After yet more digging for evidence of horse collisions I’ve found some new examples and more sources for some that I already knew about. Maybe in a perfect world I wouldn’t need to do this because everyone would just accept that shock charges are a stupid idea (as I’ve argued in lots of blog posts before, although I’ve changed my mind about some of the details), but maybe a world in which everyone accepted things without evidence wouldn’t really be all that perfect. I’m increasingly aware that old arguments against shock (eg John Keegan in The Face of Battle) are just as prone to woolly thinking, special pleading and vague appeals to “common sense” as the arguments for it. Instead of appealing to the authority of one historian’s common sense to disprove another historian’s common sense I need to appeal to the authority of science and real-world examples. Speculation about what “would” happen looks pretty worthless next to video footage of what did happen. In any case I find this research interesting and fun (despite the fact that it focuses on horrible things happening to horses and people!).

First, a new one that I haven’t mentioned before. Thursday 16 June 1994 (ladies’ day) at Royal Ascot. In the fifth race (the Ribblesdale Stakes), Papago ridden by Mick Kinane was trailing the field at the furlong post when a drunk spectator (James Florey) ran across course. The horse ran into him, knocked him down and rolled over, unseating the jockey. Although horse and jockey ended up on the floor they weren’t injured. Florey was taken to hospital. Initial reports said that his condition was serious, and he was later said to have suffered cuts and bruises, but apparently the only long-term result of the incident was that he was warned off British racecourses for five years by the Jockey Club.

YouTube has BBC footage of the accident in slow motion looking down the course, which gives a good view of what happened. It looks like the horse saw the spectator coming in from his right and tried to duck out to the left but this just kept him going towards the spectator who hadn’t seen the horse and carried on running straight across the track. The horse hit him and tripped over head first. There are also a couple of reports in The Independent from 17 June and 9 September.

A weird thing about this one is that I must have known about it at the time but I’d completely forgotten about it. I was really into racing at that time, watched it on TV whenever I could, and bought the Racing Post quite frequently. I even went to Ascot the day after the accident – I was there when Lochsong won the King’s Stand Stakes. And this was just after I’d started work on my undergraduate dissertation, which was all about cavalry, so it’s not like I wasn’t primed to look out for collisions. It just shows that memories are unreliable.

Churchill Downs, Kentucky, 26 April 2009. During an exercise period at the Kentucky Derby meeting, Doctor Rap unseated his rider and galloped into Raspberry Kiss, who was standing on the track. Raspberry Kiss was knocked over and was later put down because of a broken pelvis (or possibly died of shock just before she was due to be put down – reports are contradictory); Doctor Rap fell on top of her and suffered a bone bruise which will probably stop him from racing again. I tried to find out about this accident last year but things got confusing because many news reports got the names of one or both horses wrong! Thanks to the Thoroughbred Database, which gives pedigrees for thoroughbred horses, I’ve confirmed the correct names of the horses:

• Raspberry Kiss (USA) foaled 2007, by Champali (USA), out of Lucky Sheikh (USA)
• Doctor Rap (USA) foaled 2006, by Smarty Jones (USA), out of Carly’s Crown (USA)

Some sources gave the names as Dr Rap and Raspberry Miss, but there are no records of any thoroughbred racehorses with these names.

NBC Chicago has a video of the accident which gives a good view of what happened. Doctor Rap approached Raspberry Kiss from behind and hit her left side. She fell and rolled over, throwing her jockey off. Doctor Rap came down on top of her and neither horse could get up. They are still lying on the ground at the end of the video, over 30 seconds after the impact. The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) and New York Daily News give reports of the accident which seem to have the facts straight.

Prescott Downs, Arizona, 26 August 2000. I’ve written about this one before but now I have some reports from the Prescott Daily Courier from 30 November 2000 and16 July 2003 giving reliable details. This is the one where Pacific Wind unseated his rider, galloped the wrong way around the track, and collided head on with Lot O Love, ridden by Stacey Burton. Both horses were knocked over and killed, and Burton was in coma for 23 days and suffered permanent brain damage. That’s what happens when you maximize the shock of impact.

Finally, I came across a YouTube video of an accident in Turkey. I haven’t been able to find any background information about this, and it’s not likely that I will because there isn’t much to go on. It seems to be some kind of display related to the history of the Ottomans. The grey horse gallops into the black horse which is standing still. The grey is knocked over and doesn’t get up. I’d guess it probably had to be put down. The video shows horse and rider lying on the ground for nearly two minutes after the collision, and at the end they don’t look like they’re going to get up and walk away. The black horse did walk away and doesn’t seem to be too badly hurt. Because the accident is a long way from the camera, and the quality of the video isn’t too good, it’s hard to see exactly what happened. It looks like the black horse probably regained its balance, but it’s very clear that its rider was knocked off very suddenly. I don’t think anyone could have sat on through that.

So, more proof that crashing horses into each other, or into people, is a bad idea. Don’t do it kids…

Back in December 2006 I posted about cavalry charges. Inspired by John Keegan and Frank Tallett, I argued that the idea that cavalry horses crashed into each other in a “shock” charge was completely spurious because horses won’t willingly crash into a solid object, and if they could be made to the outcome would be disastrous because they would be killed or seriously injured by the impact. Physics and common sense are both on my side, but empirical evidence of horse collisions is very difficult to get. The best I could do back then was the footage of Anmer hitting Emily Davison in the 1913 Derby.

Now Peter at That’s Pretty Lame has found exactly what I needed: YouTube footage of two horses colliding head-on at a full gallop. According to the commentary this happened at Prescott Downs, Arizona on 26 August 2000. Both horses were killed and jockey Stacy Burton suffered severe brain injury. I shouldn’t be pleased about such a tragedy, but it’s the perfect empirical evidence to prove my point.

If only I’d thought of searching YouTube for horse collisions, but I assumed they were so rare that I wouldn’t find one. In fact that isn’t the only one. This is another – it looks like the collision is at a slower speed than the Prescott Downs accident but both horses are brought down. In this one the collision is at a very slow canter – looks like no-one was hurt but the riders only just stayed on. This is about as close as you can get to knocking the enemy out of the way with your momentum, but I think it supports my point that the effects of a collision are equally bad for both parties (just as Isaac Newton predicted – who’d have thought it?). So the bay barged past the grey and kept going, but if this was a cavalry charge I don’t think you could really say that the bay won. Both sides would be disordered and neither would have gained an advantage.

This is the first part of an analysis of the way cavalry fought in battles. It mostly focuses on the English Civil War, but I’ll be drawing some examples from other places and periods. To start with, I’m going to discuss a concept known as “shock”, which is very frequently mentioned in histories of cavalry tactics.

There are many variants of this concept, but they all generally imply that cavalry charges resulted in a collision between two tightly packed bodies of men and horses, with the losers ridden down by the speed and/or weight of the winners. This kind of thinking is very noticeable in one of the most recent military histories of the civil war, Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (2004; ISBN: 0582772818). This is how they describe the Swedish tactics associated with Gustavus Adolphus (p. 34):

The charge was always made in a tightly packed formation… Close order turned the whole squadron into a single missile, maximising the shock of impact and preventing individual horses from turning away before contact.

The context makes it clear that Wanklyn and Jones believe this is how it actually happened. They use an even more emphatic metaphor to describe Oliver Cromwell’s tactics (p. 272, my emphasis):

At the next engagement, at Gainsborough two months later, both sides charged, but Cromwell’s men, although surprised, were able to deploy quickly from column into line while ‘keeping close order’, that is each man keeping cheek by jowl with his neighbour, thus creating an equine battering ram that would gain momentum as the horse picked up speed in the charge.

Time for my favourite Wick Murray quote again:

There is only one problem with this theory. It is wrong.

It’s really quite worrying that anyone could be repeating those old myths and cliches in 2004, because John Keegan convincingly refuted the whole idea of shock in The Face of Battle (first published 1976; I’m working from the 1978 Penguin paperback, ISBN: 0140048979). Jeremy Black has a point when he says we need to move beyond Keegan’s horizons, but there are apparently some military historians who haven’t even caught up with him yet. (I realise that I’m appealing to a metanarrative of progress in which some points of view are delegitimated just because they’re old, but in subsequent posts I’ll be showing that the shock issue isn’t really a simple binary opposition between new and old.)

In his analysis of Waterloo, Keegan points out that getting two solid walls of cavalry to collide with each other at speed would have been impossible for a number of reasons (pp. 147-151). Although I’m now suspicious of his appeal to “common sense” (at best intellectually lazy, and at worst a cover for insidious ideology), some rational deductions based on my empirical experiences (which include years of riding horses and watching equestrian sports, as well as studying documents which recount early modern battles) lead me to the same conclusion. Even at the best of times it’s incredibly difficult to arrange large numbers of horses into a solid straight line. When horses are packed close together and under stress, they are likely to kick and bite each other or back away. The more stressful the situation, and the more highly strung the horses, the worse it gets. The start of the Aintree Grand National, especially the notorious fiasco of 1993, would be a good example here, but I can’t find any video footage online. While 40 horses is a large field for a horse race, it’s a trivial number compared to civil war armies. The New Model Army had an establishment of 6,000 cavalry (not including officers), divided into regiments of 600, which were then divided into troops of 100. Imagine trying to get all of them into textbook formations.

You might get your horses standing more or less still in something like a line while waiting for the order to advance, but things would get even more tricky once you started to move as you would have to keep every horse going dead straight at exactly the same speed. From the mid-eighteenth century well-drilled infantry were capable of doing this by marching in step to the beat of a drum, but cavalry almost certainly didn’t have the necessary degree of control over their horses. Well trained horses and riders can do dressage to music, but getting that kind of skill and experience in a force of 6,000 on top of weapons training and with constant attrition seems unlikely, and being able to carry it out under fire seems even more unlikely. Terrain would further disrupt charges. Going uphill would tire the horses more quickly, while walls, hedges, ditches, sunken roads, furze bushes, and even rabbit holes were all potential obstacles. Many horses might be tired from marching, poorly fed, and suffering from diseases.

Assuming the two bodies of cavalry even got near each other and were going at any kind of speed, shock obsessed cavalrymen could have tried to steer their horses towards enemy horses in order to batter them down. But horses aren’t like cars or tanks, they are living creatures with minds of their own. They tend to have a strong and justifiable fear of crashing into solid objects, causing them to try and lunge away from threatening objects or stop dead before they get to them (I once had to go to hospital with concussion because of this, but anyway…). In any case, if horses could be made to crash into each other head on, it would just end up with both horses dead or crippled (which basically means being shot anyway). More speed or weight wouldn’t increase your chances of survival, it would just make the collision more deadly for both sides. This bit isn’t conjecture: it’s basic Newtonian physics.

The idea that fleeing infantry could be “ridden down” is no more plausible. When Anmer collided with Emily Davison during the 1913 Derby, he fell over (watch film of the incident). His jockey was injured in the fall, and the horse was lucky to escape with only bruised shins. This is not really what you want to happen to your cavalry if you’re trying to win a battle.

Considering that the best case outcome would be equal losses on both sides, shock starts to look undesirable as well as unattainable. Maybe you could pursue an attritional doctrine of a horse for a horse, but that would be counterproductive. During the First Civil War, troop horses usually cost between £5 and £10 each (some were even more valuable), with saddles starting out at £2.10s in 1642 and falling to 15s by 1646. In contrast the price of an infantry musket went from £1 to 10s in the same period (see Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death, 2000, ISBN: 0750914963, p.72). Frank Tallett wasn’t exaggerating when he said that cavalry were “ruinously expensive” (War and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1992, ISBN: 0415024765). Civil war armies didn’t always have the money to pay for enough remounts, and schemes to get them without paying proved unsustainable. Losses of horses from gunshots, disease, starvation, exhaustion, lameness, and theft were difficult enough to make up.

You have to wonder how many people with military experience actually believed that shock could and should happen. Was it just something that was made up by theorists who were out of touch with reality? In the next post I’ll be looking at how drill books said cavalry should fight.

Bibliography

1. Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death (Sutton, 2000).
2. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (Penguin Books Ltd, August 1978).
3. Frank Tallett, War and Society in Early Modern Europe (Routledge: London, 1992).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).