Our war horse
How a Tipp colt became a soldier’s best friend
AUDREGNIES, August 24, 1914. With lances outstretched and the battle cry resounding in their throats, the officers and men of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers charged up to the high ground overlooking the village and tore into the German lines.
Their mission was to buy some time for the British Expeditionary Force to continue its hasty retreat. Such tactics bore a heavy cost; three of their men were killed and eight wounded, including their commanding officer. Indeed, it quickly became apparent that the cavalry traditions of previous centuries were redundant in the face of intense German shelling and machine guns.
Among those to the fore of the charge at Audregnies was Second Lieutenant Jack Colvin, my grandfather’s first cousin, who was riding upon his Irish charger, Hopit. Amazingly both Jack and Hopit were to survive the next four gruelling years of war on the Western Front. Their story is now told in the book Jack And Hopit by Jack’s granddaughter Serena Merton.
Jack’s mother Isabella McClintock Bunbury was the eldest of three daughters born to Tom Bunbury, a prominent Co. Carlow landowner who served as president of the Royal Dublin Society from 1913 until his death in 1929. Isabella’s childhood was spent between the family estates at Lisnavagh, Co. Carlow, and Drumcar, Co. Louth.
IN summer 1894, Isabella, then 20, was married in the parish church of Drumcar to Forrester Farnell Colvin, a young officer in the 9th Royal Lancers. Jack, their first child, was born just over a year later. Forrester Colvin served alongside Isabella’s brother Billy Bunbury during the Anglo-Boer War. Much sadness ensued when a Boer marksman shot Billy in the back of the knee a day after they broke the Boer siege of Kimberley. Billy, 20, died that same evening.
Much of Jack Colvin’s childhood had been spent in Ireland, primarily between Drumcar and Lisnavagh. Jack was 11 when his future mount Hopit, a bay colt, was foaled at Scarrough House near Dundrum, Co. Tipperary, in 1906. The stud belonged to John J Maxwell. Having spent his formative year grazing on the lush pastures of Tipperary, Hopit went to England where he was bought at Tattersalls by Colonel Forrester Colvin in 1912 for £162. Hopit duly made his way to the paddocks of Shermanbury Grange, the Colvin family home in West Sussex.
Meanwhile, the drums of war were beginning to beat across the seas in Europe. All the horses and ponies at Shermanbury were commandeered by the government’s Remount Department shortly after the war broke out. Hopit was one of about 591,000 horses (and 213,000 mules, 47,000 camels and 11,000 oxen) called into service between 1914 and 1917.
Colonel Colvin, who commanded two reserve regiments of cavalry at this time, was paid £70 for Hopit but the horse remained with the family. In November 1914, the horse landed in France as a charger of 19-year-old Jack Colvin. Educated at Eton, Jack had secured a cadetship at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in 1913. By August 1914, he was a second lieutenant in the 9th Lancers, commanding his own troop with Private G Tustin on hand to look after both him and his horse.
The first days in France seemed auspicious; women gathered along the roadsides and showered the 9th Lancers with flowers and kisses. However, the men were soon thrust deep into the action as a massive German onslaught drove the British back to the sea.
That cavalry charge at Audregnies was a sobering wake-up call and persuaded the commanders that such charges were futile. ‘We have become mounted infantry, pure and simple,’ lamented Captain Francis Grenfell, winner of the first gazetted Victoria Cross of the war, ‘with very little mounted about it’.
By Christmas 1914, Jack and Hopit were dealing with intense wet and cold, knee-deep mud of Meteren, where the men were now trained in infantry warfare – digging trenches, practising dismounted attacks, sniping, bombing – with breaks for football, point-to-points and even a pheasant shoot. In fact, things went one better when Hubert Hartigan, one of Jack’s fellow officers, returned from leave to Ireland with a pack of harrier dogs. Hubert went on to co-found the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association and was the leading trainer in Ireland from 1946 to 1948, saddling 13 Irish classic winners.
In 1915 the 9th Lancers were plunged into the nightmare of Ypres where they had to contend with poisonous gas and relentless shelling and rifle fire. Their confidence was greatly shaken when Frances Grenfell, the regimental hero, was killed in a gas attack; Jack was sent out into No Man’s Land with a small group of men to retrieve Grenfell’s body. He was promoted to lieutenant next day.
They subsequently served at the Somme where, as Jack later recalled, the mud of the trenches was ‘so deep and liquid that if horses stepped off the planks, they disappeared.’
Somehow Hopit survived. The horse also outfoxed an outbreak of sarcoptic mange in January 1917 for which he and all other horses were clipped short.
The cold was so intense that petrol was used to clean the cuts and wound on the horse’s legs; water simply froze over the wounds.
By spring of 1917 Jack and Hopit were in action in the blizzardwracked fields of Arras but a welcome reward came that summer when they finally secured hold of some good grazing grounds. They rounded out the year contending with the horror of Passchendaele.
Jack was badly shot in the buttock in fighting near Carpeza Copse in March 1918 and sent to recuperate in a hospital in the seaside hamlet of Wimereux. He rejoined his regiment shortly after they took part in a successful cavalry charge at German machine gun posts at Amiens.
The 9th Lancers were on the road to Mons when news arrived of the Armistice at 11am on November 11. They subsequently crossed into Germany as part of the Army of Occupation. Jack was made aide-de-camp to General Herbert Plumer in Cologne, where he remained until 1919.
HOPIT and Jack’s other horses Paleface, Black Beauty and Cliptail, now found themselves grazing in mudfree fields and sleeping in comfortable stables.
Meanwhile, Forrester Colvin, Jack’s father, was entrusted with the fate of all the horses now gathered in Cologne who had served king and country over the previous four years. He had to decide if they should be repatriated, continue with their regiments or be sold to French and Belgium farmers and, unfortunately, butchers.
Jack repurchased Hopit from the army for £30, and he also took Paleface home with him; the fate of his other horses is unknown. Jack and Hopit enjoyed some post-war point-to-pointing, hacking and hunting.
In May 1920 Jack left Hopit in England when he was posted to Ireland to take on the IRA during the War of Independence. The 9th Lancers were based at Strokestown House, Co. Roscommon. Early on March 23, 1921, Jack was ordered to lead a Crossley tender patrol out from Strokestown. However, a last-minute change of plan meant Captain Roger Greenville Peek was put in charge instead. The patrol was ambushed by the IRA at Scramoge; Peek and five men were killed. Jack was traumatised by his close escape.
Six months later, the 9th Lancers were sent to Egypt where Jack remained until 1925. When Hopit died on January 7, 1927, the horse was laid to rest beneath an granite gravestone in Shermanbury Wood in West Sussex.
Jack continued his military career through the Second World War, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. Hopit’s portrait hung over his desk until he died in 1980. He was buried in Cowfold Churchyard, not far from the grave of the Tipperary horse he rode for four long years of war. ÷Jack And Hopit by Serena Merton (Helion & Co) is out now.