Pamela Macgregor Morris

Pamela Macgregor-Morris was born in London in 1925. When she was 5, her family bought a weekend house near Goodwood. Pamela acquired a pony and was ‘hooked on the horse’ for life. In 1946, the family moved to Dartmoor, where Not Such a Bad Summer is set. There Pamela wrote her first books, as well as starting to write for Horse and Hound. She carried on her journalistic career by becoming assistant to The Times’ equestrian and polo correspondent John Board, whom she succeeded in 1956. She bred hunters before running a stud of riding ponies with her husband. Pamela Macgregor-Morris had wide-ranging interests: her books include titles on circuses, the

Pamela Macgregor-Morris wrote 8 pony books. Lionel Edwards illustrated most of them: Sheila Rose did Not Such a Bad Summer, and Clear Round is not illustrated. Her pony book career spanned 20 years, and covered most of the genre: the horse telling the tale of its life; earning a living through horses and the classic holiday story.

Lucky Purchase
Gryphon, 1949, illus Lionel Edwards
This snippet is taken from the opening of Lucky Purchase: “...if only she needn’t ever see another pony again, much less have to ride one. The trouble with Jane was that, ever since she could walk, she had had horses rammed down her throat until she was heartily sick and tired of them. Her father was honorary secretary of the West Sussex, her mother was known throughout the county as a bold and straight rider to hounds, and life was just one round of horses – hunting in the winter, showing in the summer, with point-to-point racing and breeding thrown in for good measure. How she hated it all!”

Lucky Purchase is that very rare thing: a pony book about a girl who does not like horses at all. Pamela Macgregor-Morris must have seen many of these poor children, dragged along in the wake of family enthusiasm, without any attention paid to what they actually wanted at all. In the end, Jane does develop a love for horses, but she does it absolutely on her own terms.

- the first edition states it was published in 1927, but this is a mistake as PMM was only 2 at the time! The true publication date is 1947. Thanks to Caro Newland for pointing me in the right direction here.