Winston (horse)
horse
Winston (1937–1957) was a chestnut gelding ridden by both King George VI in 1947 and Queen Elizabeth II in the Trooping the Colour ceremony from 1949 to 1956.
Biography
Winston, whose sire was Erehwemos, was foaled in Yorkshire in 1937. In 1944 he was sold to the Mounted Branch of the Metropolitan Police Service. Although named after Winston Churchill, the letter "W" was used to name all police horses in 1944. As a police horse, Winston often was present on duty at public events such as the Changing of the Guard before he was selected for Royal duties.
In 1947, Winston carried King George VI during the first Trooping of the Colour to take place since 1939. Winston participated in various roles in other Royal ceremonial events when not working as a police horse. From 1949 to 1951, then Princess Elizabeth took her father's place at the ceremony, becoming the first British Queen since Elizabeth I to review her troops on horseback. Though other police horse were made available, the Queen always preferred Winston. The year of 1951 led to the future Queen first wearing her red Guards uniform; prior to this she wore a blue uniform.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 11, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q8026030. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1937, 1957, 1947 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Winston (horse)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.