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To find the identity of who made your horse, you need to be a detective! Very few horses bore a makers name but some chose to put it on the swing stand. Over the years it has probably been painted over and is no longer readable, so we must look elsewhere. Each maker chose a turning pattern for their stand post and as a rule this stayed basically the same throughout the life of the company. Small changes such as depth of cut, deletion of a small step, thickness of post are but some clues as to period of manufacture. Change in the colour of the saddle cloth or the braid edging can pinpoint a production period, as can the number of screws in the clamp plate. The shape of the plate itself can identify the maker.
It was not uncommon for a maker to paint an opposition horse with its own dapple pattern and harness it like its own. Logical when you think about it. What maker would hold stocks of an opposition’s harness in the likelihood of it being asked to restore it. Australian makers didn’t hold stocks of previous production materials and would replace the dapple and harness pattern with whatever was in vogue at the time. Many times I have found ‘factory restored’ horses to be many years older than the harness and dapple pattern would suggest.
Early English horses (Lines, Ayres) often have the side-saddle peg holes plugged up with corks, possibly because the owner didn’t know it was a side-saddle model or it stopped children from dropping articles into them that rattled when the horse was ridden. Knives, clothes pegs, (I found 36 in one horse) screw-drivers, and marbles are the most common found. The holes were phased out around 1912 when girls were allowed to ride astride!
Each maker tended to carve a particular breed but was influenced by the person who taught them. The early Roebuck post (1885-1934) and that of Ayres (1880-1914) are very similar, as is the saddle and construction. Both used a ‘riveted washer to retain the swing iron. A genealogy search shows a Roebuck horse maker in 1720, so who taught who? Is the body box of ‘lid-on-top-of-sides’ construction or ‘lid-inside-the-sides’, are the teeth an insert or carved as part of the head? Are the legs fixed to the body by dowel or screw? Are the eyes glass or just large nails? Do you suspect it is a ‘reproduction’? These are only a few of the questions that need to be answered.
As a general rule, ‘Fairground type Carousel’ type horses are not suitable to mount on a swing stand, as their legs are not only too close together at the hoof but the leg joints are not designed to carry weight. This type of horse is suspended on a pole and the weight is carried on the belly. The width at hoof is narrower than the shoulder so the hoof does not touch and break when they are stacked shoulder to shoulder on a vehicle transporting them to the next location. Many have an elongated body to take 2 riders and this is difficult to balance on the swing type stand. |
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Identification |
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Rocking Horse Man |