IT'S EASY to forget that the horse was hugely important to many people well into the last century.

In his 70's, the clothing pioneer and entrepreneur Thomas Burberry – known to his friends as 'Old Tom'– rode every day between his business in Basingstoke and his home in Hook. He only stopped after a serious fall.

Horses were second nature to him: he had grown up on a family farm near Dorking in Surrey. His namesake father was steward to the Duke of Norfolk. In his early years in Basingstoke, he lived in a house call The Mount, in Bounty Road (now the Conservative Club), a substantial dwelling with stabling for six horses – as well as many bedrooms and several acres of land.

He came to Basingstoke as a young man in 1856. He was in the classic mould of Nonconformist businessman, a Strict Baptist opposed to drinking and other routine pleasures. But more than that he came up with an invention that for 50 years gave him an unrivalled market dominance in field sports, extreme adventures – and fighting in dire conditions, notably the Boer War and World War I.

That invention was Gabardine, a highly engineered fabric that was waterproof and windproof, and crucially, it also breathed.

At the time, the main contenders were Aquascutum and the humble Mackintosh that left wearers bathed in sweat.

Like any idea, Gabardine required effort and imagination to bring it to fruition. And that was Burberry's genius.

He came up with the concept of triple-proofing, that is, treating the raw material, the yarn and the woven fabric with a waterproofing agent. And he had the material made in Lancashire, then the cotton spinning capital of the world.

In 1879 he trademarked Gabardine and in 1888 patented it. The details are highly technical, with phrases like "alternate wefts weave 4/2 twill and 3/3 twill".

But his fabric did the trick and he sold huge numbers of weatherproof garments, many to the hunting, fishing and shooting fraternity. But his big sale was half a million trench coats during World War I.

One of the reasons Burberry was so successful was that he realized that, although he needed a good product, the brand was equally important, if not more so. Hence, he put much of his energy into advertising.

And for this he needed an artist. It was probably his love of horses that in the 1880s brought him into contact with an extraordinarily gifted young man who fitted the bill, George Conrad Roller, who lived in Tadley, a few miles from Basingstoke.

Burberry asked him to make drawings of his garments for advertising, thereby starting a 40-year partnership that endured even when Roller was soldiering. During World War I, when he was stationed in Ireland, Burberry sent out garments for him to draw, using his subaltern as a model!

The story of the artist has been researched by members of the Tadley and District History Society. Once a village, this part of north Hampshire has grown into a substantial town. Its past is told in a number of excellent publications, including Around Tadley: People and Places, a lavishly illustrated book available from a recently rebuilt website: www.tadshistory.com.

Roller grew up in London, the son of an importer, a naturalised German, whose trade included cinchona bark from South America for quinine.

He went to Westminster School and Lambeth College of Art. Unlike Burberry, who was a country boy, Roller had a sophistication that enabled him to produce evocative drawings aimed at the well-to-do.

A man of many parts, he was an accomplished portraitist, a close friend of the American painter John Singer Sargent and an internationally known picture restorer.

For 20 years he served the Royal Academy. His Boer War epic Imperial Volunteers Taking Cover in a Farmyard is in the collection of Reading Museum and Town Hall.

He was also a renowned steeplechaser, a London magistrate and a governor of several hospitals, including the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading.

At one time he lived in a mansion in the midst of Tadley Common, called 'The Wilderness'– now Tadley Court School – and later in 'The Cottage'.

His name was so well known when he died in January 1941, in Salisbury, that his death was reported in the Glasgow Herald, which recorded: 'Soldiering. Travel, art and sport all had their place in the romantic career of Major George C Roller DCM'.

Although it was common knowledge that he had been buried in the graveyard of Tadley's old church, St Peter's, until a couple of years ago the location was unknown. Members of TADS were keen to solve the mystery and so in September 2020, after a determined search, they found it engulfed in bushes. All that was visible was the top of a cross, which, together with the grave has now been restored.

The story of George Roller is told in TADS Project News by Tadley historians, who in 2000 visited the Burberry archives in London.

These demonstrate the importance of Roller in maintaining Burberry's image at time when photography was rare in advertising. They reported that "the majority of line drawings used in Burberry's advertising bore Roller's signature".

There were other family links: when Burberry Ltd was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1920, Roller's younger brother, Frederick, a solicitor, was on the board of directors.

At some stage, Tom Burberry gave the artist the gift of one of his mares, a small beast "funny tempered and having no nice feelings for anyone". Apparently, his groom passed over the wrong horse!

However, she turned out to be an extremely tough animal and carried Roller, who named her 'Gabardine', through the Boer War and the South African Campaign, saving his life on more than one occasion.

When Gabardine died in 1906, at the age of 25, Roller buried her with due ceremony and had a gravestone inscribed "a gallant little mare…winner of many races and jumping competitions". The stone has been lost, but some say the family grave was at some time alongside the perimeter fence of St Peter's graveyard and the horse was buried just outside. Later the churchyard was extended, taking the gallant Gabardine into consecrated ground.

It's a good story, but recent research by TADS has quashed it, according to Ian Burn, who quotes Roller from Open Spaces, a promotional book published by Burberry Ltd in early 1900s, saying that she was buried "in my back garden", which means 'The Cottage', now appropriately called 'Rollers'.

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