Diana Mason

The daughter of farmer George Mason, Diana started riding ponies on the farm from an early age and when she was 17 her father purchased her first real horse, a four-year-old bay mare called Tramella, who Diana affectionately called “Mell”. The two had a difficult relationship at first, but the young Diana persevered and the two became inseparable.

Planning to become a jumper, she tried her hand at eventing and at a one-day event at Epperstone, Nottinghamshire, she beat the experienced John Oram. Tramella and Diana first competed at Badminton in 1953 and finished a creditable 19th but the following year the pair finished third and then helped Great Britain win the team event at the European championships in Basle when Diana became the first woman to ever be selected for a British three day event team.

That European success was repeated at Windsor a year later, despite Tramella falling during the cross country section. Having retired Tramella from eventing, they switched to dressage and in 1963 they completed a unique double when they became the first and only combination to win European championships at two different disciplines after they were part of the British team that won the dressage team title. Sadly, Tramella was put down in the Winter of 1974 at the age of 28.

Diana made her Olympic debut with her new horse Special Edition in 1976. Diana was the oldest member of the entire Great Britain team at the 1988 Seoul Olympics when she partnered her next horse Prince Consort who had had made its Olympic debut four years earlier. Diana was one of the reserves and Great Britain’s Chef d’Equipe for the 1984 Los Angeles Games and when Jennie Loriston-Clarke’s horse Dutch Courage caught a virus, Prince Consort was flown to the United States for Loriston-Clarke to ride.

Diana bowed out of international competition in 1991 after riding Prince Consort in the Netherlands. Mason was the Chairman of the British Horse Society Dressage Group, the predecessor of British Dressage, for 17 years from 1975 to 1992, and was also the chairman of the British selectors but resigned her position in 1992 shortly before the Barcelona Olympics following the committee’s decision to leave Jennie Loristion-Clarke, its most experienced dressage rider, out of the Olympic team.

Honoured with the OBE for services to equestrian sport in 2008, Diana Mason continued her role as a dressage judge up to 2013 when she was 80. She had the honour of being Britain’s team manager the first time equestrianism was included in the Paralympics, at Atlanta in 1996.