Show Jumping

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28630, 5 July 1958, Page 3

Show Jumping

Clear Round. By Dorian Williams. Hodder and Stoughton, 188 pp.

Dorian Williams, author of this story of British show jumping, is regarded as the best of the television commentators covering the biggest English shows because he can make the spectacle come alive. This same quality lifts his book above so many other publications which have been written recently about the horses and riders who have made Britain’s name great in this international sport.

Harry Llewellyn and Foxhunter, Pat Smythe and her champions, Wilf White and Nizefella are the stars of the success story of British show jumping, but behind their performances is a team of administrators who made success possible.

Undisputed captain c this team is Lieutenant-Colonel M. P. Ansell, who dreamed of great things behind the barbed wire of a German prison camp in the

early 1940’5. Through his inspiration and courage British show jumping was raised from the bottom to the top in post-war years. In a decade Britain has won one gold and two bronze Olympic medals and Dorian Williams tells with understanding and keen observation how it was done, by a country which had been told it would do better with bicycles than horses by one of its opponents, only 10 years before.

The course in international jumping has not been an easy one for Britain and if any one person has achieved a clear round it is Ansell, now completely blind, but still the inspiration behind the British teai..s. Dorian Williams, who has been following shows as a competitor and later as a commentator since he was two years old, sees past the spectacle, the stage production and the performance to the impetus which drives on. He tells the story in a colourful, convincing way such as no other author has yet attempted. The book is fully illustrated by photographs of leading riders performing in shows at home and overseas.

Protests have been descending on the ‘‘New York Times” since its Washington correspondent recommended that “parameter” should be included among the baffling technical terms that ought to be banned. Nobody has quarrelled with the definition of the word by Professor Edwin Hewitt, of Washington University: “A parameter is a point of the domain of a mapping, this domain frequently being an interval on the real line, and the range of the domain being a subset of Euclidean space of several dimension or even of Hilbert space (infinite-di-mensional Euclidean space).” Professor Hewitt says he is anxious to be helpful. “Trusting,” he concludes his letter, ‘‘that this clears up the matter satisfactorily.”