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New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume IX, Issue 693, 18 June 1903, Page 19

Lord Miiner has given importers and breeders to understand that the English hackney stallion is not wanted in South Africa. From this it is easy to see that he at least has profited by the lessons taught by the late war, at the opening of which the War Office sent out men to fight on half-bred coachers. The hackney is without doubt a valuable horse in his place, and his place is in harness. He also goes well in saddle around a park for an hour or so a day, but when asked to gallop for a mile or two after a lot of Boers, or away from them, he is likely to lay down and stay down. It is the pace that kills the hackney. Doubtless if well fed he would dawdle along all day at an easy pace for about a week, but to do so would need the care and attention of a racehorse. It has been an article of faith with the English for some years that the broad-beamed cob with 9in. of bone under the knee is the proper horse to ride, but when they went Boer hunting they found their broad-beamed cob was useless, and that one weedy, well-bred pony was worth a paddockfull of them. Some years ago army buyers would purchase nothing but great larruping showy horses of the hackney and Cleveland Baytype for the cavalry, and all the crack cavalry regiments that went out to the Cape at the opening of the war were mounted on these squash yhearted over-fed brutes The faith of the War Office in these big, 1 falshy hybrids received a seyere strain in March, 1900, when the cabled account of the battle of Driefontein reached London, and told the world that “ when the enemy fled the horses of the Australian cavalry were alone able to pursue.” In a previous engagement it is recorded that General French’s horses gave out after a 20-miles’ of a flanking movement, and were unable to act at the very moment when the Boers might have been closed in; yet the War Office authorities refused to believe that the fault lay with their cavalry horses. The history of the march of the relief column to Kimberley tells us that the English cavalryhorses collapsed, and died all alon r the line, while the horses of the Australian cavalry, forming the advance screen, went through from start to finish, and had go enough left in them to carry their riders back to Magersfontein to take part in the discomfiture of Cronje Lord Milner was on the spot, and knows all these things, and while he, or such men as he is in power in South Africa the hackney, or any other harness breed, is not likely to be encouraged as a sire of remounts. In his place as before remarked, the hackney is a useful horse, and BO is the Clydesdale and Suffolk Punch, but when in the saddle they are very much out of place, and it is satisfactory to note that there is at least one man in the British service that has the courage to give the case-hardened cranks of the War Office a set back by ostracising their pet breed from the Government stud farms in South Africa.