31-03-2025
WH Smith has lost its way, but I remember the glory days of the ‘win a pony' competition
It's hard to explain to my children what high street shopping was like in a small market town in Britain fifty years ago. Ok, it may not have been Soviet Russia, but it's fair to say choice was limited. If you wanted to whittle away your pocket money, there was basically a choice between Woolworths and WH Smith – the latter was indisputably the classier option. For a start, Smith's was a proper bookseller in those days where you'd dash to get the latest Roald Dahl or Le Carré. On top of that, for a young person, it was a temple to glorify stationery, pens, pencils and general artistic endeavour. I still have a beautiful set of Caran d'Ache coloured pencils I bought there 50 years ago.
So, when I heard that WH Smith's high street shops had been sold to Modella Capital and will be rebranded as TG Jones (personally, I would have gone for TGI Jones), my sentimental old heart lurched. I know that the chain's been on a downward spiral for years, to the point entering my local Cambridge branch often feels like stepping aboard the Marie Celeste – but there's still, lost in the mists of time, a small Rowan standing in the big Bromley branch, a train-ride away from Sevenoaks, clutching her Christmas haul of WH Smith tokens. Dear lord, the sweet agony of having to decide between a new Parker ink pen, the tape cassette of Grease, or the latest pony books by the Pullein-Thompson sisters.
Tens of thousands of women my age associate WH Smith with ponies. Not because of the equine literature, but because – hard to believe in these cash-strapped times – Smith's used to run an annual 'Win a Pony!' competition in the 1970s, complete with a year's livery maintenance. The months dragged slowly until I could once again fill in a dozen of the forms (available with a purchase from WH Smith) with ardent pleas detailing all the ways in which I'd be a worthy custodian for a four-hooved friend. The supporting advertisement featured a girl posting an entry and the post-box whinnying back at her. No ad campaign since has proved so fiendishly seductive to the horsier of the species.
If you're a 50-something bloke, it's probable this entire scenario passed you by, while you daydreamed of owning a Raleigh Chopper. But girls were transfixed to the point there are many threads across Facebook and social media devoted to the topic, of which my favourite is the one on Horse and Hound's forum. I've rarely encountered so many wistful middle-aged women outside of a Nick Cave concert. One mournful soul recalled, 'I used to lie in bed and imagine someone coming to the door to say I'd won.' Another remembered a friend who'd won the runner-up award of a new bike: 'Never seen anyone so upset to win a prize!'
My favourite was the frustrated reader who wrote, 'I was banned from entering the competition as my mother told me in no uncertain terms that even if I did win a pony, we could not afford to keep it', adding for good measure: 'I always scribbled over the faces of the lucky winners every year too.' She wasn't the only one brimming with resentment. One woman remembered looking at a photo of the winner 'of a lovely grey' who took him swimming in the sea dressed only in a bikini: 'I was horrified and sure she didn't deserve the pony if she would ride without a hat.'
Years later, in the 1990s, I had another brush with Smith's when my publisher and I tried to sweettalk them into stocking our new, saucy magazine, the Erotic Review. We explained it was a literary journal, sold to well-heeled and home counties' types and came enclosed in a cellophane wrapper. Even so, their head office wrote a letter back saying stiffly, 'It is not the sort of thing our readers would like'. For a year or, so we used that majestic statement, fully attributed, as our strapline run in small print over the title. The seal of disapproval from an august newsagent, founded in 1792 by Henry Walton Smith, felt almost as grand as a royal coat of arms.
But the store's heyday is long past, high street outlets lack any sense of purpose outside flogging water and Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and someone needs to give it the retail equivalent of a shot of Viagra. Let's hope Modella are the people to effect the transformation. If they want to woo back countless menopausal women, they could do worse than offer us a chance to win a horse.
