After demise of the Royal Show, RASE falls at first hurdle

Judging for the best-in-show classes was disappointingly thin, even for the Horse of The Year qualifier.

I have a bit of history to declare on this one, so I’ll get it out of the way.

Back in the late 1970s, I was a young agricultural correspondent (among other duties) for the Coventry Evening Telegraph – a job title made less incongruous in a car city because primarily it involved organising all the coverage for the Royal Show at nearby Stoneleigh in Warwickshire.

“The Royal” was one of the foremost agricultural shows in the world – attracting more than 140,000 visitors each year plus more than 1,000 stands including the cream of global farming businesses and organisations. It was a show I loved so much that once I was back at work within an hour of cutting my hand there badly enough to require a dozen or so stitches in the St John Ambulance pavilion.

But the show failed to survive its wounds so well. Last year, after a series of questionable decisions that reflected rather than countered the UK farming industry’s problems, plus some hard luck such as the 2007 show wash-out, came the final Royal Show. I berated the organisers, the Royal Agricultural Society of England, in April last year in a blog pleading simply “Don’t ditch the Royal Show”.

So that’s the history.

At the end of the week where the Royal Show would traditionally have been staged, the former National Agricultural Centre (now Stoneleigh Park) was home this weekend to the first three-day Royal Festival of the Horse – billed as “spectacular mix of equine competition, display and entertainment featuring the world’s top riders and personalities will keep the whole family enthralled”.

I spent many happy years riding horses round the former deer park next to the Royal Showground, and still ride now more than 40 years on – so I was prepared to give the festival the benefit of the doubt.

What a shame the RASE bet on a winner and ended up with a lame old nag.

The crowds were way below stallholders’ expectations – and it will be hard work getting any of them back next year. Many of the visitors who paid £20 per one-day ticket were dismayed to be faced with another £20 charge for covered grandstand seating, £5 for a programme – and a further £15 for evening seminars on “natural horsemanship” in the Parelli Pavilion.

The cash cow, if you’ll excuse the agricultural metaphor, was milked to exhaustion. The result was epitomised by general sadness for the Pony Club youngsters whose colourful Bollywood musical ride was performed before a largely empty grandstand on Saturday morning.

A wash-and-brush-up for the heavy horses. A pity folk missed their highlight display when it ran early.

But the RASE had forgotten many of the other lessons it had learned in running the Royal Show. The layout lacked cohesion on the huge showground, with tacky building-site-type fences marking out-of-bounds areas while there were huge gaps between various areas. One key event, the carriage display by the heavy horses on Saturday afternoon, even ran early – an unforgivable error when you consider the keenness among the thin crowds to see such a key highlight.

And there were astoundingly few signs around the broader area, a fact not lost on stallholders complaining of poor marketing and a lack of local awareness.

I confess I still had a happy day watching some magnificent horses from the tiniest Shetlands through the whole gamut of native breeds to the mighty Shires. But the puny numbers watching a qualifying class for the Horse of The Year Show were dismaying and bode ill for any future.

After some confusion among locals a little while ago about the RASE and plans for an eco-town – plans that seem to have gone away – the society now faces another distraction. The planned high-speed London-Birmingham rail link would run across its traditional car parks.

The rail line would also have a devastating effect on the neighbouring village of Stareton, which incidentally houses the headquarters of The British Horse Society.

The society had the sense to move from the Royal Showground more than a decade ago. I suspect it’s a distancing (however small) that the BHS might not regret after the past weekend.

* I shall send the link for this blog to the press officers for The Festival of Horse and carry any statement here.

* Martin King (@making54) is Online Editor of The Independent.

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