Home, James, And don't spare the hybrids

One of Lady Meux's hybrid zebras bred at Theobalds Park. Photograph: The Pennycuik Experiments by James Cossat Ewart

The internet is littered with references that Lady Valerie Meux of Theobald’s Park, Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, was often to be seen in London driving herself in a phaeton (a type of open carriage) drawn by a pair zebras. This was an affectation adopted by many rich Victorians.

“She (Lady Meux) drives a tandem team of zebras in a dog cart. She claims she is the only person in England who can handle these animals,” reported The Kansas City Times (Sunday, 14th July 1901).

Lady Meux was very proud of her menagerie of exotic animals kept at Theobalds Park and these included zebras.

And not just ordinary zebras.

Inter-breeding experiments between zebras, donkeys, horses, and ponies were being carried out at Theobalds Park.

The primary motivation behind inter-breeding experiments was to explore the potential for creating unique and useful traits for specific purposes, such as stronger work animals or animals with better resistance to diseases or environmental conditions.

Some breeders pursued inter-breeding for aesthetic reasons, hoping to create animals with distinctive coat patterns or colours.

But practical applications remained limited often due to issues of sterility.

A Chapman zebra mare (Equus quagga chapmani) kept at Theobalds was used to breed several hybrids and these experiments attracted the attention of scientists and naturalists of the day, including Sir William Ridgeway, an Anglo-Irish classical scholar and the Disney Professor of Archaeology at University of Cambridge. He described some of the Theobalds hybrids.

“The eldest, by an English pony, is a yellowish-brown, but faintly-striped; the second by an American trotting-horse, is brilliantly and richly decorated with brown stripes over a bright bay background; the third hybrid, by a Shetland or Highland pony, is only very faintly and partially striped.”

Scottish zoologist James Cossar Ewart, Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, performed breeding experiments with horses and zebras at his home in Penycuik, Midlothian, Scotland.

He took great interest in the Theobalds Park experiments, making multiple references to them in his book, The Penycuik Experiments (Adam and Charles Black, London,1899). He even arranged for photographs of the animals and skins, some which he also published. He was fascinated about that lack of stripes in the hybrid offspring.

“This is well illustrated by the three zebra-hybrids bred some years ago by Lady Meux at Theobald's Park, Hertfordshire,” he wrote. “These hybrids are by different sires, but all out of the same zebra mare. The oldest of the three, by an English pony, is of a yellowish-brown colour, and but faintly striped.”

The English naturalist William Bernhardt Tegetmeier referred to three jennets bred by different sires out of a Burchell zebra belonging to Lady Meux. A jennet, or Spanish jennet, was a small horse from Spain, now extinct. Valerie’s beasts, he thought, were not broken to harness, but kept as ornamental stock. (The Field, Saturday, 15th February 1902).

Frederick Collis Willmott, Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society in 1879, also served as Secretary of the Hackney Microscopical and Natural History Society.

He wrote: “Anyone interested in the subject can generally see a herd of some seven or eight by riding through Sir Henry Meux’s place, Theobald’s Park, near Enfield. There they are so tame that they come to the side of the road, and the coachman has often got down and stroked them. They are the same size as a zebra – graceful in shape, of a light brown colour, with dark, if not black stripes. I remember one coachman exclaiming when he first saw them, ‘Well, I never saw such ponies as those before.’” (London Evening Standard, Friday, 4th September 1896).