Who are Charlie and Yoanna Hanbury? Meet the family transforming Argentine polo

The Hanbury family’s seamless lifestyle across England and Argentina aims to inspire readers by showing how they balance education, family and passion in two worlds.

England is home, but Argentina gives them freedom. For their daughters especially, it’s transformative. The Hanbury family wakes up in the morning and disappear on bicycles, jump on horses and ride for hours across the endless pampas. Eight-year-old Cara drives her mother around the property. The children zoom about on motorbikes and quad bikes. In England, there are worries about traffic, roads and strangers. Here, there’s simply space—endless, liberating space.

Both places are gloriously different, which is precisely why experiencing both is so valuable. England provides structure, tradition and education in its most formal sense. Argentina offers wilderness, liberty and a profound connection to nature and horses. As Charlie puts it with elegant simplicity: “England gives us who we are, and Argentina gives us how we want to live.”

For Charlie, horses have been a lifelong passion inherited from parents deeply involved in racing before polo consumed the family. When he was young, there was always a horse available for an afternoon ride. His first tournament was alongside his father, and that experience of playing together was extraordinary. To now replicate that with his own wife and children feels like a full circle.

But there’s something more profound than family tradition at work. Horses are remarkable creatures. The relationship you cultivate with them, the respect they command, the way they teach responsibility and humility—it becomes part of you. The sport itself is exhilarating, certainly, but it’s genuinely about the horses.

The perfect polo pony, Charlie explains, must be exceptionally comfortable to ride. It requires a brilliant mind, an excellent mouth and responsive sides. But if he’s being specific, he always jests that the main thing he seeks is a really substantial bum: a powerful, well-developed hindquarter, a deep shoulder and a short back. “You essentially want a magnificent motorbike,” he laughs.

Beyond conformation, temperament matters most. The world’s finest horses can be ridden at full intensity by elite players, yet remain perfectly calm with a child in the saddle. A horse that allows your daughter to sit peacefully, then lets top players perform at their peak—that’s an animal with an exceptional mind.

Polo teaches discipline in its most fundamental form. Early rising, caring for animals and prioritising something beyond yourself. For Charlie, family and polo have been intertwined since childhood. Starting with his father in his first tournament, now sharing morning rides with Cara, planning their first tournaments together—it feels like a beautiful circle completing itself.

Horses themselves are outstanding teachers. They sense your energy instantaneously. Tension, anxiety, fear—they respond to all of it. You learn to remain calm, focused, present—even when everything’s chaotic around you. It’s perhaps the greatest gift the sport offers: not trophies or prestige, but these fundamental lessons in character, patience and presence.

This past August, a moment arrived that crystallised everything Charlie had built. The Argentine Association of Breeders (an institution as venerable and traditional as the sport itself) presented Lovelocks with a lifetime achievement award. For Charlie, it represented something far more profound than recognition: acceptance.

“To have achieved that as a foreigner in Argentina was a massive accomplishment,” Charlie reflects. “When we received the award, it felt like profound acceptance. I felt we had become part of it, which is enormous.”

He was asked to join the association’s board of directors—the only foreigner in a position traditionally reserved for Argentine dynasties whose polo heritage spans centuries. 

As their daughters grow into the operation their grandfather initiated, and their father perfected, the next chapter of the Lovelocks story promises to be as compelling as the one that made history. The Lovelocks family divides their time between the rolling hills of Berkshire and the endless horizons of the Argentine Pampas—two worlds, one remarkable legacy and a story that proves that with passion, patience and the perfect polo pony, even the impossible becomes surmountable.

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