SNARESBROOK: Tributes paid to inspirational riding teacher (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

SNARESBROOK: Tributes paid to inspirational riding teacher

4:05pm Thursday 12th January 2012 in Redbridge News By Dominic Sutton

A WOMAN who devoted her life to a local riding school for nearly 70 years, has died at the age of 99.

Dora Parfitt’s association with the Snaresbrook Riding School began in 1932 when she was out on her bicycle and saw two horses trotting towards ‘Dunbar’ a riding school on Woodford High Road.

She asked the owner, a cavalry officer called Mr Pugh, for a job and he agreed to take her on as a working pupil.

Once in, she never left the school, learning how to ride and care for the horses and eventually teaching others to ride.

During the Second World War she took six of the animals to the grounds of Forest School each night to minimise the chances of all the school’s horses being killed if a bomb should hit.

When Mr Pugh retired in 1960, Dora took over the school, moving down the road to ‘Oakneath’, behind Snaresbrook Station.

She lived and worked there until 1993 when she retired to a bungalow in Eagle Lane, Wanstead before moving into a residential care home in Churchfields for the last few years of her life.

Former riding school pupil and close friend Jenny Johns, 69, of Mornington Road in Chingford, paid tribute to her former teacher, who never married.

“She gave up everything for the horses,” said Mrs Johns. “She was just devoted to them.”

“When she sold the school in 1993, other people including myself took on the horses and, while she was still able, she would come and visit them.

“She was a real inspiration to us all. If you go out into the horseriding world you will find hundreds of riders who started off at the school.”

Mrs Johns and her fellow former pupil Beryl Hall, 72, of Monkhams Avenue, helped looked after Dora in her later years.

Mrs Hall recalled: “She was a wonderful teacher – strict because she learnt her methods from a cavalry officer, but also a lot of fun.

“The School was as much a social club as anything else and we all made long-lasting friendships there.”

In rare moments away from her beloved horses, Dora was a member of the Conservative Party and canvassed on behalf of Winston Churchill in the days when he was the local MP.

Both ‘Oakneath’ and ‘Dunbar’ have been replaced by blocks of flats, but before her funeral on Monday (January 16) at the City of London Crematorium, a horse drawn carriage carrying her coffin will pass by the site of Oakneath.

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