Mar2509small.jpg I received the following email from my friend in Australia. 

“Winnie, you tell me about these things you are teaching the boys… you know when I was a teenager my dad helped a very destitute man named Jim Wilton who had a team of performing horses and white German Shepherd dogs. Dad allowed him to put the horses in our paddocks until he got his life more together. Now Winnie, it has all come back to me. He actually had Tim, The Wonder Horse walking along an uplifted wooden plank placing his feet in line like a tight rope walker all the while carrying a flag in his teeth.

He had a team of horses who did the following… I saw it at a show and was mesmerised… a horse had a dummy rider on his back. He made a jump over a hurdle. The “rider” fell off. Then four horses galloped over with a stretcher or gurney, as you would call it, and another horse or two I forget ,,,,,maybe two, then picked up the “rider”, put “him” on the gurney, carried him to a horse-drawn cart and placed “him” in the “ambulance”.

J.D. Wilton also wrote a book which I am trying to find for you as I have had it for over half a century! Funny how in those days this man made a pittance travelling from showground to showground with his animals, and while he later got going with a place near Sydnay I think he still died as a very “poor” man ……where money was concerned!”