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_ REVEALED: The full extraordinary story of the Household Cavalry horse rampage - and how the fallout has gone down like a lead balloon in the military and led to calls for the monarchy to be abolished
_ REVEALED: The full extraordinary story of the Household Cavalry horse rampage - and how the fallout has gone down like a lead balloon in the military and led to calls for the monarchy to be abolished
It was an incident that appalled and concerned the watching public in equal measure. Terrified horses from the Household Cavalry bolting through
But how did it happen? Who's to blame? And can anyone stop it occurring again? GUY ADAMS investigates...
Spooking the King's horses
It's around 8.20am on Wednesday, and a detachment of seven horses plus six soldiers from the Household Cavalry are clip-clopping through London's Belgravia on an 'extended exercise' to prepare for Trooping the Colour, the first big ceremonial event of the summer, which kicks off with the so-called Major General's Review on the first Saturday in June.
The small group, who like all of their mounted colleagues are based at nearby
One of the towering properties, which these days change hands for upwards of £15million, is owned by Jeremy Peace, a 67-year-old former stockbroker best known for his stint as chairman of West Bromwich Albion football club. And he is currently employing builders to excavate a single-storey mega-basement and renovate his swimming pool.
To carry out the work, contractors must use a sort of conveyor belt to take rubble up from below ground level and then transport it, several feet above head height, across the pavement. It's then dumped into a lorry owned by a firm called A40 Grab Hire.
At the exact moment the horses are passing the property, a heavy load reportedly containing large pieces of concrete falls into the bed of the truck with a deafening clang.
All seven horses are spooked and five attempt to bolt.
Four of the terrified creatures, later named as Vida, Quaker, Trojan and Tennyson, manage to break loose and charge towards the traffic-clogged streets of rush-hour London.
Bloodbath in Belgravia
The bolting horses head round Wilton Crescent to the north-east corner of Belgrave Square, where a taxi driver's dashcam video shows Vida, a mare who like all grey horses in the Household Cavalry is trained to carry State trumpeters, careering across a zebra crossing before bucking her rider off.
She then crashes into a row of scooters and e-bikes, falling to the ground and cutting her chest, before getting up and following the other horses past the embassies of Malaysia, Turkey and Trinidad and Tobago, where they leave hoof-marks in the Tarmac.
'There was horse blood all over bikes and the pavement,' said a passer-by. 'I saw the white horse run past covered in blood. It all happened so fast, in the blink of an eye.'
Accounts of what exactly occurred next differ, but three of the horses, of which two appear to still be mounted, are next pictured roughly half a mile away, when they suddenly emerge from a quiet side street into Buckingham Palace Road.
Smash at the station
Several eye-witnesses watch in horror as a rider is tossed to the ground at a busy intersection before a horse crashes into a silver Mercedes people carrier-style taxi parked outside the four-star Clermont Hotel next to Victoria Station.
'The rider fell back on this little middle bit of the road,' said one, claiming that a female soldier riding one of the other two horses then managed to dismount by grabbing onto a set of railings.
'The horses were injured obviously from the glass that they had broken. [The injured soldier] was laying there on the ground. He looked like he hurt himself pretty bad. It was terrible.'
A security guard from a nearby store told reporters: 'Unfortunately the soldier was thrown off and got trampled on. The horse ran off covered in blood.'
Attention swiftly turned to the casualty, with bystanders running to administer first aid.
'Everybody panicked and started screaming. It sounded like a car crash. And then the soldier hit the ground and screamed out,' recalled a local construction worker. 'When the ambulances arrived they set up a tent around him because they had to cut his trousers off. He was unconscious when he first fell, with his head on the ground at an angle.'
Chaos grips the capital
All three of the horses then smash into a parked bus belonging to a company called Big Bus. Its driver later recalled: 'I saw two horses without riders gallop away. One rider managed to calm his horse down.'
Another onlooker told reporters, however, that the individual who detained the animal was merely a bystander.
'They were running down the street at a very high speed. It was very scary.
'I heard a loud noise from further down the road as the horse ran into the bus. Two others then also hit it and fell before getting up and running off.
'The first one just stood there like it was stunned. A man came over and guided it out of the road and calmed it down. I was very impressed because he wasn't in any uniform. He just knew how to deal with the horse.'
Either way, the remaining two horses, Vida and Quaker, who are by now rider-less, run past Buckingham Palace, and begin an extraordinary journey. They speed down the Mall towards Trafalgar Square and head east up The Strand, covering almost two miles in just five minutes. As they make their way around Aldwych at the end of the Strand, Quaker, the black horse, collides with a taxi next to a coffee shop.
It is here that photographs showing the grey, Vida, with her chest covered in blood, are taken.
Both animals continue down Fleet Street, hitting a pedestrian on the corner of Chancery Lane. An ambulance is called and the person is taken to hospital.
The two horses are spotted again at Tower Bridge, where an astonished driver photographs the galloping duo, and then reappear at 8.55am, near St George's Leisure Centre, Shadwell. A little further on, in Tower Hamlets, they finally run out of steam and stop on Glamis Road, near the Rotherhithe Tunnel, almost six miles from where the incident began.
Here, the police are finally able to capture the two horses. Footage shows Vida being ushered into a horsebox, seemingly lame.
The injuries
During the roughly 12-week period when incoming members of the Household Cavalry's mounted regiment are taught to ride at their training stables in Windsor, they also learn how best to fall off a horse.
This part of a new recruit's training involves repeatedly launching oneself from one of the hefty creatures (which measure at least 16.2 hands, or 1.68 metres, at their shouders) onto a blue crash-mat, rolling so that one's shoulders take the brunt of the impact and a rider's head is protected.
That's the theory, at least. In practice, even the most expert horseman or woman will struggle to safely extricate themselves from the saddle of a spooked horse. Particularly when that horse is running through the Tarmac streets of a major city.
It was something of a miracle that none of the four soldiers unseated during Wednesday's incident appear to have suffered serious injuries.
One was completely unharmed, another swiftly discharged after being taken to hospital. The remaining two were kept in overnight for monitoring, in keeping with the precautionary protocol for anyone who has received a head injury.
Sadly, the same is not true of the horses.
Two of the four who bolted but were initially recovered are said to be fine. However, Quaker and Vida are in what Defence Minister James Cartlidge has described as a 'relatively very serious condition'. Both were operated on during Wednesday night and one remains in an equine hospital.
The greatest damage of all, however, may end up being to reputations.
The fallout
A rackety collection of animal rights zealots, anti-monarchy campaigners and old-fashioned attention-seekers lost little time in attempting to weaponise the rush-hour rampage.
'Yet another reason to abolish the Monarchy,' was how an influential republican (and hard-Left trans-rights activist) Robin Hosking put it.
Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner who is also patron of Animal Aid and supporter of Animal Defenders International, announced that 'these horses are held captive as animal slaves to serve the Royal Household Cavalry'. He added: 'They have never known freedom and every aspect of their lives is regimented. SET THEM FREE!'
The headline-prone American animal rights outfit PETA put up a spokesman to argue on TV that the incident ought to lead to the abolition of not only mounted military regiments but also police horses, saying: 'Unlike humans, horses don't choose to be in the military or the police.'
Meanwhile, Animal Rising, an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, launched a petition for Quaker and Vida to be sent to a 'sanctuary'. It already has 11,000 signatories.
Whether going to an animal sanctuary would actually improve their lives is open to question. For horses in the Household Cavalry have, in many ways, drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life.
'These are some of the most pampered mammals anywhere in the world,' is how one former senior officer puts it. 'They also have probably the most interesting lives of any domesticated animal in existence.'
The regiment keeps around 220 horses, with 150 or so in London where they exercise each morning in and around Hyde Park. The remainder are either stabled in Windsor or Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, though they enjoy occasional summer holidays and were last year photographed galloping along a beach in East Lothian.
They are sourced from Ireland, at the age of three or four, with each year's batch given names beginning with a particular letter of the alphabet (like car numberplates).
Though some have their working lives cut short due to respiratory problems (believed to be exacerbated by pollution around their London HQ) and others can go lame from too much walking on Tarmac, most serve until their 20s when they are re-homed by a charity, the Horse Trust.
'If I drop dead tomorrow, I want to come back as a Household Cavalry horse,' is how one insider puts it.
Military muttering
The week's ugly headlines have — perhaps unfairly — been met with a degree of schadenfreude in military circles, where the Household Cavalry often divides opinion.
To fans, the regiment performs a vital duty at key ceremonial events and provides a significant tourist attraction.
Critics, however, regard the Regimental headquarters overlooking Hyde Park as a hotbed of class-based elitism, noting that the patronage of senior royals has allowed it to sidestep some of the financial cuts crippling other parts of our armed forces.
Not helping the organisation's reputation as a finishing school for chinless public schoolboys was an ill-advised recent foray into the world of fly-on-the-wall television.
It saw plummy-voiced commanding officer, Lt Col Matt Woodward, invite a TV documentary crew into the officer's mess, where top brass dine each night in black tie, while members of the proletariat in more junior roles bring drinks on silver trays.
One excruciating scene in the show, The King's Guard, saw Woodward talking viewers through the various types of velvet slippers that he and his colleagues like to wear at the table.
The whole thing is said to have gone down like a lead balloon among the rank-and-file who, according to well-placed sources, were 'letting it be known that the regiment is not an entirely happy ship', even before Wednesday's PR disaster.
Closing the stable door
Given all of the above, preventing a similar tragedy from happening again is now a top priority. The problem, as one insider puts it, is that 'horses are horses'.
'Things like this are highly unusual,' he says. 'Every day, around 150 Household Cavalry horses are exercised in Central London. They go down Horse Guards [Parade] 365 times a year, and aside from the time when the IRA bombed us, I have never seen a significant incident. What happened this week wasn't the fault of the horses, and it certainly wasn't the fault of the riders, so it's difficult to see what could be done differently.'
That said, only four months ago a cyclist on the Broad Walk, a wide Tarmac thoroughfare in Hyde Park, was 'terrified' to see a large riderless bay galloping towards him, followed at some distance by a group of mounted troopers travelling at a canter and looking 'supremely relaxed'.
Sources close to the regiment have dismissed suggestions — doing the rounds online — that the time of year might have exacerbated the incident. While the insider points out that mares can become more flighty in spring as they come into season, he says: 'I don't see how this is relevant here since as far as I am aware only one of the four horses, the grey, was female, and I know for a fact that Quaker is a gelding.'
One possible safety measure would be for younger horses to be withdrawn from service if they do spook during official engagements. Indeed, it was reported this week that Vida, who is five years younger than Quaker, became agitated during last year's Coronation and kicked a soldier in the head.
Although the truth is that almost every horse will be unsettled at some point in their life, particularly if they are surprised by a loud noise.
'Watch a few gun salutes,' says an expert. 'Household Cavalry horses spook quite often, but it generally doesn't cause any issues. You probably get one or two incidents a week happen in Hyde Park that no one ever hears about. So while what happened this week is terrible, it's totally understandable.
'Horses have two natural responses to being frightened: fight or flight, and generally they prefer flight. The tragedy this time was that they just didn't stop.'
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