Goodbye Old Friend: A Sad Farewell to the Working Horse

Our relationship with the working horse, which had existed since prehistoric times, reached its peak during the long reign of Queen Victoria. Truly this was the age when the horse was king. On the farms of Britain little moved without horse power and the coming of the railways only increased the number of horses in the country. Yet following the First World War, the Empire of the Horse evaporated, and within a few decades the working horse had disappeared almost entirely from the British landscape.In Goodbye Old Friend, Simon Butler explores the reasons for this change and the effect it has had on our lives. The story follows on from the his bestselling bookThe War Horses in which he describes the fate of the horse during the 1914-18 war, in which over a million horses died on the Western Front alone. Here the author looks in detail at the prominence of the working horse in rural Britain during Victoria