During our work on a new book for the Willesden Local History Society, we found that Sydney Galvayne, and son Frederick were living at the Model Farm, Neasden in 1891.
Sydney was shown in the census as a horse farmer and his son Frederick was described as a Professor of Horsemanship. In 1891 they advertised as ‘Galvayne and Son, The Model Farm and Horse Depot Neasden’ with 70 large horse boxes. This was intriguing as Neasden was still a remote village and the Galvaynes were born in Australia.
Sydney first appears in the online newspapers at the end of November 1884 as Professor Galvayne ‘the celebrated Australian scientific horse trainer’. He was opening his first school at the Corn Exchange in York and giving demonstrations of how to break previously difficult horses of the local gentry to harness in a few minutes. In his ‘Galvayning’ method a string from a strap on the the horse’s head was tied to its tail causing it to spin around without harm until it quietened down. Instruction was also given on how to tell the age by examining the horse’s teeth. Tickets for the classes were three guineas and proved very popular. In January 1885 Sydney began touring the country and that May, he was at Hengler’s Grand Cirque in Argyle Street (now the site of the London Palladium), working with the American horse trainer Professor Hamilton Sample. Two years later Sydney was invited by Queen Victoria to give a demonstration at Balmoral Castle. In 1890 he was giving daily presentations at the Wellington Barracks near Buckingham Palace.
Who was Professor Sydney Galvayne?
The term professor does not mean what it does today in higher education. In the Victorian age it was used as a general term to mean teacher or expert. But Professor Galvayne was not who he said he was. For a start, he was born as Frederick Henry Sydney Attride in April 1848 in Camberwell, one of the large family of a bank clerk. He grew up in South London and initially followed his father into the Bank of England.
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Sydney was married at least four times. But he never divorced his first wife, Emily Westley, who he married on 14 November 1868 at the Parish Church of St Olave in Southwark. They had two sons Frederick Henry, Albert Attride and a daughter called Winifred. Emily died in 1895 at the age of 49 in the Liverpool area, and her death was registered under the name of Emily Attride Galvayne.
Sydney Attride abandoned his family in 1872 and set sail for Australia. Using the alias of Ralph Frederick Osborne in 1876 he worked as the licensee of the Albion Hotel in Bank Street, Belfast Victoria before becoming a horseman and dealer. Moving to Sydney in 1879, he ran a business called ‘F. Osborne and Co. Horse Bazaar’, and then relocated to Melbourne where he married Edith Webster Morgan in 1882. They had two sons before he was divorced by Edith in 1884. At this time he learnt horse taming from the American Professor Sample who was visiting Australia, and returned to Britain under the alias of Professor Sydney Frederick Galvayne.
When Sample arrived in London six months later, he found that Galvayne was using his system and running his own horse shows. Sample demanded that Sydney become part of his show otherwise, he would let it be known that Sydney had breached their confidentiality agreement. This explains their joint performances at Hengler’s in 1885.
Sydney’s third marriage was to Gertrude May Atkinson on 14 February 1896 at St Matthias’s Church, Waverley in Sydney, Australia. The couple had a daughter Nina.
On the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899, using the name Sydney Galvayne, he volunteered for active service. He left for South Africa to serve in the Army Remount Service and was appointed honorary lieutenant and Director of Horse Breaking to the Imperial Army. For his War service he was awarded the Queen’s South Africa Medal with four clasps (Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Transvaal, and Natal).
Sydney had left his wife May well-provided for in Australia. He sent her a first-class ticket to join him in Cape Colony South Africa where they lived from October 1900 to May 1901 before she came to London and rented rooms in 13 Buckley Road Kilburn. Sydney followed her to London in October, after discovering letters to May beginning ‘My Darling’ and addressed to a ‘Mrs James’. He hired Slaters Detective Agency to investigate, and they discovered that soon after May arrived, she cabled George Alexander Webster who came to lodge as ‘her brother’. The landlady soon realised their behaviour was not that of a brother and sister and asked them to leave. They moved to Aberdeen Road in Harrow where they were discovered by Slaters agent, Thomas Craige. Sydney was very hurt as he had met George Webster in Australia, helped him get employment and introduced him to May. As Frederick Henry Attride, Sydney was granted a divorce in December of 1902. George and May married soon after.
Sydney wrote four books on horses between 1885 and 1905 using his pseudonym ‘Professor Galvayne’ and today is best known for estimating the age of a horse by a groove on its teeth, known as the Galvayne’s Groove. However yet again, Sydney was being dishonest: Professor Sample had previously published the method in his book ‘The Horse and Dog: Not as They are But as They Should Be’ in 1882.
His son Fred from the first marriage was brought up in Peckham and joined Sydney when he returned from Australia as Professor Galvayne. Fred helped him run the horse taming exhibitions around the country and then went to India with horses for the Nizam of Hyderabad. Returning to England he supplied Polo horses and hunters for wealthy owners and by 1906 he was the manager of the Societe du Polo in Paris.
As Frederick Henry George Attride he married Annie Jane Baker in Marylebone in April 1894, and they had a daughter Doris who was born on 13 December 1894 at 32 Fordwych Road West Hampstead. In 1901 they were at 16 High Road Willesden, and twenty years later, in Rock Hill, Dartmouth. In 1939, and describing himself as Frederick Henry George Galvayne, retired polo manager, he was sharing a house in Paignton with his wife and daughter. Frederick died in Totnes in 1942.
An earlier ‘horse whisperer’ was the American John Solomon Rarey (1827–1866). He used a different technique to calm difficult horses by gently controlling one of their front legs with a strap. In 1858 he gave a demonstration to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who were very impressed, and this gained him world-wide publicity.
John Rarey demonstrating his method to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, April 1858
Our mysterious Sydney lastly married Emilie Newell Martin Simpson a 43-year-old
widow in 1902 in St Giles London. They had moved to Hampshire by 1911 where Sydney
Frederick Galvayne died on 10 June 1913 in Ovington, leaving his widow Emilie
£169, worth about £21,000 today.
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