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September 2007 • VOLUME 25 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
Ross Harper-Lewis Her path led her to
Portugal where, as she states: "I was privileged to be accepted as a
civilian student on the Officer Instructor course of The Portuguese
Cavalry School in Mafra and through this experience to meet Mestre Nuno
Oliveira who invited me to study with him. I studied with Mestre Nuno
for five years and learned a great deal about finesse and new concepts
of collection and lightness. It was here also that I gained a sense of
freedom in training." Ross is a rider, trainer
and breeder, but more than any of these, she is a kind and welcoming
person who graciously shares of herself and her passion for the horses. Last month in Ross in
Conversation Part 2, Ross talked about how she met Nuno Oliveira
[Ross]: I knew he was there long before I met him. I finally did
meet him when I was with the Portuguese Army where I took part as a
student on the officer instructor course. I had rather jokingly
suggested I would quite like to do it and they said why not? So I
did. I think I was the only woman who ever did it and there was
one other foreigner,who was the Military Attaché to the
British Embassy in Lisbon at the time, who had done the same course.
During the course we went to visit Oliveira and as I watched him ride I
realised almost immediately that this was really where I ought to
be, not in the army. This was what I really wanted to do,
but how? The following year I still had my horses at the army’s
stable where I worked them regularly. At the
time, Mr. Oliveira went there to help some of the officers with their
horses. He was giving a conference and teaching, and
afterwards we all went to have dinner. He was sitting near me and he
asked, “When are you going to come and have lessons with me?”
Somewhat shocked but thrilled I said, “I'd really love to, but after we
went and made our visit to you and I rode like a soldier I didn’t think
you'd really want me to come.” He said, “You come, if you
like.” I thought, "Why not?” You don’t get that kind of
invitation every day!! I dropped everything else and went and
rode all through the summer with him. Then he was going off to do
a Clinic in Belgium and I was going off around Europe. I visited his
school again a few months later when he said, “Why don’t you come over
and ride some of the school horses if you’ve got time, because when I’m
away they don’t get ridden and they just get lunged?” Join us in part 3 of the conversation with Ross Harper-Lewis [N]: What a wonderful opportunity!
[Ross]: Well, sure. To have passed up an opportunity like that would be completely crazy. So it was a great experience. [N]: I think a lot of people who look at someone like Oliveira, who was a master, think that they can’t reproduce what he taught or what he did or the way he rode. [Ross]: Well, you can’t exactly, but you can build on what you learned from him. I mean what one has to realize is that it was an on-going process. He started out as a young rider and he changed over the years because he evolved. And so he worked his horses differently toward the end of his life somehow than he worked them in the beginning. And I think it was something that people didn’t necessarily understand. They thought that the periods when they were there and saw him, that’s how he always had been and always would be! Somewhat lacking in imagination!! I watched him break in and work with lots of young horses and I don’t think I ever saw him do it exactly the same way twice. Each horse is a new page to write on. And each one would develop in the way it needed to be developed. Yes, you did do the same basic work. And yes, you were aiming for the same thing in the end, but the way in which it was approached varied, and that, I believe, was something very important to bear in mind. I used to tell people that 'how you see him now isn’t how he always has been'. But yes, his underlying principles as a whole were probably the same.
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