The decline of the Suffolk Horse
A hundred years ago there were thousands of Suffolk horses. Now we have 70 breeding females, so it is an excessively rare breed. In 1963, only twelve foals were born and the breed was in the hands of five people. If it wasn’t for those five people of course the breed would have become extinct. We rely on people who wish to keep them as a hobby, and without those people the breed would become extinct.
East Anglia was the prime place for working horses before the Second World War. There were large arable farms and a lot of them had forty or sixty horses working on them. But because they were big farms and were relatively level the early tractors were able to work on these farms. Once mechanisation came in these horses disappeared at a dramatic rate. All of a sudden there were so many being sold, there was no outlet for them other than to the slaughter houses. So farms sent off forty horses in a day and they were all slaughtered. The other breeds of big horses, such as the Shire and the Clydesdale, were largely employed on smaller farms perhaps in Wales and in Scotland. They didn’t have the money to buy tractors at that time, and the land wasn’t particularly suitable for early tractors either, so the decline was much less gradual. So as those two breeds declined it was much easier to pick them up and start again, but the Suffolk dropped so dramatically it’s been extremely difficult to build those numbers up again from the very low levels of the early 1960s.

Horses as a species are very inefficient reproducers of themselves. They have a very long gestation period and are seasonal breeders. The mares also have a uterus which is rather fragile. So if you take these things together with a horse that has got very low in numbers indeed, it’s a very difficult job to build those numbers up.

What other breeds are unique to Suffolk?

Suffolk is renowned for something called the Suffolk Trinity - the Suffolk horse, the red pole cow and the Suffolk sheep. The Suffolk sheep is a huge world-wide breed with probably millions of them all over the world so that’s not a rare thing. There’s also the large black pig which is an interesting creature, because that appears to have been developed in Suffolk and in Cornwall almost at the same time. So these two large black pigs were developed in two very distant areas and in the 1920s the breeders in Suffolk decided they would create a breed with of something which until then had been more of a type, and three or four of them got together and brought up a train load of black pigs from Cornwall and they amalgamated the two in east Anglia and made the large black pig. So that’s the fourth breed of Suffolk.

Are we in real danger of losing any of England’s rare breeds for good?
The Suffolk is one about which we’re very worried about. The Suffolk Horse Society now has 640 members and the membership goes up all the time. The vast majority of those people don’t have Suffolks, they’re just very keen to be involved in saving something which is really so important. In my lifetime I’ve taken photographs of the last Lincoln curly coat pigs that ever existed on a farm in Lincolnshire where there were the Lincoln curly coat pigs, Lincoln red cattle, the Percheron horse which really was the heavy horse breed of that area and the Lincoln sheep. But the Lincoln curly coat pig disappeared very shortly after I photographed them. There was the Norfolk horn sheep which was created by crossing the Norfolk horn sheep with the South Down, which is really the sheep of Sussex, but which was perfected in Cambridge. Those two breeds were amalgamated to form the Suffolk. But I have photographs of the last pure Norfolk horn sheep.

What can people who would like to get more involved in trying to help preserve the Suffolk horse do?
We welcome as many people as possible to come and help us one way or another. There are all sorts of ways they can do it. If they just join the society then that is of huge importance to us because our membership provides a great deal of financial support, and a great deal of moral support which is very important at times as well. Of course we’re also very keen to have new breeders, so anybody who has the land and the inclination to do it. we’d be very pleased indeed. It is of course a great commitment, it’s not so much the cost, I have two of my own and it’s not exactly cheap to keep them but it’s not that expensive either. I could spend far more money playing golf or going sailing or whatever. But it is the commitment. Mine come in every single night, they’re fed twice a day and someone has to do it day in day out. So if I’m away someone else has to do it. Now, as long as you have that commitment and you have somewhere to keep it, anybody who kept one would get a huge amount of pleasure out of these animals, because they’re such nice things to keep. When we meet together at the Suffolk punch spectacular, that’s a huge pleasure, for everyone whether they own a horse or not.

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