The famous white horse of the first FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium, 1923. In fact the horse, whose name was Billy, was not white but rather gray, and as can be seen, he wasn’t the only horse at Wembley that day, just the most visible one. But he did his work well. The policeman riding him, George Scorey, has an entry in the DNB.
This is worth remembering because mounted policemen still offer one of the most effective, and least threatening, means of crowd control. Police departments have an immoderate love of technology and so have increasingly neglected the great effectiveness of equestrian policing. And as one cop on horseback has commented, “Nobody ever tried to pet my police car, but they line up to pet my horse.”