Miss Horsfall Dissents

It's a dangerous course at the best of times, But on days like this some jumps are crimes.

--Right Royal, by John Masefield

Most Britons agree with their Poet Laureate that steeplechasing is at best a perilous pastime, though few of them think any the less of it for that. Last week, however, an increasingly vociferous minority rose up to damn the ancient and respected sport. They were shocked by the death of four stouthearted thoroughbreds during this year's running of the Grand National at Aintree, steeplechasing's most famed race.

"A slur upon a horse-loving people," cried an outraged letter writer in the London Times. In the House of Commons, a Tory and two Laborites joined forces to present a motion condemning the "cruelty of the Grand National." Animal lovers of the National Equine Defense League and the Society for the Modification of Steeplechasing and Grand National Reform closed ranks with their fellows in the League Against Cruel Sports to bring an action against the Aintree race promoters under the Protection of Animals Act.

But lengths ahead of all the rest of the anti-steeplechasers rode a doughty little ex-schoolma'am of 62 named, by exquisitely suitable happenstance, Miss Georgina Horsfall. Her motherly white mane set askew by news that the Queen Mother herself had entered a horse in the Grand National, Miss Horsfall cantered all the way from Leeds to declaim before a meeting of the Cruel Sports group: "I think it is scandalous that the royal family should have horses in these races."

Lord Grey de Ruthyn, the meeting chairman, pointed out that the Queen Mother's horse had been scratched before the race began, but Miss Horsfall was not one to give up in a hurry. "I saw," she replied with spirited irrelevance, "that young Prince Charles was having his first lessons in shooting deer." The league finally agreed to write Queen Elizabeth, whose stable includes 36 thoroughbreds, and ask that the royal family pronounce itself against the "cruelty" involved in the sport of kings and queens. Her point won, Miss Horsfall briskly traveled the 1,600 furlongs back to Leeds.

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