Gary Docking

Gary with two of his horses

Stats:
Gary is a Light Harness Horse Instructor (LHHI)
Age: 44 (A very young 44)
Starsign: Libra, but not a typical one

Job:
Producer, trainer, exhibitor
Specialises in the production of private driving horses in single, pair, tandem, random and team
After dinner speaker, raconteur, diarist, columnist

Likes:
Good red wine (burgundy), musical theatre (not amateur, god save me from amateurs), decent food, Bombay Sapphire, entertaining and being entertained.

Dislikes:
Teenagers, lack of personality, anybody telling him he is wrong, those with no passion or interest, boring horses.

Equine:
Regardless of breed, he likes any horse which has a certain something about it. Specialising in carriage driving, he adores Hackneys, Welsh Cobs, Dutch Warmbloods but it has to have a 'look at me' personality and a trainable temperament. These two characteristics do not often arrive together.

Passions:
A beautiful, original Lawton gig, a Mills Phaeton, an untouched drag or coach in a barn totally forgotten by the world with its whip and gloves still left in the box seat some 100 years on. To continue hunting, although on foot, to be as un PC as possible, and to find the health and safety bureaucrats and run them down in my pick up truck, and to tell the woman in the village that if her dog chases his four year old down the lane again he is going to shoot the blighter!

Gary describes himself as being ‘pathologically in love with driving’. As a leading professional producer in his field, managing his yard of 10 horses and ponies near Midhurst in West Sussex, Gary exhibits and wins, at multiple shows in the UK and Europe every year. He also sits on the Councils of both the Hackney Horse Society and Carriage Driving Society, judges numerous classes and runs a series of lecture demonstrations in the spring.

Although he has already been awarded the ultimate accolade of producing the Show Champion at the British Driving Society Show at Smiths Lawn in Windsor five times, he freely admits that he is fiercely competitive and aims to win at the Horse of the Year Show. As Gary sums it up: “Being a producer you are only as good as your next rosette and as bad as your last result – three bad results and people assume you’ve lost your touch.”

Having come from a background in theatre and entertainment, he treats the ring as his stage. All the horses and ponies he accepts to produce for their owners have their own harness and carriage made to measure and he spends weeks perfecting his own outfits and even carries dozens of ties and matching handkerchiefs at any one time in his lorry to co-ordinate the look. He is a fierce custodian of preserving what is correct and his support team on the yard are indispensable in achieving his success.