Before my grandfather, Thomas Haley, joined the Hampshire Regiment in 1914 he drove a baker’s van for local bakery, Lowman’s. In those days, the vans were pulled by horses and the baker’s man and his horse were a team. When the war came, the men weren’t the only ones called up. Thousands of horses were requisitioned too. They were needed, not only for the cavalry, but to move supplies, equipment, guns and ammunition. When the war broke out, the army had just twenty five thousand horses. By the time the armistice was signed in 1918, four hundred and sixty thousand horses and mules had been purchased and shipped to France. The owners had little say in the matter, unless they could prove they needed their animals for essential transport or agriculture, they had to surrender them.
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