Leslie Howard Begins His Love of Horses

[Leslie Howard]

Leslie Howard had a very active imagination and used it to begin writing plays and stories at a young age. He wrote his first play, in Latin, by the time he was 13 years old. Young Leslie's drama was presented at the Christmas pageant at his school. His mother encouraged her son, but his
father definitely disapproved. Mr. Steiner thought his son was wasting his time and Leslie's mother and father argued over it on more than one occasion. But Leslie was not daunted and formed an amateur theater company, The Upper Norwood Dramatic Club, with a couple of his friends, Fred Buser and Fred Mitchell, and began to produce and perform in his own plays and the plays of others in a hall near his home. Leslie would have been happy to continue writing, producing and performing, allowing his father to support him, but as fathers do, Leslie's dad finally put his foot down and Leslie was forced to take up a job as a bank clerk, a job his father secured for him.

The job was boring and his math skills so poor that when war arrived in 1914 Leslie was eager to sign up. He and his friend from his dramatic club, Fred Mitchell, proceeded to the recruiting office where they found two lines: Infantry and Calvary. For Fred Mitchell the choice was obvious as neither of them had ever ridden a horse. Mitchell headed to the line marked infantry, but Howard stopped him. "What? And walk?" Howard asked his friend. "When you could ride?" "But I can't," Mitchell replied. "Well, nor can I. But I'm jolly well not going to walk," said Leslie, and he proceeded to queue up at the end of the line marked calvary.

In the words of his son, Ronald Howard, in Trivial Fond Records:

"The next day, mounting an enormous charger, he was swiftly deposited in a sprawling heap on the ground and heard for the first time the classic calvary sergeant's question: 'Who told you to dismount?'"

Howard, Leslie, ed. with Ronald Howard. Trivial Fond Records. London: William Kimber & Co Ltd, 1982. ISBN 978-0-7183-0418-8.

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