AMONG the outstanding artistic successes of recent years, few have exceeded Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. As a book, a film and, most recently, an astonishing stage production with puppets, his story of Joey, the Devon farm-horse used by both sides in the First World War, has captivated millions. Its popularity during the 100th anniversary of the start of the war has established it as a classic.

But where did the author find his inspiration? If he had wished to research the background of horses in the First World War he could not have done better than turn to the memoirs of a figure once familiar to readers of this newspaper.

Contributor for more than 50 years of what became his legendary Country Diary – “Notes on Rural Life and Sport” - Jack Fairfax-Blakeborough served in the war as a “Horsemaster.” With the rank of Major, he had up to 1,000 animals in his care. What were conditions like? “I used to say you could follow where we trekked by our dead horses by the roadside,” he wrote. So there you have it – the context of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse in a nutshell.

Born in Guisborough in 1883, son of a father who himself was a noted authority on Yorkshire rural life and folklore, Jack Fairfax-Blakeborough began his working life as a journalist on Middlesbrough’s Evening Gazette. But a passion for horses gained at an early age, and developed through riding with the Cleveland Hunt, soon led him into the world of horseracing. Employed for a time at the Hambleton racing stables, near Sutton Bank, he was building up his own stables at Middleham when the First World War broke out.

Volunteering almost immediately, he was commissioned in the Kings Hussars, which singled him out, with other skilled riders, for cavalry training. “We found difficulty coping with the big cavalry saddles and riding without our feet in the stirrups,” he wrote. “You had to grip with knees and thighs.” Falls were ridiculed by the ‘riding master’: “Who told you to dismount?”

Appointed a Horsemaster, the Major was sent to France. His first base was “knee deep in filth… The horses were often standing hock deep in slush and mud, never able to lie down. Poor beggars.” Within an hour he was up at the front line, a wilderness of snow and mud. “The horses were mangy and stood belly deep in water and filth. I never saw horses in such a state. Carrying ammunition day and night and waiting hours at dumps played havoc with them.”

During his first night several horses vanished. “I expected a court of inquiry and a rumpus, but it seemed a normal occurrence. Some other unit had stolen them.”

Always anxious for his horses, the Major did his best for them. “I continually tried to get watering improved and extra forage but soon found the staff were useless.” He claimed that soldiers assigned to horse duties were “invariably the most hopeless and notorious shirkers.”

His opinion of army vets was little better. “I was inclined to think our veterinary sergeants were a little too handy with their pistols,” he wrote. “If a horse was exhausted, it saved them a lot of trouble to shoot it.”

Near Vimy Ridge, a notorious bloodbath, his unit camped in a wheatfield, which quickly became a bog. “Conditions for the horses were dreadful,” the Major recalled. In his field diary he recorded mounting daily losses: “1 died, 3 destroyed…3 died, four destroyed… 6 died, 14 destroyed.”

The troops were up to their thighs in mud, and “if a horse went down it was drowned and carts and gun carriages rolled over it.”

Later, at Arras, another slaughter ground, “there was not a stitch of canvas for us…The site was just a mud heap, and the horses stood there shivering.”

But the depths of horror were plumbed in Belgium. “It was a 1,000 times worse than France, a veritable hell,” wrote the Major. “Men and horses lived in the utmost squalor and discomfort. Anyone who stepped off the duckboards drowned.” One night 20 horses perished.

Michael Morpurgo’s story has the horse bolting across the battle-scarred landscape. The Major once found himself having to ride “at full gallop” because he was in clear sight of the nearby Germans. “It was all like a rather nightmare foxhunt,” he recalled.

The fictional war horse is finally brought down by a tangle of barbed wire, from which it is freed by a British and a German soldier. Only a little less dramatic, the Major at one place ignored advice not to venture into No Man’s Land, from which he cleared the barbed wire to allow his horses to graze. “I really did see horses improve here,” he wrote.

By now the British were advancing, and the Major rode ahead to identify suitable positions for the artillery. “Sometimes I rode 100 miles a day,” he recalled. His search took him through a street “littered with the bodies of German soldiers and horses.” He also found a quarry, which provided “shelter for the horses during their short rest.”

Scope even came for the Major’s sporting spirit. He twice set out “a little steeplechase course”, staging “a sports meeting, with jumping competitions, mule and horse races.” Mules had won his greatest respect: “They carried on under weather and forage conditions that caused horses to die like flies.”

These memories of the Major’s war form a chapter in “J. F. B.” – The Memoirs of Jack Fairfax-Blakeborough, a collection of the Major’s autobiographical writings assembled by his son Noel and published in 1978, two years after the Major’s death, at his home in Westerdale. The Major’s service earned him the Military Cross and he summed up his experience with these words: “We all lost dear friends, and the tragedy of those years still haunts me. Also, I am filled with horror and admiration when I think of the hundreds of horses under my command. Horror at their suffering, and admiration at their enduring bravery, willingness and strength.”

Michael Morpugo couldn’t have put it better.