Queen behind Anne’s Games aspirations

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32777, 30 November 1971, Page 7

Queen behind Anne’s Games aspirations

(By

One evening a few weeks ago , the Queen was happier and in higher spirits than anyone in the royal circle can ever remember.

“It’s one of the most marvellous things that has ever happened,” she said to a friend. “But I can’t pretend that I’m not a tiniest bit envious.” That afternoon, her daughter, Princess Anne, just 21, had become European show-jumping champion at the Burghley Horse Trials, and is now a near-certainty for the British show-jumping team at the 1972 Munich Olympics due to be announced soon. It was the sort of success that the Queen herself used to dream about as a child, until her duties as a future monarch forced her to put such ideas out of her mind. But it is no secret that, after her job and her family, horses are the Queen’s great love.

There was a time, according to close friends, however, when the Queen doubted whether it would be physically possible for Anne to fit in the necessary training among her official duties as fourth in line to the throne.

Now she has proved it can be done (she gave up a month’s holiday to train for the Badminton Horse Trials, in which she came fifth) the Queen apparently intends to cut her daughter’s official engagements as much as possible to give her every chance to get to Munich.

GILLIAN FRANKS)

Certainly Anne should be in with a fighting chance. Not only has she got one of the finest trainers in Mrs Alison Oliver, but in her mother she has a leading authority on show-jumping who has hardly missed a major event for 20 years.

“As a dedicated horsewoman herself, the Queen knows just how much a chance to represent Britain would mean to Anne,” says a noted court commentator. “It is something she would have loved to have done herself.”

From the age of five, Anne was riding with her mother at Windsor and Balmoral, usually before breakfast and while the rest of the family were still in bed.

Of all the Royal children, Anne most shared her father’s spirit of adventure and her mother's love of the country. Many small girls go through a phase of adoring their ponies and then lose interest. But the Queen never did, and neither has her daughter. By the time Anne was 15, the Queen was admitting to friends: “She is a better rider than I am.”

But where the Queen has always excelled is in the equally important sphere of horse-management and breeding. Indeed, she is one of Britain’s leading experts. She knows instinctively what makes a classic showjumper—and in fact, Anne’s European championship mount, Doublet, was personally chosen by the Queen and bred by her as well from her own thoroughbred, Doubtless 11.

Not only that, but the Queen’s knowledge of the stresses and strains of competing in the Olympics will be invaluable.

In a manner of speaking the Queen has already won an Olympic gold medal, Countryman, one of the British team, was entered in her name at the Stockholm Olympics and the Queen and the Queen Mother put up some of the money needed to send him to Sweden. TRAINING

The British team also trained at Windsor as her guests, and she was out early every morning to watch their preparations. And she went to Stockholm to watch the equestrian events.

As Countryman left the arena after his fine performance, the Queen gave a delighted smile and a "thumbsup” sign to Princess Margaret.

That evening a fire broke out at the stables in which the British horses were quartered. When the Queen was told, she insisted on going immediately to the stables to make sure the horses were unharmed.

It was the Queen’s great interest in show-jumping that ’ first turned Princess Anne towards the competitive side of riding. She went with the Queen to the Badminton Horse Trials where it is the Queen’s regular practice to get up early to watch the veterinary inspection of competing horses. Once, when the Duke of Edinburgh was playing an important polo match at Windsor, the Queen and Princess Anne went along to support him, and spent most of the match looking the other way . . .

There was a good reason. The Queen had had a portable television set put in a small marquee nearby so that she and her daughter could keep an eye on a major show-jumping event. On another occasion when staying with, friends the Queen and Princess Anne asked if they might watch show-jumping on television, only to be told the set was being repaired. They ended up watching the event in the butler’s cottage.

The Queen is the first to admit that, even with intensive training, she would not be as good a rider as her daughter. The Queen has been described as “an aboveaverage competent rider, but not in the top flight.” In the photograph Princess Anne is shown on Purple Star before the show jumping section at the Windsor Horse Trials, earlier this year.