by R S Surtees
The stables at Charborough are near the house and are as good as it is possible for stables to be — light, lofty, airy, roomy, and so clean that a man might be excused who spent the day in them; all communicate with one another; and they contain only greys, hunters and coach-horses. I forget the number of hunters there last winter, but were it not for days with other packs, and the frequency with which Mr Drax mounts his friends, there were more than he and his servants could keep in condition with his two-days-a-week country.
In the autumn Mr Drax has races in the park — fine natural turf; among the prizes is a Cup to be contended for in a Hurdle-race by farmers resident within the Hunt, which produces great fun. The Dorsetshire farmers are a very superior class making from one to two thousand a year and living in the style of the squirearchy of the last century. They are all sportsmen and show great attention to strangers. Mr James Burgess, learning that I was in his neighbourhood, most politely offered me the shooting over his farm, and I received similar kindnesses from many others. Mr Robert Burgess, his brother, is also a capital sportsman who hunts often with Mr Drax. Other good sportsmen are the Messrs House, father and son, the latter excellent across the formidable Vale of Blackmore; Mr Martin; that trump, Mr White, the brewer of Wareham, who is nearly as big as one of his own butts, but bowls over the heaths like a good one; the young Pickards, sons of the Rev. Mr Pickard, are among those who promise well; their pomes generally tire first, which is always a good sign. There is also a little veterinary surgeon who lives at Dorchester or Weymouth, who will ride at anything. I saw him going capitally on a flea-bitten grey one day with Mr Portman’s in the Vale. A great sporting character named Beale lives at Blandford. A barber by trade, he will clip either a man or a horse; indeed, I believe horses provide his principal occupation in winter, as clipping is much in vogue in Dorsetshire. Beale is an amazingly stout-built, powerful man, very active, and one of the first cricketers in the West. He is very fond of hunting and is much patronised by the gentlemen of the different hunts, being an exceedingly civil, respectable man.
VI. LORD ELCHO’S COUNTRY.
ITS VAST EXTENT — A THIRD KENNEL CONTEMPLATED — THE BERWICKSHIRE COUNTRY — NORTHUMBERLAND FARMING — THE MASTER — SUPPORTERS OF FOX-HUNTING — A GREAT RUN — THE BAGMAN AND THE BRUSH — THE NORTHUMBERLAND AND DURHAM COUNTRIES.
WHEN LORD ELCHO gave up the Lothians, which he did on taking Mr Robertson’s country, he made Berwickshire, North Durham, and Northumberland the field of his operations, hunting ten or twelve miles south of Belford, as far as Lord Grey’s at Howick on the east, and nearly down to the Vale of Whittingham on the west. In the former district is included the beautiful Vale of Bamborough, one of the first fox-hunting regions in the world; indeed, take it all in all, Lord Elcho has one of the finest countries of the day. He deserves it, being an out and out sportsman with every quality that ensures popularity. It might be thought that his lordship has undertaken a larger country than he can manage, and certainly if it were a case of riding 15 or 20 miles to cover, hunting his hounds all day, then mounting a fresh horse to ride five-and-twenty miles home again, and this five days a week, one might be inclined to think him ratifier tightly tied up, as the Thames watermen say; but fortunately this is not the case. At one time Lord Elcho did ride great distances to and fro; and for creditable reasons; but those reasons have now ceased to exist. His Lordship’s kennel was then at Dunse in the heart of Berwickshire; now he has one kennel at Coldstream in Scotland, another at Wooler in England, and it is proposed to build a third with suitable stabling at Belford for convenience of hunting the Northumberland country south of that town.
Lord Elcho formerly hunted four days a week; now he hunts five; and if he were a new hand just taking a country it might be thought he was attempting too much; but he is no novice; he has been a sportsman all his life, knows what hunting is in the best countries, has had fox-hounds for ten or a dozen years, and knows exactly what he can do. Lord Elcho’s country as it stands is one of the finest in the kingdom;... wild, roomy, and natural; there is a fine sporting air about it. The population, if such a term can be applied to a country where a village consists of one farmhouse and a hundred wheat-stacks, is purely agricultural. To be sure there are some tall hills called the Cheviots that sometimes bother both men and horses; but what can equal a hill for displaying the working of hounds and the beauties of hunting? In this wide country there is every variety; the Berwickshire moors ride like a race-course, while the vales present double fences with drains on either side wide enough to satisfy the veriest glutton in leaping. I never saw such ditches save in the Thomdon country in Essex; still, they are very safe if one could but imagine them so.
“They tell me my horses won’t put their feet into them,” said old Mr Chute of the Vine in Hampshire to a friend who found his butler levelling in the ditches with a spade. “But I can’t help fancying they will.”
Many are of the same way of thinking with regard to the Berwickshire ditches. The big places, however, never deceive a horse; and if once he lands well into one he will take care not to do it again if he can help it. They are never blind either — too wide for that, by Jove!
Berwickshire abounds in foxes, and good ones too; fellows that don’t wait for much finding. “Ah, it’s you again, is it, coming in long-drawn line through the turnip field? Then I’ll just trot off down this double hedgerow!” and away goes Master Reynard. These double hedgerows are planted on banks so wide that a horse can trot along them like a cat. Formerly they were faced with stone as far up as the quicks, but the mania for draining has caused the removal of the stone for underground uses. The furze, gorse or whin, or whatever it is called in different localities, grows very luxuriantly in Berwickshire, and it is no uncommon thing to find a very substantial whinstone wall coped with a very broad binding of most prickly-looking gorse upon which it would be better to be chucked in leather breeches than in cords or kerseymeres.
Northumberland, I am sorry to say, is not so well off for foxes as Berwickshire; the Vale of Bamborough in particular is very deficient; which perhaps may be explained by the circumstance that many of the coverts are open and are consequently disturbed by cattle. The country wants a little more making, in fact. Another drawback is the paucity of fox-hunting landowners in this district; farmers are the same all the world over; they are always friendly to fox-hunting, and that is paying no small compliment to their liberality; for if there be a class who suffer by fox-hunting, assuredly it is the farmer, who sees his wheat crossed, his turnips smashed, his seeds crushed, his gates thrown open, his cattle disturbed, and all without a murmur — at least without a murmur if it is done fairly in the chase. Farming in Northumberland, however, is quite a different thing to what it is in most counties; there are no little grubbing, scratching, fifty-pound tenants-at-will, but men of station and capital who farm land to the amount of several thousands a year. No wonder there are villages of wheat-stacks! Such breadths of land in single hands must also diminish the number of fox-hunting farmers, and contract the ability of those who do hunt to look after foxes; for the man who farms on a large scale has enough to do to get his day or two with hounds in the week.
Still, there is good feeling towards fox-hunting throughout the country, and Lord Elcho is the man of all others to conciliate those who can promote it. He is just what a Master of Foxhounds ought to be — kind and jovial with his field, courteous and considerate to strangers, affable with the farmers, and bent on showing sport if sport can be shown. Neither does he look upon fox-hunting as a matter of right but as a matter of courtesy, for which the obligation is increased when conferred by non-hunting proprietors. Fox-hunters are apt to think that because they follow the noblest of field sports, all behave ill who do not assist and encourage it; but let me ask these gentlemen to carry this principle into other pursuits and see how it would act. Let us suppose our fox-hunter has a coursing neighbour who would like to exercise his long dogs over our fox-hunter’s lawn. The long dog man may t
hink coursing quite the perfection of sport; and yet I dare say our fox-hunter would think him very unreasonable were the long dog man to d — n him for a selfish sinner if not allowed to have his course in that fox-hunter’s park. But our fox-hunter would throw down the paling, tear up the walks, pull up the drains, invade the flower garden — nay, the sanctity of the greenhouse itself, in pursuit of an animal “he can’t eat when he’s caught,” as old Elwes the miser observed. No! Fox-hunting must always be by sufferance: and to the credit of British gentlemen and British yeomen I feel confident it will always be suffered so long as it is conducted as Lord Elcho conducts it.
The Duke of Northumberland, though no fox-hunter himself (the more the pity as he would most likely then enjoy the good health all wish him), with a spirit worthy of his station, gives every encouragement to the sport throughout the whole of his wide demesnes. He extends every support to Lord Elcho and, I hear, has promised £500 towards the erection of the new kennels. Lord Tankerville, too, is a good supporter, and his coverts are sure finds. So is Lord Grey. Nor should the fair owner of Haggerstone be omitted; she is as enthusiastically friendly to fox-hunting as any of the field. Many gentlemen could be named who, though not devoted Nimrods themselves, are most anxious to forward by every means in their power the good cause; and altogether I really believe that the country is as friendly as any country can possibly be, and only needs a little activity and management to make it everything Lord Elcho deserves. The gentlemen should bear in mind the fact that the matter is theirs more than his. His lordship likes the country; he has an unrivalled pack of hounds, capital servants, excellent horses; and all he wants is what those north of the Tweed call the “tod.” This indispensable adjunct, however, I do not despair of seeing as plentiful in Northumberland as it is in Berwickshire. Mr Robertson has been a rare friend to the fox in the latter county, also in North Durham; some noble coverts attest his ardour in the cause.
Lord Elcho’s hounds had a rare run on 27th November; there was a flaming description of it in the Berwick Warder, headed “Splendid Border Run in Two Kingdoms and Three Border Counties to which should have been added “Three Swollen Rivers”: — for fox and hounds swam the Till twice and the Tweed once — the latter being so full as to make Lord Elcho shudder when the pack took it, thinking he should see them all drowned. Fortunately all got through, with the exception of a few couple which found their strength unequal to the current and returned ere they reached the middle of the flood. It was a splendid hunting rim, not fast — at least, not until the last twenty minutes. Lord Elcho picked up the fox in a hedgerow, stretched out quite stiff, and as clean as when he started. The length of the run was computed at three-or four-and-twenty miles, much of it over deep ground, the greater part after crossing the Tweed.
A good joke happened with these hounds earlier in the month. They met at North Charlton, found at Twysal, the residence of Mr Selby (a nonhunting preserver of foxes), and went away over the moor, turning to Newlands; there, in a plantation, a fresh fox jumped up, which eight or ten couple of hounds and the majority of the field, including Lord Elcho, followed; Joe and Will, the vice-huntsman and the whip, sticking to the body of the pack. The latter ran their fox into the Vale of Bamborough on a tremendous scent; and rather towards the end hounds beat horsemen. After an hour and twenty minutes the fox thought it well to try and get home again, and was making for the north road with hounds gaining on him when a bagman (some say Dicky Cobden) tooling along in his vehicle, saw them, and jumping down, came up just as they killed. The gallant anti-corn-law man whipped out his knife and off with the fox’s brush; and leaving hounds to fight for the carcase, jumped into his rattletrap and bowled away into Belford, swearing he had taken the brush! Not only that, but putting it into the paper — the Berwick Warder, to wit.
Concerning the Northumberland and North Durham countries: the former is wild and has variety; the moors rideable but greatly inferior to those of Berwickshire, with sound-bottomed rich vales formed of enormous enclosures not over-strongly fenced. In fact it is a country that any man may ride over with pleasure, and excellent for seeing the work of hounds; it is also even and carries a good scent, particularly early in the season before the stubbles are ploughed up. Tiledraining is practised to a great extent, consequently the country is improving every year; in short, its prospects are brighter than those of any country of the day. When the kennel is built at a civilised place like Belford on the coach route between Edinburgh and Newcastle through which several coaches pass every day, it should ensure an influx of sportsmen who would never be drawn from their homes by a two or three days a week pack. From Coldstream a man may hunt all six days, the Duke of Buccleuch’s always hunting within reach on Thursday, which is Lord Elcho’s rest day.
In Northumberland and North Durham the foxes run straight — which is unusual in these fox-heading days. In conclusion I advise all who like Nature in almost its primitive form to visit the North and see it with Lord Elcho’s hounds.
Sporting Magazine, January 1844.
VII. THE BEAUTIES OF BECKFORD.
CHAPTER I.
BECKFORD’S A MODERATE COUNTRY — COST OF THE BELVOIR IN 1730 — HUNTING A NEW SUBJECT IN BECKFORD’S TIME — ECONOMY IN KENNEL BUILDING ADVISED — SIZE OF HOUNDS — HEADS AND COLOURS OF HOUNDS — ONE OF BECKFORD’S BEST PASSAGES — PACKS LARGE AND SMALL — BAG FOXES— ‘RAGAMUFFIN WORK.’
THERE IS NO work on Hunting to be compared with Peter Beckford’s immortal ‘Letters,’ written half a century ago. There is in it such an easy spirit of pleasant, gentlemanly, sporting gossip, such an absence of all attempt at dictation or effect, and above all such sincerity and disregard of ‘book-making’ that year after year we take up the volume and read it as though we had never read it before; and we never lay it down without having found something fresh to admire, or some old beauty that will bear admiration again. The author is so amusing and at the same time so instructive that, without disparagement to subsequent writers, many of whom have supplied omissions and have simplified details in which Mr Beckford was deficient or at which he only glanced, we think it will be admitted that Beckford’s is the book to which people first refer; and that his precepts — with rare exceptions — stand as good in the present day as they did when written.
True, there are omissions; but it must be remembered that hunting in Beckford’s time was not conducted on the elaborate system it is now. Neither did he hunt a country requiring much management; he therefore directed his observations to the actual material — hounds and servants — requisite for showing sport. Taking into consideration the age in which he lived, the third-rate country he hunted, and the deficient communications of that day, he evinces throughout his Letters not only a most lively sporting spirit, but a most liberal style of handling his subject, recommending liberality in the hunting establishment without anything like ostentatious display. What he wrote was the outcome of his own experience, obtained chiefly in his own country; and the very fact of his hunting only a moderate country perhaps makes his book the more valuable, inasmuch as moderate countries preponderate greatly over good, thus making his work applicable to more countries than had his scene of action been of the first-rate order. What might do for Leicestershire might not do for Berkshire, Hampshire, or Dorsetshire. In Beckford’s time people did not leave home to hunt except for Leicestershire, and, perhaps, Northamptonshire; and we question whether there were a dozen packs which now would be called “regular” packs of foxhounds in the Kingdom. Mr Beckford, we think, mentions only Mr Meynell’s, though there were others — the Brocklesby, the Belvoir, Lord Monson’s, Lord Talbot’s, The Duke of Richmond’s, &c.
The Belvoir Hunt was established in 1730, and the Articles of Agreement, subscribed by five noblemen, show the expense of a first-rate establishment in those days. This document begins by saying that John, Duke of Rutland, George, Earl of Cardigan, Baptist, Earl of Gainsborough, John, Lord Gower, and Scrope, Lord Howe, shall annually place in the hands of Alderman Child of T
emple Bar by two payments, the sum of £150 apiece towards defraying the expenses of hounds, horses and all other incidental charges; with a proviso that, if the sum should be found insufficient at the end of the year, it should be made good by the parties; and if there were any surplus it should be equally divided. The Agreement also specified the size of hounds and the number to be kept; they were not to exceed 20 inches in height, and they were to be not fewer than 19 in number: a small complement compared to packs of the present day; and indeed only half the number Mr Beckford himself took into the field.
The Belvoir seem to have made up in establishment what the pack wanted in strength. The Agreement provided that there should be a steward, one huntsman, six whippers-in, and two cooks; these to be chosen, paid, turned off, and disposed of by a majority of the subscribers — also that a majority should determine the number of hounds and horses to be kept: that each of the party should take upon himself during the hunting season, for one week and no more at one time, the ordering, the stopping of earths, management of the hounds and horses, appointment of the places for hunting, hours of meeting, &c. From this it is evident that hunting in those days was pretty much what shooting is in ours; either gentlemen kept hounds at their own expense, or a few friends joined, and kept a pack among them, just as gentlemen have their own preserves, or a few friends join and take a moor or a manor. The hour of meeting, too, being at the discretion of the weekly dictator, was uninviting to strangers, as it would be inconvenient to arrive at ten o’clock and find that hounds had thrown off at eight. Advertising meets was unknown in those days, as indeed local papers were, for the greater part of the Kingdom, unknown. Inserting the meets of hounds is a practice introduced during the last quarter of a century, and we have known proprietors of newspapers try to make Masters of Hounds pay for such insertion.
