETY

The History of the Suffolk Horse

The Suffolk horse’s history is better documented than any other breed. There is no doubt that the breed existed in East Anglia in 1300 because in 1500 Campden in his Britannica, which was a gazetteer of Great Britain, described a Suffolk horse exactly as we would recognise it today and it will have taken two hundred years to create it. It is almost certain that the genes for its very large size came from Belgium. Once the breed had become established the written history is very complete. The pedigrees are the longest unbroken pedigrees of any breed in the world, because they go back to 1768, and we have the records of every Suffolk since then. Which means that any Suffolk that is alive today can trace his/her parentage back to 1768 in an unbroken line.

The Suffolk Stud Book is housed at the Suffolk Horse Museum in Woodbridge, Suffolk and is an extraordinary series of volumes, especially Volume One. It was written by the first secretary of the Suffolk Horse Society, Herman Biddell, who spent two years of his life just researching the breeding of every stallion that he could trace alive or dead. He recorded the breeding of every mare that was alive in 1880 and put all this information together in one volume and prefaced it with an extraordinary account of the people of the day and all the history he could find about the breed. It’s a very humorous and fascinating read and it’s a lovely book.

The Suffolk Horse & East Anglia

The Suffolk horse was the most important thing in the whole of East Anglia because nearly everything was moved by it one way or another and it affected the lives of so many people. There were hundreds of these horses and they were very labour intensive so there were probably thousands of people who worked with them. Even today, if we have a Suffolk horse event, people will come up who live in town somewhere and tell us about their father or their grandfather who was a horseman. It touched the lives of everyone.

The horseman was the most important man on the farm. There were grades of horsemen. On a very big farm, which might have forty working horses on it, there was the head horseman. He was absolutely in charge of everything to do with the horses - he fed the horses and was responsible for them. Veterinary medicine was at a very low level at that time and all the vets really did was things like castrating horses. It was the head horseman who would actually treat their illnesses. He would have had a little notebook and we have one or two here at the museum. They were deadly secret these books because in them they recorded treatments and secret ways of handling horses and controlling them with concoctions that they made up. Each book would have recipes for lotions, special oils and aromatic herbs used in the caring and treating of the horses. These little books were the passport to a job and jobs were very difficult to get at the time. If you had a job you had to look after it, especially if you were a head horseman, because that was the peak of the whole farm labour force. They were very often passed down from father to son and once you had the book you kept it and no one else was allowed to see it.

Very few people are seriously working with cart horses in this country nowadays. There are some town councils use them in parks which is a very suitable use for them. But there are very few people seriously using them commercially. On the other hand, in the last five or six years, Suffolk horse members, have shown an increasing interest in breaking Suffolk Punches for work. Until five or eight years ago probably, there weren’t that many Suffolks actually broken. We now have a society ploughing match every year, a Suffolk ploughing match not open to any other breed. The members of the society between them now have a huge collection of restored horse drawn vehicles, heavy horse drawn vehicles and implements.

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