Rosemary Lane

Died: September 3, 2015.

ROSEMARY Lane, who has died aged 92, was something of a "horse whisperer" but not just to relax horses, in fact more to use them to relax people.

What she did, for 50 years in Scotland, was to let the mentally or physically-disabled, notably children, improve their confidence and general well-being by "talking" to horses and feeling the natural sensitivity of the animals' response. She realiSed very young that horses and ponies had a natural affinity for humans and that the sensitivity could be channelled to help human beings who were suffering. "Horse power," she called it.

Miss Lane believed passionately in hippotherapy, how the disabled could relate to horses or ponies -- animals which seemed to have a natural gift for looking after their human counterparts. She was a physiotherapist by training, founder and Principal of the School of Physiotherapy in Aberdeen, her adopted home, until her retirement in 1986.

There, she became a driving force behind the local branch of the Riding and Disabled Association (RDA), which has helped hundreds of disabled people to improve their lives through their relationships with what the great cowboy Roy Rogers, singing about his horse Trigger, described as "that wonderful four-legged friend ... honest and faithful right up to the end."

She first committed herself to the RDA in the 1960s, after moving from England to Aberdeen and volunteering with the RDA's local branch. She became Regional Physiotherapist and Regional chairman for the group's Grampian and Highland Region for many years. The titles do not tell the story: she was hands-on, helping people with mental or physical disabilities to get on horses or ponies, saddling them up, "whispering" to both human and animal to make both of them feel comfortable, to establish a relationship of trust. The Queen made her an MBE in 1976 for her work in physiotherapy, notably using horses.

After her death, colleagues who worked with her, and parents or relatives of disabled people, described her as inspirational, energetic and enthusiastic, a role model and a mentor. A volunteer herself, she attracted many others who helped make horse-riding not only therapy but fun for the disabled. Her only payment was to see people smile when they made a connection with their horse or pony, often getting involved in "show-jumping" with fences and other obstacles. She loved nothing more than to see a disabled child smile after making their first small "show jump."

A spokesperson for the RDA told The Herald: "Rosemary's motivation was her love and respect for people with physical disabilities, and her belief that riding can help them to achieve a greater degree of independence, self-confidence and pleasure than would otherwise have been possible."

Eloquent as a public speaker, Miss Lane travelled throughout the UK to show fellow physiotherapists how horses could help people. Representing the RDA, she led courses as far away as Portugal, Greece and Hong Kong, simply getting the disabled to ride or relate to horses or ponies. She was thrilled recently when Robert Gordon University (RGU) in Aberdeen officially accredited a hippotherapy course which she herself had drawn up. The course - Hippotherapy Practice and Equine Assessment - is the first of its kind in the UK.

Although organised by the RGU, the course is currently being delivered at the Clywd Special Riding Centre in Wales, where therapists can gain postgraduate credit and a professional qualification in hippotherapy. The course is coordinated by Dr Valerie Cooper, a former RGU lecturer who also runs a hippotherapy clinic for disabled children at the Aberdeen Riding Club.

Miss Lane's ideas have been used to provide an integrated holistic therapy for neurological conditions in children and adults, for those with muscular skeletal disorders, back or pelvic pain and many other problems. A five-year-old girl, Allissa Archibald, who had brain damage which confounded her doctors, has recently shown massive improvement through riding a pony at the Aberdeen Riding Club.

Rosemary Eleanor Jane Lane was born in Lomond, Surrey, on January 19, 1923, one of three daughters who were all educated at home and rode ponies from a young age. It was not unusual for Rosemary to disappear from home on her pony, causing her mother to fret until her father insisted, always correctly, "the pony will find its own way home." She reckoned many years later that some it not all of her childhood home and horseback playgrounds had been demolished to make way for London's Gatwick airport.

At the end of the Second World War, she joined the RAF, serving variously in Fighter Command, Coastal Command and Transport Command, retiring with the rank of Flying Officer. She spent the first 40 years of her life in Surrey, always surrounded by horses, with a three-year break to lecture in physiotherapy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Soon afterwards, she discovered Scotland, which would be her home for the next 50-plus years, until her death.

Miss Lane died in Aberdeen's Cranford Care Home after a short illness. She was unmarried but always considered the volunteers and "patients" at the Riding for the Disabled Association as her family.

PHIL DAVISON