Arthur Waterhouse wrote several children’s books, and also wrote under the pseudonym Vera Painter. As far as I can tell, Dark Champion was his only pony book. It is a fairly conventional horse rescue tale, interwoven with the story of a girl’s mysterious origins. Arthur Waterhouse was perhaps not the world’s greatest expert on horses: according to Hannah Fleetwood, who has written a review of the book, “I would hazard a guess that he did not really know one end of a horse from another: I found [as] with Peter Grey’s Kit Hunter series, [that] although the story/ies are great there are rather large and gaping blunders where the horses are concerned. In this one the main thing is [the way] the children gallop and jump Jim straight from the stable and cold. Warming up is never given a second glance and like Peter Grey's books it is assumed/taken for granted that all horses need regular good gallops and can be jumped day after day after day without getting fed up/soured.”
Finding the book: easy to find in all its printings, and not expensive.
Sources and links:
Hannah’s review
Dark Champion
Brockhampton Press, Leicester, 1948, illus J Abbey, 188 pp.
Reprinted by Brockhampton 1950,1954, 1965
By mistake, Farmer Webster buys a neglected black horse at auction. He decides
to
keep the horse, feed him up, and sell him at the next auction, but his daughter
Brenda
falls for the horse, and with the help of her friend David, schemes to keep
him. Once
recovered, the horse breaks out and finds his way to the home of
Colonel Martin,
who plays a much greater part in Brenda’s life than she could ever
have imagined.
Bibliography -
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