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their in laws the leeston smiths the conveyance still describes the cottages as recently in the occupation of w fisher and j cook both labouring households had therefore gone by then in 1941 the two elderly leeston smith ladies formalised their interests in the property between themselves walter fisher died in the colchester district that same year the physical transformation of the cottages belongs to this period two elderly ladies accustomed to the substantial house across the green were not likely to move into a pair of labourers cottages while continuing to carry water from a pump and use an earth privy in the garden the most economical explanation is that the first serious plumbing and sanitation were installed around 1939 41 and the conversion of two labourers households into one genteel residence the old well and out house that remain today were simply left behind muriel margaret leeston smith died in 1946 katharine pennington leeston smith died at fishers on 1 may 1950 her probate estate was 13 968 14s 4d substantial money at the time see footnote 1 below her probate address proves that by then the house s had acquired the name it still bears her brother in law colonel john frederick pennington thorburn m c was left the house in her will and moved in with his wife see footnote 2 below his younger brother brigadier general stephen keith thorburn o b e m c lived across the road at malting green house and that was the period during which the greatest changes were effected on this house not only unifying it but going on to more than double the newly single house s size while preserving and maintaining the ancient structure within constructing a tennis court and an automobile garage that stands to this day accessible across the middle of what is now malting green in those days the green had no known owner our friends the round family of birch hall as then lords of the manor of layer de la haye had disclaimed it in 1937 and the lords of the manor of our neighbours at blind knights named for the returning maimed crusaders who had lived there had named it waste land in 1926 it was declared common land in 1973 proprietary possession not ownership was given to the parish council in 1993 and later absolute title by default in 2006 colonel thorburn died in 1958 and the house was purchased by an even more senior army officer and war hero brigadier ord henderson tidbury m c who did works of his own including building at second double doored garage opening on to the green from the other side of the house he died in 1961 from him it went to lieutenant commander kenneth binfield brown d s c of the royal navy and later a director of tate lyle who completed the modern additions building a large car port as well and from him to his widow during that period malting green house passed from the thorburn family to a stockbroker and partner of cazenove co and descendant of the author of king solomon s mines rae haggard lister who lives there to this day 1972 my parents bought fishers from mrs brown in 1972 together with over half of potash field which she divided with a fence accessing her portion via the historic access over malting green in order to tend her herd of a dozen or more holstein friesian cattle meanwhile our larger portion accessed via a gateway on fields farm road variously had sheep horses corn briefly then hay and now wild flowers my parents built a swimming pool but other changes have been cosmetic and negligible by then fishers was recognisably a comfortable country house there is a symmetry in the family which eventually settled here my father clive fiske harrison was born in colchester was educated at nearby felsted school and cambridge university and having moved to london for work bought fishers in 1972 to be close to his parents at aldouron house on mersea island and his siblings in nearby peldon abberton and fingringhoe the following year he left panmure gordon where he worked under ian cameron father of the future prime minister david and founded the stockbroking firm which eventually become fiske plc his coat of arms at the college of heralds is styled harrison of layer de la haye and quarters by descent the arms of the east anglian fiske family the fiskes are deeply rooted in the eastern counties noted as the landowners under the name fisc in norfolk in the domesday book of 1085 at wood dalling and then as lords of the manor in stadhaugh in the parish of laxfield in suffolk by the 1200s as ffyske meanwhile this north essex house has passed through an extraordinary social arc it may have begun under the plantagenets as the compact holding of a woodman in the midst of an immense heath it survived plague enclosure and the disappearance of neighbouring dwellings it became two cottages and as late as 1921 contained twelve people in conditions parliament had just declared intolerable within twenty years it crossed almost instantaneously from agricultural labourers to landed gentry since 1972 it has remained the fiske harrison family home the great irony is that the later house concealed the earlier one almost too successfully fishers was overlooked when layer de la haye s historic buildings were surveyed for listing in 1982 yet inside it the medieval building remains crooked green oak great pegged joists passing braces redundant mortices and all the later centuries did not destroy it they simply accumulated around it a r fiske harrison esq m a oxon m sc lond my parents and family and friends under one of the great poplar trees in the summer of 2016 footnotes 1 for comparison our other residence the garden flat of 114 eaton square in belgravia london sw1 sold for 14 000 at that time although the duke of westminster only sold leases not freeholds when it was a unified house it had been that of sir george smyth baden powell brother of the founder of the boy scouts when i grew up there our upstairs neighbour was damian aspinall the son of the great conservationist gambler and friend of lord lucan john aspinall along with damian s two daughters tansey and freya i had no idea at the time that my cousin by marriage hamish s aunt min musker had been married to john aspinall 2 colonel thorburn s wife was born dorothy melville de chair whose first cousin was the mother of the wife of sir jacob rees mogg mp who was himself so often a guest at lunch in the old boardroom of fiske co incorporating bragg stockdale hall co founded in 1824 and thus the oldest independent stockbroking firm in london when my father was still chairman in the offices at salisbury house in the city and where i remain a director posted in uncategorized leave a reply my latest article in the spectator how the king can help save dartmoor s ponies posted on june 20 2026 by fiskeharrison reply oriiginal article with free registration online here https spectator com article how the king can help save dartmoors ponies the spectator alexander fiske harrison how the king can help save dartmoor s ponies 20 june 2026 rain squalls drifted across their russet face and the heavy slate coloured clouds hung low over the landscape trailing in grey wreaths down the sides of the fantastic hills this was how arthur conan doyle described dartmoor following his visit in june 1901 and that was what i expected to find 125 years after his research for what would become the hound of the baskervilles in its place i found the bright beautiful light of devon in summer revealing a landscape which is almost voluptuously organic an excess of life great trees and stones coated in rich mosses criss crossed with streams and rivers rushing into rapids suitably i was shown dartmoor by a pair of hounds i was tasked with caring for shelka a blond german shepherd who resembles a pretty white wolf and her wildling daughter bolero whose father was a carpathian wolf dog hybrid my guides on dartmoor observe the wolf colouration on bolero closest as we walked among the herds of sheep and cattle in that sunlit wilderness there was another shyer less civilised animal standing in small groups eyeing me and my lupo canine companions they intrigued both the horse breeder in me and the former biology student these are the semi wild dartmoor hill ponies these creatures have lived here for thousands of years but they are facing an existential threat thanks to natural england a quango that could consign these animals to history note the truth is that there is only one truly wild horses ponies being horses under 4ft 9in at the shoulder left in the world przewalski s horse which is its own species equus ferus rather than the domesticated equus caballus and thus the ponies of dartmoor are classified by biologists as feral like the brumby and the dingo in australia or the mustang and the carolina dog in the us those who live with dartmoor hill ponies call them semi wild but the reality is more interesting they arrived from 2 500 bc onwards with the britons of the bronze age just as these celts almost entirely replaced the neolithic aboriginal people s of the british isles so their horses took over from the vanishing population of wild indigenous horses across the rest of the country our first ancestors settlements were built over their culture overwritten by roman and angle saxon and jute viking and norman although with remarkably little genetic impact their most prized possession horses were fully genetically recoded by injections of roman anglo saxon and norse stock dartmoor however on dartmoor this isn t what happened as the climate changed from around 1 500 bc on becoming cooler wetter stormier and with a rising water table the land became untenably boggy the people who had built the 5 000 ruined hut circles that remain today simply upped and left some of their horses remained these became the wild ponies of the moors where the river dart rises the most ancient and indigenous breeding population left in britain today and these as the owner of the dogs and one of the wild pony s strongest supporters sophie windsor clive explained to me are what the paradoxically named natural england have elected to drive to the verge of extinction natural england has effectively demanded that all livestock grazing on the moor is reduced substantially by up to 75 per cent to protect other habitats plants and species the government s environmental quango claims that this will help protect the diversity of dartmoor it also insists that decisions about which animals graze on dartmoor rests with individual landowners but the wild ponies of which there are about 900 will inevitably pay the price what is their animus against the dartmoor hill pony as one would expect from a non departmental public body nothing at all it isn t personal they have simply decided that the moors are being overgrazed and it is damaging biodiversity and so they are planning on reducing grazing units that bureaucratic term bundles together 100 000 sheep with minor historical links to the land 10 000 cattle with none and fewer than a thousand of these hardy little equines so despite the hard scientific fact that horses as non ruminant highly mobile grazers are infinitely better for biodiversity as opposed to the scorched earth approach to feeding of their even toed distant cousins it will be the unprofitable horses who lack the lobby group support of everyone from the national union of farmers on down who will suffer the thing that scares any true biologist are the numbers with fewer than 1 000 ponies left on the moor the combination of herd structure and breeding mathematics is already close to lethality the real bottleneck with horses is stallions not mares once you begin squeezing the number of active breeding males you can push a population into long term genetic narrowing astonishingly fast exmoor shows what happens afterwards the animals survive yes but as a managed remnant population with obvious bottleneck signatures in the genetics you do not immediately get five legged foals and screaming deformity you simply burn genetic capital quietly until one day you wake up and realise your wild pony is now effectively a conservation exhibit it brings to mind the last thylacine the so called marsupial wolf which the dingo replaced who died alone in a zoo in 1936 or the last aurochs the truly wild ancestral cattle who died alone in a polish royal forest in 1627 this is not because the animal is intrinsically doomed but because bureaucratic tidying and agricultural lobbying are accidentally and nonchalantly shoving it over the edge so who can save the dartmoor hill pony the heads of the major political parties have all announced they will because it is a costless and priceless vote winning statement to make which can be forgotten in time for the next news cycle i would suggest another route in the early 20th century when the then prince of wales later king edward viii began making the nascent sport of polo glamorous and popular he decided to create a new type of pony for the game he wanted to bring in arabians for their speed and agility but had to get them under the then required pony height limit and wanted more hardiness and stamina so he cross bred them with dartmoor hill ponies and in doing so created the dartmoor pony official breed our present prince of wales like his father is no stranger to polo or conservation and is presently embarking on a host of environmental projects on dartmoor as one of its largest landowners in his role as duke of cornwall in fact he is visiting one as i write perhaps he would care to bring the dartmoor hill pony under his protection as one of them by which i do not mean the sensitive selection of royal patronage between rival charities or political interventions or even public corrections of bureaucratic crudeness instead the minor addition of the distinguishing words conservation and agricultural before the phrase grazing units to denote horses as a different class to sheep and cattle suggested to natural england by dartmoor s largest landowner the duchy of cornwall preventing this unwarranted cull with the stroke of a pen for without such a royal intervention britain in its infinite managerial wisdom may now be in the process of destroying a most ancient and indigenous upland horse population and not because anyone hates them but because the system cannot distinguish between a sheep a cow and a living fragment of historical ecology please do click through to the original article with free registration online here as clicks today will save the wild ponies tomorrow https spectator com article how the king can help save dartmoors ponies written by alexander fiske harrison alexander fiske harrison is presently writing the children of wolves how men and dogs were forged in the land of ice posted in uncategorized leave a reply my latest article in the spectator desmond morris was a master of provocative truths posted on may 1 2026 by fiskeharrison reply my latest article in the spectator and another one quoting me in ...