'It had to end sometime'

The closure of beloved Hampshire saddlery Calcutt Sons is a loss to the hunting and wider equestrian worlds, as Octavia Pollock reports

-  Octavia Pollock

FOR six-time Badminton winner Lucinda Green, the closure of Calcutt & Sons is akin to the death of The Queen. "Both had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember and the loss of these wonderful, well-organised, honest institutions is a sad milestone," she says.

For countless others - for whom a visit to the Hampshire tack shop to have a jacket mended, a saddle fitted or to search the second-hand treasure trove was a cherished event - the loss is equally sad.

Streams of people would ring the bell and pass in to where the scent of saddle soap mingled with new leather and bits clinked on the racks. A wall was crowded with advertisements and baskets of string gloves, shelves of velvet caps and stacks of saddles invited clients to rummage for hours.

The shop's founder was born Joan Le Lachuer in 1915. Her first husband, Lt Richard Grayburn, was killed in the war, and subsequently she married Patrick Calcutt. Never happier than in the saddle, Mrs Calcutt established a riding school in Sutton Scotney and added a second-hand tack business. She was a larger-than-life figure at the bustling monthly horse sales in Reading.

“She knew what she was doing,” says Pauline Homan, then a horse-mad teenager and later proprietor of Lyford outfitters. “If she wanted something, she got it. Calcutts got the best, always did.”

Despite her success, Mrs Calcutt’s sons were, sadly, never interested – it is they who are now selling the site – but she had a surrogate son: Ian Compton. Sitting in his office in a worn leather chair, dusty filing cabinets awaiting the final clear-out, he looks back to his arrival as a lad in 1962, when the A34 ran past Calcutts door and carried a fraction of the traffic that now roars up the bypass.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he says. “Mrs Calcutt was a character!”