Each team of horses attached to a farm was well known to the village and had to be harnessed and ready for action at any time of day or night in case the lifeboat maroon went off. Until well after the Second World War horses were vital to the work of every farm.

Mrs Alice Morris, aged 87, writing in the WI Scrapbook in 1958, recalled the days when: On the farms there were horses only and they were trained by word of mouth. The men only had to say, ‘Bither’ or ‘Hoot’ for them to go right or left. They never led them by hand. By the late 1950s there was not one agricultural horse left in Brook or Mottistone.