Caroline Silver
From the back cover of Caroline’s 1973 book Classic Lives: The Education Of A Racehorse
Caroline Silver, born of Edgbaston, Birmingham in 1938, was a woman of many hats. Writes her friend, Sue Ellis, in her eulogy for her, “she had a passion for knowledge, undertaking courses at Columbia University in New York in the sixties, and later in horticulture and horse care at Hartpury College, Gloucestershire, and in nursing from the Red Cross. She did not have a degree, but would cheerfully invent one if required: she believed that if you could do a job well, you should have the job.”
Caroline’s first notable occupation was that of a model (or ‘mannequin’) in the late-fifties, represented by the Lucie Clayton College. It would become the top agency in Britain with the day’s modeling industry boom, going on to represent such names as Celia Hammond, Jean Shrimpton, Paulene Stone, Joanna Lumley, and Samantha Juste. Caroline was a ways before their time, a few years younger than graduate Fiona Campbell-Walter and two years the senior of future actress Tania Mallet; nevertheless, she made enough of a splash on the scene to appear in a 1958 BBC blurb, putting her natural versatility to good use in a witty segment regarding prolific stuntwoman Connie Tilton, who helps her do a front-fall.
Framed in the five-and-a-half-minute segment as an “independent” young woman “seeking adventure”, Caroline carries her head high with a unique confidence that even sticks out among the day’s most recognizable models. She would carry that ambitious spirit into a freelance writing career, eventually penning two books profiling the British rock scene of the sixties. The first, 1966’s The Pop Makers, is a chapter-by-chapter profile of numerous high-profile groups, both within the spotlight and out of it. The photos featured throughout the book, many of which have not been reprinted elsewhere, were taken by her husband at the time, Nathan Silver; his bestselling 1967 book Lost New York has been reprinted numerous times, lauded for his lens’s perspective on the city’s gilded history, one undoubtedly informed by his own skills as a lecturer at Columbia’s architecture department. The two wedded in 1961 and would move across the pond four years later, with Nathan transferring his skills to Cambridge and Caroline devoting herself fully to writing.
The two would divorce in 1970, though Caroline kept the surname for her preceding publications; a horse rider and a lover of the animal since childhood, she would pen a cover story for the Telegraph in ‘69 regarding her winning a point-to-point race, a rarity for a woman to accomplish then. She covered horse racing for that paper and the Sunday Times, reporting for the latter on the 1976 Summer Olympics. She also published numerous books about horses throughout the seventies; Classic Lives: The Education of a Racehorse in particular was widely lauded, selected as a book of its year by Jilly Cooper, and reprinted numerous times. Its followup, from 1974, surrounds the training of a wild pony named Tommy, a fun coincidence given another one of her books that year, The Who... Through the Eyes of Pete Townshend, cowritten with Connor McKnight. It stands as one of the earliest biographies of the group, utilizing original and quite insightful interviews with the group’s members, though it cuts off before the release of Quadrophenia.
Both that book and The Pop Makers were distributed through Scholastic Book Services, for whom Silver edited maths books and crafted crossword puzzles. The publisher released many a ‘rock book’ across the sixties and seventies, including James A. Hudson’s Fillmore East & West and David Dachs’ Inside Pop series. Owing to their method of distribution at school book fairs, these sorts of books fell with ease into the laps of American youths eager to learn more about the music they loved in a manner less ephemeral than the magazine clippings most rock scholars today hone in on. Silver’s earlier book would’ve proved particularly valuable to these chipper minds, a clear and earnest glimpse into the myth-laden world of the so-called British Invasion, released just two years after the Beatles made landfall. Peter Stanfield, author of various books about rock music and sixties culture, was particularly intrigued by her chapter on the Yardbirds, which portrays them (as many media did) as “human, fallible… the anti-stars of the music machine.”
Silver also writes of the Manfred Mann being trampled by fans, how Ready Steady Go! hostess Cathy McGowan represented a British generation, Charlie Watts getting shot below the eye with an airgun pellet at a Rolling Stones show (“It was meant to shoot Mick Jagger dead”), and other such happenings. But her tone is never sensational, as attentive as it is to the human side of shiny showbusiness; wrote one retrospective commentator, “I remember reading the book and having my naive thoughts about what it must be like to be a ‘rock star’ punctured by this narrative.” (See an excerpt below of her discussion of the Beatles’ grapplings with public versus private life.) “Public idols or not, pop group members are pretty much like other people,” opens Silver’s chapter on the Stones. “The most popular performers, such as those who appear in this book, are perhaps different only in that, having had more experience of eccentric human behavior than the average person, they tend to be more tolerant than most others.”
Being so well-rounded in regards to her hobbies, it is no wonder that she portrays the day’s reigning pop stars, so often mythologized and stereotyped, with such dignity. The introduction to The Pop Makers goes as far as to note that, in the uber-competitive, post-Beatles performing landscape, “the public no longer buys just a pretty tune, but requires a piece of musical individuality” — yes, the girls pressed up against the barricades at the Yardbirds gig may be feigning faintness to wind up backstage, but they’re doing so for a completely understandable and socially present reason. She even considers pop a sociological phenomenon, writing of rock’s cultural infiltration with both the necessary citations and the same enthusiastic neutrality that she does the black roots of rock in the book’s second chapter.
Though The Pop Makers and Through the Eyes of Pete Townshend would be Silver’s only forays into the world of rock journalism, her writing abilities made their rounds elsewhere. She wrote “The Gallops Man”, the second episode of a narrative BBC series called Country Tales; it starred Fred Winter, CBE, who himself had been a top jockey and needed no training to himself portray a horse trainer. Wrote a reporter for the Swindon Evening Advertiser, “Fred said he was ‘rather embarrassed’ when the BBC first asked him to do the programme, but he confessed that he later grew to enjoy the whole thing.” (He was further relived that he had no lines of dialogue, as the series is entirely narration-based — “I don’t like talking much.”) The episode was “filmed in true ‘horse-country’” on Berkshire’s Lambourn Downs, told the South Wales Argus: “It is set at the end of the last century and is the portrait of a man totally immersed in the countryside and his work and love for the living creatures of the downs. But he suffers near heart-break at the hands of the bullying son of a racehorse owner.”
At the time, Silver lived at Crooked Soley, a hamlet near the market town of Hungerford that happened to be the site of a short-lived crop circle some decades later. But on Lambourn Downs would become her home by the time she wrote the text to a 1978 book profiling the naïve art of Vincent Haddelsey, who most often portrayed stallions, mares, and the like. Silver wedded him that year, though that union wouldn’t last, either. She would continue to write throughout the eighties and nineties, chiefly a column for Harper & Queen and a few more horse books. She also moved to Amberley, a small village in Gloucestershire, upkeeping a bed and breakfast while taking care of her aging parents, Phillip and Ethne. She would eventually marry one Richard Barnes — nicknamed ‘Biffo’ and of no relation to the Who associate — after he cared for her ill father. All the while, she advocated for numerous animal welfare causes, took care of numerous pet cats, and was a delightful friend to those who knew her.
Barnes passed in 2020, and Silver did two years later, aged eighty-three; her funeral procession was led by her two greys, Mickey and Tommy.
Sources: obituaries by Sue Lewis for the Guardian, Horse & Hound, and AboutYourPetz.com; Newspapers.com; the Internet Archive; the blog of Peter Stanfield; the Steve Hoffman Music Forums; BBC Archive, VillagePreservation.org; French Sampler.
Read excerpts from The Pop Makers:
Fame: The Beatles
Not All Roses: The Yardbirds (as scanned by Peter Stanfield)