Saddlechariot History

I never had much in common with Ancient Sumerian society until my mother gave Minimul Henry the Fifth to my two (oh those happy days, there are four of them now) girls. Henry, as he is called when I am not using bad language, is a failed American Miniature Horse. Despite paperwork to say he is only going to be 34" tall, he obstinately remains 41". Too big to be a miniature but still too small for an adult to ride, the only answer to keeping him fit and occupied was to drive him. This is where the Sumerian connection comes in. Here I am a grown man with an animal too small to ride; Sumeria was a civilisation where all animals were too small to ride. The answer in both cases is a chariot.

At the time I didn't know it. I never set out to build a chariot, I just wanted a safe simple vehicle designed for an adult to drive a small pony. I looked at the exercise carts and other vehicles available on the market and was unimpressed. They look great on a horse or even a decent sized pony but just didn't seem right on a small pony. In addition, they didn't look safe to drive solo, and I thought my 17 stone was quite enough for Henry. I have since learned that Henry for all his faults, and they are myriad, has power to spare.

My first three vehicles looked lethally dangerous so I let Kate, my wife, try them. I was dead right, they weren't safe. In fact Kate turned over the first vehicle, a three wheeler within the first 300 yards. But my first Saddlechariot changed all that. I let Kate check it out just to see if it was as good as it looked. She survived a walk and a trot so I suggested she should try a canter. "No, it's your go!" she said. The first horse or pony drawn vehicle I ever drove was a revelation, and I was cantering within 5 minutes redesigning frantically as I went.

The wheel bearings were lousy, and it snaked like mad, seat height adjustment was a nightmare and a bare steel seat isn't frantically comfortable. In addition my knees disliked the angle so much that while I could drive perfectly well I couldn't walk or stand for half an hour after driving..

I thought it was just a fun vehicle, but everyone who saw it, said it was a chariot. So I started looking at chariot history and discovered I had indeed built a chariot, to be specific a straddlecar used between 2,800BC and 2,300BC in Sumeria and Akkad. Since Kate didn't like the name straddlecar, Kate and I invented the word Saddlechariot to describe our vehicle. To add to the tribulations of an inventor, the blacksmith who built the first few Saddlechariots for us, decided to register my design in his name. To avoid paying lawyers more than I had to, I redesigned the whole vehicle from scratch, so no vestige of my first vehicle remains in the Saddlechariot of today.

The chariot connection remained. All my design work has been done round Henry and if you build a vehicle for a small pony, you build a chariot. I have just designed and built two versions. The second version is faster, stronger, lighter, smaller, more adaptable, there is no comparison.

During the vehicle redesign I started to build my own harness. Most small pony harness seemed to be horse harness scaled down but this doesn't produce the best small pony harness. Ponies are not the same shape as horses. A breast harness which is commonly used for carriage driving should be fitted so it lies above the point of the shoulder and below the windpipe. Unfortunately in Shetlands particularly the windpipe is level with or even below the point of the shoulder.

I am not going into the details of harness design at this stage but when I put my first collar on Henry, while I was still using the early, and very heavy, Saddlechariot, Henry cut loose with pure joy. I could get extended paces, he was enjoying himself and I had become a serious chariot designer.

Six years of living, breathing, eating and driving chariots for me and my incredibly long suffering family, has finally produced a vehicle which allows small ponies to have serious fun. I can and do take the vehicle anywhere because you can do things in a chariot you just can't do in a carriage. The chariot is back and the future is fun.

From 3,000BC to 600BC the chariot was the weapon of mass destruction, the basis of long distance communication and the Ferrari/Lamborghini/Aston Martin of its time. If you wanted to go fast, a chariot was the only answer. 2,400 years of the land speed record and the history is forgotten, dead and buried.

If you mention chariots the response is Ben Hur or Gladiator depending on your generation. And in England they go on about Boadicea and scythes on the wheels. This is where practical history comes in. I have used a scythe, and to go through grass requires a precise and accurate swing with the blade at the perfect angle. Any system where over half the time the scythe is actually facing backwards doesn't stand a chance. If the blades were fixed and would go through foliage, they would have been used for cutting hay. I have driven chariots cross country not far from Boadicea's great slaughter at Colchester and I wouldn't get far with scythes.

Boadicea, Ben Hur and Gladiator are all from the era after the chariot was redundant. The original chariot was a military vehicle, communication system and most important and frequently neglected, sheer fun. To a civilisation without rideable horses, chariots were the ultimate buzz. The Saddlechariot still is.