PERHAPS only a playwright like Hugh Leonard could conjure up of a life as event-filled as his spry 80-something namesake. Or “83. No, 83 and a half!” to give the Co Meath horseman his precise age.

For many, Leonard is a familiar sight at his beloved Dublin Horse Show and at shows, point-to-points and hunt meets around Ireland, while his worldwide travels have seen him travel pedigree bulls by air to North America and search for polo ponies in South America. But like any good book, these often unexpected gems of stories slowly unfold as the conversation progresses, not to mention seven pages of meticulous notes, in his copperplate writing, later supplied with even more details of an extraordinary life.

“Life has been lucky for me,” he claims. Born in the former maternity hospital in Hatch Street, Hugh claims his arrival later forged two of his life mottos. “I was born a twin with my sister Gretta. She arrived first and I was a breech delivery. 80-odd years ago breech deliveries seldom survived and only that a priest anointed me on my big toe I might not have been here to tell the tale. This had two effects on me: I try to practise ‘ladies first!’ and I believe in religion.”

Two of four children, Gretta and Hugh grew up near the former Warrenstown Agricultural College in Drumree. “I lived there all my life,” Hugh recalls, adding that he and his sister were sent to boarding school as eight-year-olds; “Me to St Gerard’s and Gretta to Mount Anville. I wasn’t the brainiest in class but I loved sport - rugby, hockey - and the spirit of adventure.”

Known as “the twins who went everywhere together,” the inseparable siblings got their first pony, “a pretty bay mare” when they were seven. Having survived their first hair-raising riding lesson in a 50-acre field, Hugh went on to share a number of other ponies, including the well-known Spider.

“In 1945, my parents went on holiday to Donegal, near Spider Bay, presumably to celebrate the end of World War II. While there my father put his eye on a two-year-old dun Connemara gelding which he bought and we named Spider. He was still hunting and playing Pony Club games until he was 22, everybody in the parish wanted a hunt on Spider.”

One eventful trip took place in 1954 when Hugh was picked for the Trinity College Dublin skiing team against Oxford and Cambridge held in the Austrian resort of Zurs. This took place just after harvesting the winter wheat crop at home with a team of Allis Chalmers and Nuffield machinery, working from 10am to midnight, with a neighbour walking ahead with a torch to show the way after night fell.

Weather conditions of a different kind met the skiing group on the return journey with heavy snowfall hampering the return bus journey to the train station. “I remember saying to my sister ‘I don’t like this, something is wrong’”. Having reached the station, only to be informed of a four-hour delay because of heavy snow, Hugh noticed another group of skiers boarding the return bus to Zurs.

Just an hour later, the bus driver “staggered in through the door with a bloodied face. It turned out the bus was hit by an avalanche on the return journey and fell down a ravine.” Only three of the 29 holiday makers survived and Hugh’s group helped with the rescue mission before the sombre group boarded the next train.

While Hugh was retrieving “a sealskin rug belonging to one of the girls, a daughter of one of the Guinness family,” the train started to pull off. “I found myself running after the train shouting ‘Halt der zug!’” but as it sped off, he resorted to enlisting a taxi driver at the station to chase the train. Each time they reached the next station, they discovered they had missed the train by minutes, “so Herr Zoller, the driver, said we must go to the border where the train has to stop for 20 minutes.”

However with Hugh’s passport and wallet on the train with sister Gretta, Zoller’s plan involved Hugh lying down on the floor as the taxi drove through the border checkpoint. Having being smuggled to the station, Hugh had another predicament as the fare stood at 10 shillings. “I said ‘I have no money but I will collect it from my friends on the train. He said ‘you can send it to me’ but I managed to collect 12 shillings from the others and gave him the extra two shillings to buy a present for his daughter.”

A Demon To Break

Hugh also learned the art of making young horses producing the many youngsters in the yard. Before leaving for agricultural college in Aberdeen, he spent the winter hunting eight horses, including a brown mare by Gold Court, “the sire of Golden Miller”. Stella, sold afterwards to the UK, went on to jump a clear round at the 1952 Olympics.

“I also rode a 15.3hh thoroughbred gelding called Iceberg, by Cold Shoulder, who would stop at nothing. He was fearless and once jumped a tributary of the Broadmeadow River with me one day.”

In between managing three farms, Hugh was also a keen amateur jockey. He often raced the produce of his father’s polo pony mare, when polo ceased during WWII, including Trigger. This gelding required all of Hugh’s patient horsemanship to master. “He was a demon to break, he spent more time on his hindlegs” although he and his full-sister, Molly Brant, won several point-to-points and races for him.

One spectacular photograph features Hugh on a still-standing Trigger as Eddie Harty and Willie Rooney’s horses both fall at one fence. “We finished second,” notes Hugh.

He regards his win at Navan on board Fast Buck, when they beat Olympia who went on to win the Irish Grand National the following year, as his biggest success and succinctly records another day’s result at the Fairyhouse Easter meeting when he “won one, was second twice, third once and nowhere in the last!”.

The long summer evenings spent schooling polo ponies and playing matches resulted in a lifetime friendship with the Balding family. “Gerald Balding was the father, he came over to Phoenix Park and asked would I come over and play on a team for Colonel Whitbread with his two sons [Toby and Ian]. We’d play our hearts out to go to Cirencester where there was a week-long festival every year and we came third one year.”

Another polo venture involved being despatched to Argentina in 1964 with “250 quid” after nine other players chipped in to fund buying ponies there. “I didn’t know a sinner in the Argentine and I didn’t speak a word of Spanish!” he recalls, however some detective work through a pedigree cattle contact saw two profitable buying sprees with the ponies shipped to Ireland, via Cork port. “With the exception of one, they all worked out well so I took him home and subsequently sold him as a stunt horse.”

“I went to the States a good bit as we used to export pedigree Aberdeen Angus cattle to Maryland. The Wyatt plantation sold a one-third interest in a yearling we exported for $250,000, he made that price in 1966.”

Animals shipped by air was still a new concept then. “I accompanied a lot of thoroughbred mares to Louisville, we loaded them in Shannon and flew to Canada as back then, when flying to Idlewild [now JFK], we used to touch down and refuel in Gander. I remember opening the door of the plane once and I will never forget the wind that came in and thinking ‘how did these people live here,’” he says about Newfoundland’s near-Artic conditions.

He also remembers the inaugural cattle shipment. “Thirteen bulls flew on a Super Constellation jet. It was the first time cattle ever flew to USA and they had to do 60 days quarantine in Canada first.”

RDS – 68 YEARS

Hugh’s involvement with the RDS stretches back to 1948 when a visit to the Spring Show also sparked a lifelong interest in Suffolk sheep and training border collies.

He was introduced ‘as a sprightly 15-year-old’ at the Horse Show that same year to Frank Eustace, saying “He was a steward and a stickler for detail. One spent one’s time running from the stables to the ring and don’t be late! I’ve never missed stewarding lightweight hunters in 68 years.”

Hugh recalls three showrings, where Rings 1 and 2 are now situated, and hunter classes ‘milling around, often three abreast’, whittled down to a front lines and with those horses then sent for vetting during the judge’s lunchbreak.

Was there any champion that particularly stood out for him in almost 70 years?

“I would have to say Standing Ovation. I had judged him as a raw four-year-old at Ballivor,” where Hugh, as ride judge, had taken a slightly unorthodox route. “He didn’t really trot but Frances [Cash] covered it well and when I rode him, I couldn’t produce a trot. So I took him outside the ring, did a couple of figure-of-eights and then he did give me those couple of steps of extended trot. I met David Tatlow several years later and he said, for him, Standing Ovation was the best heavyweight of the past 10 years.”

He has been the Chief Steward in the showing section for “over 20 years” so must surely have seen many changes?

“A lot of changes. Pat Hanly has probably been the best influence in the running of the Dublin Horse Show. He’s what you’d call a market leader, he’s brought in very worthwhile, largely performance, competitions.”

Not that Leonard was behind the times either as he recalls suggesting at a Horse Show committee meeting back in 1962 that an optional fence should be placed in the arena during the show hunter classes.

“They didn’t agree with it. Judge Wylie had a tongue like a razor, his meetings lasted 2.5 minutes! The whole thing was cut and dried, he was very effective at a meeting.”

No One Shouted Stop

Since the Traditional Irish Horse Association was founded in 2011, Hugh Leonard has chaired his own fair share of meetings. And usually ends up proceedings by singing a tune. “I’m a great believer in ending on a good note, it’s only light hearted,” he maintains.

The Association’s objective of preserving traditional bloodlines echoes the theme of John Healy’s great work “No One Shouted Stop”, which chronicled the decline of small rural towns.

“I could see the way it was going [with breeders using continental sires] and you couldn’t blame the breeders for that. But we’ll look very foolish in 20 years time if we haven’t tried to preserve a traditional base.”

“I don’t want to be critical but Horse Sport Ireland have absolutely no breeding programme for traditional horses. Letting in foreign horses and then sending them back to the Continent with 70 [automatic] points, that was a crazy thing.

He has however the height of praise for former HSI chairman, Pat Wall. “A charming man, a very fair-minded man and I was impressed by him. He took on an unwinnable task and circumstances didn’t allow him to turn things around the way he wanted.”

Is there money in traditional breeding or is it another labour of love? “I think the dedicated breeders will carry on. They say that people who breed leisure horses lose money but even at the top, there’ll be some that won’t make a profit either.”

Amongst his current horses is a traditional-bred that he plans to show in-hand. “He’s by a young horse that few know of called Generous Lad, owned by the late Des Noctor and out of a really good Draught mare. I’m hoping he’ll do something this summer.”

As a lifelong follower of the Ward Union and Meath hunts, he has enjoyed some memorable days hunting with both packs. What was his favourite day? “Fifty-five minutes as fast was we could do with the Meath Foxhounds and on a private hunt, three hours without a check for 23 miles, around Beauparc, the Hill of Skyrne and we took him [fox] three fields from Ratoath,” is his instant response.

“Only three horses finished, I was on a small thoroughbred mare, just 15.1hh. She was some mare, she trotted back to Drumree as fresh as she’d started,” he says in admiration of the mare who was brought to South Africa when her subsequent owner, Lady Stark, emigrated there.

Family life

“My luck in life really changed when I met and married my late wife Sheila McDonald, from Carlow. She was the most talented and good-natured lady one could meet and she reared eight children, four boys and four girls. Unfortunately at 23 years of age, we lost one of the girls, Rita, through suicide,” Hugh says, speaking about his wife, their children and the light and shade years of his family life.

In much-demand now as a babysitter for his grandchildren, he has also travelled the world to visit his family. “At one stage, there were four working in China so I said I had to go out to see them.”

Met by his daughter Louise in Singapore, the pair went on to visit the killing fields of the Khymer Rouge, New Zealand and Hong Kong adding a store of more anecdotes.

Reminiscing over, it’s back to practicalities.

“I have to go and make up feed for 13 horses now, I won’t be in bed for quite a while,’ is the cheerful parting shot of this extraordinary character, one of the quiet men this country is fortunate to have.

Next week: Paddy Quirke.