Ken comes to Finmory after he ends up in probation after being wrongly convicted for a break in to a warehouse. Tom Manders was his probation officer and the family became friends with him when they lived in Stopton, with Ken even turning up on their doorstep with a pony for Jinny to ride.

Ken is mentioned in the first chapter of For Love of a Horse when they are preparing to move to Finmory and Jinny and Mike, while excited about the move, lament that the won’t see him again.

Of course not true, Ken turns up on the second day they are at Finmory, bringing a large grey lurcher dog called Kelly who joined him on his way up north. He is only 17 but his rich parents have washed their hands of him other than sending him a monthly cheque.

Ken at that time would probably have been called a ‘hippy’, as he is very environmentally oriented and vegan. This is more normal now than when these books were originally published in the 1970s.

Ken suggests that Jinny changes Yasmin the Killer horse’s name to Shantih ( it took me many years to realise that Shantih is pronounced Shaan-tee rather than Shan-tie lol 😂).

It is Ken who rescues Jinny when she heads out to the moors to look for Shantih and they get caught in a snowstorm. It is also Ken who gets the vet out for Shantih as she has a bad leg.

I could write more about Ken but I won’t just now but I will finish by saying that as a teenager, I imagined a TV series being made of the Jinny books, I would have casted Paul Nicholls as Ken and Alexander Morton, who played Golly in Monarch of the Glen as Mr MacKenzie.