Story – Chris Hector, -Photos – Roz Neave

It’s crazy that it seems harder for talented well trained young Australian dressage trainers to break into their own market than any number of smooth talking con merchants with a winning manner and a foreign accent. I suppose it is much easier for the ones on holiday in Australia, they can tell their clients how ‘wonderful’ they are, secure in the knowledge that they will never ever have to see them again.
For Graham Chapple it’s different. He’s back making a home in the land of his birth. Sure Graham intends travelling back to Europe regularly to keep in touch, but his main focus is here. He is trying to build a base of students honestly, and if that occasionally means telling a pupil that he or she is less than perfect – so be it, that’s what teaching is all about.
I was lucky enough to see Graham work with a THM regular, Champ, and his talented owner / trainer, Samantha Bartlett. Sam had had a lesson with Graham five weeks ago and insisted that I make the long journey, 500 metres down Old Gembrook Road, to see Graham in action.
It was a real ‘rider’s’ lesson. You knew instantly that the teacher standing on the ground actually spent more time with his feet on stirrup rubbers than arena sand – the comments were well and truly from within the rider / horse loop. Did he do anything new, dramatically different? Of course not, if he had, then I probably would not be writing about him. There are no wild wonderful new training methods, just a subtle re-telling of that good old Training Scale, but as always, a good instructor, gives it his own spin – or if he is a really good instructor, and I suspect this one is, the spin for this morning, or the spin that is needed at this point in this rider and this horse’s education.
Working with Sam and Champ, Graham was concentrating on getting to take the contact on the outside rein by bending to the inside. Riding a small circle, and continually turning into that circle, flexing the horse to the inside, making it give its side and accept the rider’s outside rein, but all the while keeping the forward impulse…
Something that you do notice when you come back to Australia after watching a bit of dressage in Germany, is that it looks as if someone threw the slo-mo switch, that everything is happening in a tank of heavy oil…
Graham is keeping Samantha on the job…
"Don’t let the stride get slow, don’t let him drop into neutral, get him quicker, but when you get there, don’t do anything, just enjoy it…"
That sounds simple doesn’t it, but really it’s very tricky. That go forward, keep them quick has nothing to do with huffing and puffing, and spurring and pushing every stride. It’s exactly what Graham says he wants – forward, crisp, athletic, quick with the rider doing absolutely nothing at all.
"He must very gently pull you into the saddle, but it must be with both hind legs."
Graham has a very good ‘Puuk Puuk’ sound he makes to keep the horse and riding alert and forward, but it must be effortlessly forward.
"Try really hard to sit still. Never move. Don’t throw it all away, keep riding him softly to your hand. Say to him, ‘I promise horse I will never pull you down with my hand’. You must not pull back on the rein. Keep the horse’s jaw supple with the outside hand, but you must not pull down with the inside hand. He must be gently pressed to your hand, let him keep going to the bridle all the time. Don’t try to shake him off the bit. He must pull you along with a very light pull, never you pulling back. Not even to slow him down, if you want to slow him down just take a deep breath but don’t pull him back."
"When you want to let him stretch, just take your hands out a little but don’t let the rein get floppy. Don’t give the contact away, hold it, nurture it, it’s like a little puppy, don’t strangle it, just hold it gently so it can’t get away."

 

But we weren’t just working with the hand; the legs too got their share of attention.
"When he throws his head and back up like that it is because he is nervous of your legs, instead of being respectful of them. Work with him, you are not trying to fight him, you are trying to exercise him and make him supple. You’ve got to find a way that works for both of you – and be committed 100% of the time."
Back to that turning on the circle, and turning into the circle at the same time. "When you supple him to the inside, you mustn’t give your inside rein away. You are trying to loosen him to you, not him loosening you."
And watch out rider if that focus starts to waver…
"You got slack there, it felt good so you threw it all away. Even if you don’t do anything, still stay mentally alert!"
"Get him a bit looser to the inside, I don’t want to see so much of the bit through his mouth. Turn your body to the inside, open your chest, open your rein so the bit has a sideways action. DON’T give to him after five minutes or he is going to wait for it. You can relax, you don’t have to be clamped on him like a vice, but don’t give. When everything feels nice, give a little uberstreichen, just one even movement to his ears, not jigging about with the rein."
And when Champ breaks out of the trot into the canter, it is the rider again who has to make the correction: "He can only break when he braces his neck against you. Keep him loose."
Champ yields.
"Now go jelly arms, not longer arms, but a relaxation – let him out, but not so he is a slob, try to raise the bar every minute of the lesson. DON’T try to pull his nose down. The inside rein says ‘poke your nose, go longer, go bigger’, the outside rein keeps it under control."
Out of the circle into a bit of bigger trot:
"In the medium get him higher like a Hackney, not flat like a show hack. He moves into your hand, not you holding him back. I’m not a great exponent of riding horses down, but use your leg to make him more round, better in the back, more hind leg – the hand is just there to regulate it, it doesn’t do the work for you."
"When you use your leg it means step up into the hand, it means move over your back into my hand then I can distribute the energy where I wish. Good now you can sit a bit behind the wither. Now allow the inside hand forward as you go to trot. Great – it was not really forward, it is just that you didn’t pull back with it."
And when Champ decides that he has had enough and would like to stick his head in the air, Sam stays focussed, holds her position, and earns some more praise:
"That was good because you were determined. You didn’t get aggressive, you stayed in there and said, ‘move away from my legs, my legs are electric’ – and he got the idea. Don’t get aggressive, don’t get tough, you are a gymnastics instructor."

"The wall of the arena is the outside rein, open the inside rein. Open the door – yes you can go there."
After he rode Champ, Graham suggested that Sam might change to a fatter bit: "I always ride my horses with a big fat bit so they can hold it and not get nervous of it. With the thinner bits they can start to hold them, either pulling through the bit or sucking back."
On the horse, Graham’s work was once again straight forward, clean, and athletic, and he has one of those wonderfully unshakeable seats that just stays in the correct position no matter what happens. And he stresses, that at this stage, nothing all that dramatic should be happening…
"My philosophy, and my feeling, is that with a young horse like Champ, if you start him at four years, then for the next year to eighteen months, he should be able to do nice walk, trot and canter with simple transitions. We are looking at all those basic principles: rhythm, suppleness, contact, straightness, collection. All of those should be addressed but in a very simple, easy way."
"With Sam I just tried to get the horse in an easy going rhythm, that you can make quicker, you can make slower without any stress. Easy circles, big circles, smaller circles, no major exercises, making sure he keeps the contact on the reins, seeking both reins evenly. Nothing more should be attempted with that horse in that period of time – after that some more strenuous work can be attempted."
"That’s not to say that in that early stage you are not working on transitions, and in other words, working on collection. When he comes from trot to walk he hopefully starts to lower his croup and lift his shoulder. For me that is a very big thing, that the horse is always able to carry himself on his hindlegs. Everyone says that, yeah yeah, but for me that training starts immediately but in a very soft progressive way. You don’t change the training in the middle of the horse’s career. You don’t say up until this point you can stop this way, then you have to stop a totally different way, it is all just a natural progression, so you are introducing elements of collection right from the start."
"With Sam, I don’t know Sam, I just tried to make her aware of my principles – that we want the horse rhythmic, steady contact and already begin to think about straightening and collection but with simple exercises. After riding the horse, the aim is to make him a little bit more confident with the leg aid and the hand aids, so that the horse can be totally at ease, but willing to work."
You say you want the horse confident, but you obviously wanted his a lot more electric to your leg when you first got on him? It does seem to be the last frontier in Australia, to learn to put them in gear and they stay there until you do something to change it?
"Exactly right. If I say I want a tempo, the horse stays in that tempo until I decide to change it. If the horse drops the tempo, he gets a gentle reminder from the leg; if there is not a reaction the next reminder must be sharper, not harder, sharper. You mustn’t start whipping and spurring and making him nervous of the leg; he must be respectful of the leg. Let the horse be at ease, then the horse will be happy. You don’t have to pat him every second stride – in my experience, 90% of the time, the horse already knows the job at hand, he doesn’t need the pat. It is only the rider who needs the pat because the rider has been able to communicate to the horse, that is what I wish you to do."
It is an interesting exercise of yours, where you get them to take the contact on the outside rein by increasing the flexion to the inside, but all the time turning them in on a circle, keeping the forward?
"Always forward, everything must be forward, never ever must you think ‘slower’, even in the collection. Unfortunately I see a lot of people who when they go to the more collecting exercises; they think ‘collection – that means slower’. And it is so hard to tell people, when you want the horse to collect he must go faster, quicker in his legs. He must move his hindlegs closer to the centre of gravity, that means he must work very hard and very quick with his legs. It appears that he is going slower because the forehand is raised so he becomes more expressive. It appears he is going slower but actually he is going very quickly, the engine is in high revs when he is in a collected state."

So what exercises would you prescribe for Sam and her horse?
"Easy, big circles, lots of changes of direction. Making sure she can put him to one rein or the other, always checking herself on the quarter line that she has both hands exactly the same. Exercises for that horse are more related to Sam – she must address her own position, making sure her legs hang in an even manner, that her hips sit evenly, that her shoulders are square, that she always sits in a very correct, classic way – then she will have at least half a chance to transmit to the horse how she wishes him to go."
You’ve had quite a lot of success in Young Horse classes in Europe, isn’t it a contradiction that we say on the one hand that with the ‘baby’ horses we only want to ask them to do walk, trot and canter but in a couple of months, when Sam takes Champ to DWTS in the Young Horse Class, if she comes out and honestly just does walk, trot and canter, she won’t make the final…?
"She could make the final if the horse is electric and confident in her aids. If she can say to the horse when the chips are down, come on – I need a little bit more, and the horse says ‘yeah, okay, I understand, I must try a little bit harder…’ She won’t do very well if he is nervous because then if she says ‘come on, I need a little bit more from you’, he will resent it because he won’t understand why he is being inadvertently punished with harder and stronger aids."
"I think the Young Horse classes are devoted to very special dynamic, naturally well-moving young horses. Quite often you never see the champion from the six year old class at Grand Prix, and that is not always because they were either sold or too over-pushed or whatever, they just happen to be young horses with a special talent for big movement. Whether they fall into the wrong hands after that and that’s why they don’t make Grand Prix, I don’t know but the young horse classes are for a rather special type of horse."
Was it a big shock coming back to Australia? When you look at the warm up rings in Australia and compare them to Europe, there are a lot of basic position faults in Australia…

"Was it a shock? Not so much, because you understand that riding in Europe is hundreds and hundreds of years old. You just have to look at someone like Harry Boldt, he was riding dressage with his father, and his father’s father, it is a generations thing, a way of life. In Australia we are just over 200 years old, it takes time to build a tradition and find a way. Australia’s new but we want to learn and there is nothing wrong with that. I was prepared for the fact that we might be fifty years behind Europe, but that’s no-one’s fault, we are only a young country. The fact that we are out there trying to make it better – importing semen, importing new horses – that should be a reason to embrace those people and give them a pat on the back, not ‘oh just because they’ve got money they can afford to do it’. I knew what it would be like. It takes time to make it better. The horses are getting better and I hope people can learn how to produce horses in a nice way – not just to win a blue ribbon. Dressage is not always about winning a blue ribbon, there’s a lot more to it than that. Sure if you go to the young horse class you want to win – but that is not always real dressage. I’m not one of these ‘dressage purists’ who just wants to sit in the garden and talk about doing it – I’m out doing it every day. I want to compete and run a successful stable with my partner but dressage is not just about winning ribbons. When people can start to think a little bit differently, and learn to train their horses in a slightly more correct way, then we’ll be on our way to where we want to be."Sam Bartlett and her lesson
What were you hoping to get from the lesson?
"Basically that I had improved on the last time – which was about five weeks ago. I’d been practising the little exercises he’d given me then, and hopefully Champ was getting a bit easier and more responsive. He wanted me a lot more supple to the inside, making sure the horse was into my outside rein. Rider not supporting the horse with the inside rein, and making sure they are truly off your inside leg."
"I find Graham’s teaching style very easy, simple and clear."
I thought he was encouraging when he needed to be encouraging and critical when he needed to be critical?
"Yeah, he was very constructive. You don’t learn anything from the ones who tell you how wonderful you are. You need to know when you are wrong."
How do you think the lesson went?
"Champ was good, probably even better after his big day the day before. He was looser, so the exercises had worked – I was concentrating on making it clearer in my own mind so I can continue it."
What Graham was saying was hardly new – it is what lots of good instructors have told us. So we still need someone standing there saying it again?
"More often than what we normally have. Definitely. You need to hear it frequently so it stays clear and fresh in your own mind rather than getting to a spot when you think, ‘is this right, no, yes’. Then you get into a grey area rather than being confident enough to move on when you need to move on, or back off when you need to back off."

It is nice that Graham gets on and rides the horses?
"I think so because I learn a lot by watching rather than listening or reading. You can have someone on the ground repeating over and over what to do, but to actually see them get on, then see the results of that, that makes it much clearer in my mind."
Graham Chapple – A rider’s life
The truth is that Graham Chapple has been studying, learning, refining the art of being a horse trainer since he was 16 years old and left home to base himself with the famous British horsewoman and dressage competitor, Jennie Loriston-Clarke…
"I went to Europe to learn how to ride a horse. I did a three-day clinic with Jennie in Australia. Before the clinic I already had the idea of going to Europe, I’d read the magazines, all those things in your imagination like the Spanish Riding School. After the first lesson I asked her if she knew anywhere I could train in Europe and she suggested I come to her. That’s how it started. I sold my horse and worked for a while with Vince Corvi and his show horses so I got enough money for six months in England. I liked it over there. I was only young and my parents were only going to let me stay a short while – but I figured if I became part farmer as well as rider, they might want me to stay. So I started fixing the fences, harrowing the fields, so I didn’t have to pay, and stayed there 18 months."
"I think Jennie’s greatest strength is that she just gets in there and does it. Don’t sit on the edge and talk about it – do it. Get in and have a go."
"From Jennie, I went to Denmark and rode for just under two years in a Sales Barn, that was good. I clocked up most of my miles there. We had 60 horses and four staff! You learnt how to do things very quickly, very efficiently, it was great but we rode all day every day. That was the only time in my life when I didn’t want to get up every morning and go ride a horse – I’d wake up and think I could be quite happy if I didn’t see another horse… please don’t make me ride today."
"One of the clients was the Swiss rider, Otto Hofer, and he invited me back to his place in Switzerland. He had bought a young stallion, and he saw me ride it, and said he wanted me to come back with the horse. Yes, it is time to leave Denmark, and that opportunity just landed on my lap. It was a good experience because every horse was a very good horse. Otto’s number one horse then was Limanos, Andiamo was in the stable but he was number two horse at that stage, his wife had a very good Grand Prix horse but she also had three children and was very busy. I was a similar height, and I got to ride her horse. I rode Andiamo and Limanos. I got some good rides there."
"I came back for a short while to Australia, and rode with Libby and Walter Sauer at APH, then because I had the connection with Jennie, went back to England. I worked with her for a while and then they started an auction in England, and I worked there starting the auction horses."

"After that I went showjumping for twelve months with Johnnie Harris in England. It was just to broaden my own outlook on horsemanship, just to become a more versatile rider – but I was not a jumping rider…"
"While I was working with the showjumpers, I was also working some dressage horses, and I got a very good sponsor and based myself with them in England. Every winter I went to Germany and trained with Conrad Schumacher. I used to take my sponsor’s horse, and two of my own. Conrad has a great wealth of knowledge and a very good understanding. He is a gentleman with his horses, which suited me. Not crashing and bashing, he saw that that world isn’t perfect, they are only horses and we are only human. Sure sometimes you have to tell them, that’s not what I want, but at the end of the day, you have to work with your horse. I learnt a lot from Schumacher about that – find the way in and then get the best from the horse because the horse wants to do it for you. I did that for three years. I had been travelling more and more to Holland, buying horses, we’d buy unbroken young horses – I had a backer, they put in the money, I put in the brawn - and we would get them going for the young horse classes, and then sell them."
"I met Bert Rutten, and used to train with him during the winter, two weeks at a time. I was getting some good job offers from England, but there was something more I wanted. I was tired of being a single guy. I had devoted all my life to riding – that’s great – but I want a bit more, a home. I was always with my suitcase, travelling round the world, riding in Europe, riding in Florida, I had some great experiences, and I will do it again but I needed to come back to Australia to breathe again."
"I’m Australian, and when you have been riding all your life, riding, riding, riding, all day every day, you get to the stage in your life when there is more to life than just riding horses. So now I am building a little centre, where I can invite riders in to stay, learn to ride a little better, that’s my job – Dressage Instructor. I wanted some different things in my life, get married, have a family, corny things like that…"
"But I also wanted to do my job in the most professional manner that I could. In Europe I was always renting stables, it’s never quite how you want it. I want my own place, my own arena."
"I plan to still travel. To commute to Europe to keep my eye in. I have completed a fifteen year apprenticeship in Europe but I only know a small bit – there is always more to learn and see, keeping up with breeding, with technology, keep up with what is happening on the competition scene, and that means Europe. I like the system there, I very much like the way of life, so I plan to commute between the two."