When Ernest Andrews bought this wooden carousel horse from Murray’s auction house earlier this year, it had certainly seen better days.

It had a broken front leg, fire damage to its neck, rot in the leg joints and its original colours were hidden under multiple layers of paint.

But now after a painstaking restoration that took 590 hours to complete, the beautiful galloper, that once carried children at an island fairground, looks just as good as the day it first went for a spin.

Newly christened Mona, it has taken pride of place in the lounge of Ernest’s home in Romsey, Hampshire.

But he is still desperate to find out more about its history - and would love to trace photos of a roundabout in the amusement hall at White City where he believes the horse may once have been based.

Ernest organised an online bid to buy the horse which was one of the lots at a sale of items from the estate of well-known Manx artist Simon Buttimore.

As part of its restoration, the galloper’s broken front right leg had to be carefully rebuilt and the detached lower part was grafted on with wood and steel plates concealed inside the leg.

Numerous sections had to be replaced with limewood and recarved.

Original colours and designs were revealed as he carefully stripped back numerous layers of paint.

These include the manufacturer’s name CJ Spooner, of Swan Works, Burton-on-Trent, and the date 1912.

The patchwork saddle contains 2,000 individual hand-painted stitches and Ernest carefully painted the ’Three Legs of Man’ on the name sash.

He said: ’I am delighted with the transformation and I have endeavoured to restore it to a very high standard.’

Ernest said that he had a good response to his appeal for more information about the history of the horse when we first ran the story about his auction house purchase.

Margaret Dodds from Ramsey was able to provide him with photos of some identical horses on a small children’s roundabout in Mooragh Park but not his actual horse.

He has established that there was probably some kind of bespoke roundabout created inside the amusement hall at the White City in the mid 1960s that included his horse and others.

’Unfortunately nobody has come up with any photos,’ he said. ’I would desperately like to make contact with anyone who worked at, or was associated with, the White City during the 1960s.’

There have also been suggestions the horse came from one of the many small hand-cranked roundabouts in the island during the 1920s and 1930s but photos he has obtained suggest those horses were different.

He said: ’Ultimately I am trying to establish how these horses made it to the island as I am sure they were travelled extensively in the UK first.’

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