A good ride that ended too soon
Passion for horses led to successful magazine career Had wanted to create museum for equestrian sports
To Susan Jane Anstey, it was simple and always so: A horse is the most glorious, awe- inspiring, wondrous creature on the planet. And so she built her whole life around them. She grew up with them, rode them, jumped them, hunted on them, showed them, judged them, bought them, broke them. Later, as publisher of three important horse publications, she documented their wins, losses, owners, organizations, riders and regimens. But most of all, she believed in them.
For Anstey, who died of cancer on Nov. 9 at the age of 59, there was no such thing as a casual Sunday ride along the 16th Concession Rd. outside her home, Wyndstone Farm, in King Township.
Michael Van Every, her partner for 24 years, described it this way: “ She was a nut about the turnout of a horse. She couldn’t ride down our road without spending a half- hour cleaning the tack, brushing the horse, the mane, flipping it over to the right-hand side. Her horses were always impeccable.” Added her daughter, Jennifer Anstey: “ It was an issue of respect with my mother.” And love.
Susan Jane Scott grew up on the original Wyndstone Farm, a horse and cattle farm that was expropriated for what was going to be the Pickering Airport and ended up functioning as the holding barn for new animals of the Toronto Zoo. Her father, Lewis Scott, was a hard- driving developer who served as Master of the Hunt of the Toronto and North York Hunt, a fox- hunting club, for many years.
Everyone in her family rode — it would have been unnatural not to — but Anstey rode with passion, precision and panache. It helped that she was tall and blonde, but most people always said that no one looked better on a horse.
“ She was so graceful on a horse,” said Judy Jones, a friend since the two met in 1957 at the Eglinton Pony Club junior show. “ She was poetry in motion and always upright, as if she had followed our mothers’ advice to walk with your shoulders back, as if you had a book on your head.”
After marrying broker Tom Anstey and moving to Vancouver, Anstey used to tell Jones she was fed up with the rain and having to ride indoors. When the marriage ended, she moved back east with her horse and Jennifer, then 2. With her sister, she purchased The Corinthian
magazine, an ailing publication at the time but still the newsprint bible for most of Canada’s horsey set. Anstey renamed it Horse Sport and took it to a slick, full-colour glossy monthly that rapidly took up pride of place on many coffee tables. Its circulation is 20,000, its influence much more.
Later, Anstey started Canadian Thoroughbred
(circulation 15,000) and Horse Canada, a horse magazine for families and a huge hit with a circulation base of 35,000.
“ Susan Jane saw what was and what was not working well, and through the magazines she used to lay out the issues for the equestrian community,” said Jeff Chisholm, a horse owner, former chair of the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair and member of Jump Canada. “ Her articles were always well- researched and she was an excellent writer. She could crystallize issues.” When Anstey was elected president of the International Alliance of Equestrian Journalists in 1994, she became the first woman and the first non- European to obtain that position, which she held for 11 years. For eight years, she also chaired the media advisory committee of the Fédération Equestre Internationale, the international ruling body for equestrian sport. She belonged to its Nations Cup committee, despite representing a country that failed to qualify to field a show- jumping team at the last Olympics. ( Canada was able to send only one show-jumping rider, Ian Millar of Millarbrook Farms.)
Anstey chaired a task force that led to the reorganization of the Canadian Equestrian Federation into Equine Canada, an organization that functions as a governing body and from which Jump Canada — which sets standards around the jumping competitions — was created. “Jump Canada has done an awful lot. We have more good horse-and-rider combinations now in this country than we have had in the last 20 years,” Chisholm said.
Bold, efficient (“ there will be no lollygagging,” she used to say to her daughter) and indefatigable, Anstey managed to also fill her days with riding, no matter where she was. She would often drive from Heathrow Airport near London to the English countryside for a fox hunt on a rented horse, en route to or from a meeting in Paris or elsewhere in Europe. She loved the hunt, riding over fields and through forests as morning was breaking. She told Jones it was good for the horse’s soul to get out and streak through the cool, crisp air. For years, she would join the Toronto hunt, twice a week every spring and fall, then go home, shower and arrive at her Aurora office by 9: 30 a. m. She stopped only when the hunt started later in the mornings. When Jennifer was in Grade 9 at Toronto’s Havergal College, her mother’s alma mater, Anstey bought her a horse. “ It was really nice, the best I’ve ever had,” she recalled.
Anstey would leave work in Aurora, drive to Havergal, pick up her daughter and drive her to the barn in Schomberg to ride, before heading back to Aurora to work for a few hours before repeating the circuit to pick up and return Jennifer to school.
“ She did it twice a week for two years,” Jennifer said. There are currently a dozen horses ( plus a pony and a donkey) at Wyndstone Farm, many of them horses Anstey bought off the track to develop into show jumpers or field hunters.
“ She always had young horses, she loved to watch them develop,” Jennifer said. “Fun was something you had to work on, a life you are shaping and moulding.”
After her mother gave her an ultimatum — either she could work with her or the magazines would be sold — Jennifer went to work for Anstey six years ago, gradually assuming greater responsibility at Canadian Horse Publications Inc., so much so that Anstey was planning to retire next year.
At the time of her death, she wanted to create a museum for equestrian sports and was considering writing a book on its history. She had been diagnosed with cancer only in April. By the summer, she was failing and gave Jennifer her horse to ride in competition. Van Every, Anstey’s partner, had bought Baroness, a huge horse, the summer before and Anstey had competed on Baroness in the 1.2- metre circuit in the senior division in Collingwood then.
“ Typical Mom,” Jennifer said. “ Riding a 7- year- old fairly green horse against experienced, schooled horses.”
This past summer, Jennifer rode Baroness in eight horse shows, in the 1.3- metre junior amateur jumpers A or highest level circuit. “ I had never jumped this big before,” she said. “ It was a big move for both of us.” The organizers of the Palgrave, Ont., competition allowed Van Every to drive his car to the north end of the grandstand, usually off- limits to spectators, so Anstey could watch her daughter compete.
Jennifer, in part, was competing so her mother could watch.
“ She loved watching. We’d talk afterward about why I had a rail. She loved the training process and the horse’s moods. She just really understood them.” Catherine Dunphy can be reached at cdunphy@thestar.ca.