Author: Kristine Hughes

England has undertaken some fabulous events to mark the centenary of WWI. The BBC aired a program called World War One Centenary: As It Happened, the Tower of London is installing 888,246 ceramic poppies in the dry moat to commemorate the Allies who lost their lives in that battle and on August 4th Britain turned out it’s lights and lit candles to in an act of remembrance.

Anniversary events will continue throughout the year, but one of the largest undertakings has to be Ride the Retreat – Mons to the Marne. 

To commemorate the opening actions of the British Army in the Great War, Ian Woodbridge and Dr David Kenyon are riding the retreat from Mons in Belgium to the River Marne in France for The Horse Trust and the Army Benevolent Fund. You can read about the Great Retreat here.

The ride will take place over two weeks covering over 200 miles in eleven separate stages and will visit all the major cavalry engagements coinciding with the 100th anniversaries of each event. They hope to help people experience the opening actions of the Great War and to explain the role of the cavalry during the great retreat conducted by the Cavalry Division of the British Expeditionary Force during late August and early September 1914.

For more information and regular updates, please visit and like the Retreat’s Facebook page.

The Horse Trust, one of the charities that will benefit from funds raised for the Ride, is the oldest horse charity in the world, founded in 1886 to help working horses in London.

From The Horse Trust website:

In 1877, English author Anna Sewell published a groundbreaking ‘autobiography’, the story of a working horse told through the horse’s own eyes. Black Beauty went on to sell over 50 million copies and become one of the best-selling books of all time. A few years later, a Miss Ann Lindo of North London 

 read Black Beauty and was inspired. A working horse had no rest in those days – their owners depended on the horse to earn money to feed their families. Horses pulled taxi cabs and delivery wagons until they dropped. Ann Lindo’s idea was to provide a place where sick and exhausted horses could rest and recover – lending in their place healthy animals so the owners could still earn a living.

he Home of Rest for Horses was founded on 10th May 1886. Horses were bought or donated as loan horses, and demand was immediately high. Miss Lindo saw her idea become a great success and attract prestigious supporters, but sadly died only five years later, at the age of just 52. 

It is a well known fact that Frederica, Duchess of York, was a huge animal lover and that she kept many pets at her country home, Oatlands Park. In fact, on my last visit to England, I went to Oatlands to see her pet cemetery with my friend Hester Davenport. It was only recently, however, that I discovered that Lady Castlereagh also kept a private zoo. Here is what Mrs. Arbuthnot wrote:

September 4, 1820 – Returned to town, having first seen Lady Castlereagh’s establishment for animals. She has got an antelope, Kangaroos, Emeus, Ostriches and a tiger, which Lord Combermere brought from the West Indies for the Duke of Wellington and which the Duke gave to Lady C. It seemed very vicious and growled at us.

My great, good friend Susan Brown pointed me to the following passage, which she found on  the Regency Reader:

Marked by several contemporaries to be devoted and quite in love, the marriage produced no children. Instead, Lady Castlereagh kept a menagerie of animals at their country home, Loring Hall in iron cages; contemporary George Berkeley said of her pets “ It seems a strange taste for a lady patroness at Almacks, and one of the most distinguished leaders of the beau monde, to attempt to rival Exeter Change in a small country residence…nevertheless at the gay fetes given by her during the season to her innumerable fashionable friends, no part of the entertainment was more popular than the exhibition of Lady Castlereagh’s pets.”

Berekley goes on to suggest that subordinates of Lord Castlereagh at the War Office tried to ingratiate themselves, while stationed abroad in India and Africa, by sending his lady wife a tiger (known to be bad-tempered), armadillo and other wild animals. She also had, as she told an American dinner companion, a mockingbird and flying squirrel–although the mockingbird would not sing. This discomfitted her, as she was wanting to procure a hummingbird from the US but was worried, once on English soil, that “it wouldn’t hum.”
Aside from her more exotic animals, Lady Castlereagh was adoring of her bull mastiffs, who were said to ride in the carriage beside her. It was one of these dogs that created a stir, when one bit Lord Castlereagh after he tried to intervene in a squabble.”

For a brief bio of Lady Castlereagh, I direct you to Wikipedia:

Amelia Anne Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry (20 February 1772 – 12 February 1829), from 1794 until 1821 generally known as Emily Stewart, Lady Castlereagh, was the wife of the Georgian era Irish statesman Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, who from 1812 to 1822 was British Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons. Well-connected by birth to the aristocracy and wife of a prominent politician who was Britain’s leading diplomat during the close of the Napoleonic Wars, Lady Castlereagh was an influential member of Regency London‘s high society.

During the Regency of George IV, Lady Castlereagh, along with Lady Jersey, Dorothea Lieven, Lady Cowper, and others, was a Lady Patroness of Almack’s, one of the first and most exclusive mixed-gender social clubs in London. In their role as Patroness, they had great influence over the ton, determining social acceptance by designating who might receive “vouchers” (entrance tickets) to Almack’s, thereby setting and enforcing complex, unwritten social codes of the London social elite.

Recently, Victoria sent me the link to an article written by film critic Roger Ebert about the London he had known in the 1960’s. Like us, Ebert had loved London, spent much time there and was fortunate enough to have uncovered many of the City’s treasures – hotels lost in time, shops that sold bespoke goods, restaurants that were known for their specialty food and a host of the sort of characters who define London. What a treat this article is and now I’m sharing it with you. The only drawback to the piece is that most of the places and people Ebert wrote about are long gone. How I wish I’d been able to book a room at No. 22 Jermyn Street for our upcoming visit. Sigh.

Here’s the link to the article. Enjoy.

Exotic animals owned by members of royalty are nothing new. In centuries past, foreign dignitaries and heads of state often gifted British royals and other diplomats with the rarest animals to be found in their parts of the world. In fact, the Tower of London was for over a century home to many of the specimens that found their way to England in this way until the Duke of Wellington declared that enough was enough and sent them all off to the London Zoo.

What is unusual is that Queen Victoria was once given an elephant – and kept it at Osborne House. From the Osborne House page at English Heritage:

Few members of the royal family have been quite as enthusiastic about their garden as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. At Osborne they were able to indulge their desire for a fashionable garden, drawing inspiration from the gardens of Europe. Osborne offers an intimate glimpse into royal family life, where you can see the vegetable plots tended by the royal children, and the beach where Queen Victoria would go for a dip in the sea. But it wasn’t just the queen who went for dip on the royal estate – upon receiving a gift of a elephant from the King of Abyssinia in 1884, the queen needed a place for the animal to bathe for a few days. It was decided that the existing cattle pond would do, and ever since the pond has been named the ‘elephant bath’!

You can still see the Elephant Baths at Osborne today, in fact, it’s purported to be the only one in Europe and it stands as a hazard on the the 7th hole at the Osborne Golf Club. It should be noted that the elephant wasn’t the only one who enjoyed bathing at Osborne House. In fact, the entire Royal family enjoyed having a private beach of their own and often took advantage of the opportunity for sea bathing. You can read all about it in this Daily Mail article from 2012 about the re-opening of the private beach to the public and the return of Queen Victoria’s bathing machine to the property.



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