LIBERTY SPECTACLE: ATKINSON IN ACTION

Dorset County Show is excited to welcome, for their first ever appearance in Dorset, Ben Atkinson and his Liberty horses

ATKINSON

Ben Atkinson is a horse trainer and Liberty artiste, well known for his appearances in film and TV, with credits including Victoria, Peaky Blinders and Poldark. The family business, Atkinson Action Horses, is one of the most respected equestrian services companies to the film and television industries, supplying highly trained horses, riders and trainers for a variety of disciplines and stunts.

Ben comes from a long line of horsemen and doesn’t remember learning to ride: ‘it’s like asking people when they learned to walk’. His grandfather left school at 14 to work with heavy horses on the land during World War Two. Ben’s father, Mark, was a dairy farmer who diversified into the equestrian world a few years after Ben was born in the mid-90s.

‘My father was a show jumper, show horse producer and ran a liberty yard and riding school,' says Ben. 'One day we were asked if our riding school horses could be hired to take part in an English Civil War battle re-enactment. Because they'd been prepared by our family’s somewhat unorthodox methods, they excelled – and were immediately booked to take part in a film doing similar work. Things snowballed, and the rest is history. Originally, we just hired horses out for group things – group battles, cavalry and such. Gradually we started providing more lead horses, stunt horses and carriage horses.

'When I was nine, I saw a performance where someone was standing on horses, and I thought that was absolutely amazing. I went straight home, got my white ponies out, and decided I would stand on them. That was the same time I fell in love with liberty work, where we’re working horses without any saddles or bridles, working them completely free. 'When I was 11, my party trick was jumping a five-bar gate with no saddle or bridle for my dad’s friends!'

When Ben was 14, dad Mark was working with English Heritage, which offered sponsorship for Ben to learn from the worldrenowned Cossack trick rider Guido Louis –Ben spent two years learning from him. By the time he was 18, he was performing with his horses at some of the biggest shows in the UK, including Horse of the Year Show.

Interestingly, the horses never cost more than £1,000, Ben says:

‘We’re a business — we can’t be going out and buying horses for £10,000! Most of the time a horse is only worth that because someone else has put the work in – and we can do that ourselves.

'But they don’t arrive looking like much. They tend to find us, actually, because owners have had a difficult time with them — you open the door and they’ll try and flatten you, for example. But the reason we like those horses is because they are the intelligent ones. The thing we look for when adding to our team is an inquisitive mind: we want the horses that can escape from a field, or open their stable doors, the horses that throw buckets over doors or pull rugs off the wall – the ones that have something about them. They have awake eyes that really see the world.

‘We’ve got 45 horses at the moment. One of my main horses is probably Malik, my dapple grey – he is my favourite if I'm forced to pick. He has been mine since he was two weeks old, and he’s travelled the world with me. Having him by my side is like having my little brother and my best friend on every job. He’s a horse with a very busy brain, so he does everything; he does dressage, he works at liberty, he does the stunt work and he does the carriage driving.’

And when they get too old for performing, Ben gives the horses a long and happy retirement.

‘When horses come to us, they come to us for life,’ he says. ‘When they are retired, they’re retired. My biggest fear is if I was to sell and tell the new owner ‘don’t make the horse do tricks’, but then they have a visitor and want to show a trick and they make the horse rear… So they stay with me. They never leave.’ info@porterdodson.co.uk