FEATURE
Gypsy Lore to Flying Jockey to Horse Herbalist Angela Davison has worked all her life with horses writes JANE CAMENS, of the woman who now runs a unique hair assessment business and was the third fully licensed female jockey in Australia.
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n the north of England where I lived we had gypsies camp every year on the village green,” Angela recalls. “We were told not to talk to them but they fascinated me. I used to follow the old women who went early in the morning to the ditches and hedgerows to select herbs and flowers. They’d make them up into a brew and give them to horses they bought for dogging money at the sales. After a few weeks of brew the horses were transformed, put back through the sales and sold for a high price. That’s how they made money and clearly that’s when the seeds of herbal medicine were planted in me.” Angela went to work at a breaking and training stable for show jumpers while she was still at school. “I was mucking out 20 boxes before breakfast,” she says. “They threw me on every kind of horse, and that was a huge learning curve. I rode many difficult horses plus we were out on the jump circuit. It was a fabulous experience for over four years. I loved it.” Later, Angela enrolled as a working pupil - “slave labour” as she describes it - at a dressage academy. That wasn’t such a
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good experience she says. “I was allowed to bring my own talented JA jump pony, Charles, with me, but he was no dressage horse. ‘Captain M’, the principal, taught all his lessons on a poor mare who had an enormous split in her front hoof. At one point she was very sore, so Captain M decided to give me a dressage lesson on Charles.” But Captain M found it difficult to give Angela a dressage lesson on the fiery Charles. “He dragged me off my pony and got on him himself. He was on the ground in under six seconds!” That saw Charles banished to the stable, and not even allowed to be led out for over a week. Angela wasn’t supposed to be allowed off the property but one night she sneaked out and called her old teacher at the jumping stable to come and get her. “I went and tied hessian bags around Charlie’s hooves and at two in the morning we sneaked out never to return. Good riddance to Captain M,” she says firmly.
HORSEVIBES MAGAZINE - MARCH 2019
But on her return to the jump circuit she unfortunately got badly kicked. While she was convalescing, she came to Australia to see her father and to have a look around. She laughs: “I came with a small bag, but I packed 12 cans of hairspray into it. I thought Australia couldn’t possibly have hairspray!” She expected to see kangaroos in the street, she says, laughing her own ignorance. “All I knew for sure was that it was hot and you wore shorts. I was a bit disappointed on flying into Sydney seeing all the industrial area, not a
