Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Shrapnel and/or bomb splinters on the Fairways, or in Bunkers within a club’s length of the ball, may be moved without penalty. On the fairways of the ball, they may be moved without penalty, and no penalty shall be incurred if a ball is thereby caused to move accidentally.

  A ball moved by enemy action may be replaced, or if lost or destroyed, a ball may be dropped not nearer the hole without penalty.

  A ball lying in a crater may be lifted and dropped not nearer the hole, preserving the line to the hole, without penalty.

  A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place. Penalty one stroke.

  Somehow this new disposition came to the notice of Hitler’s club-footed propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, who reacted with a characteristic combination of mendacity, irritation, ignorance and sense-of-humour failure:

  By means of these ridiculous reforms, the English snobs try to impress the people with a kind of pretended heroism. They can do that without danger because, as everyone knows, the German Air Force devotes itself only to the destruction of military targets and objectives of importance to the war effort.

  Eighteen

  Field Sports

  ’Unting is the sport of kings, the image of war without

  its guilt, and only five and twenty percent of its danger!

  R. S. Surtees, Jorrocks

  In the autumn of 1939 hunting men were determined to carry on with their sport, come what might. The Masters of Foxhounds Association sent out a circular pointing out ‘how prejudicial it would be to the country in general’ if hunting were to lapse altogether. The Association claimed that hunts were keeping fox numbers down, even though they were going out two days a week instead of their normal four. A ministerial report noted: ‘The Hunts are treating hunting as a necessary business rather than as a sport.’ The MFHA recommended that the sport should continue, ‘as local conditions permit, in order to kill foxes and keep the packs going’, and predicted that ‘many a “woman” huntsman will now cheer hounds into covert’. Difficulties abounded. Shortage of girl grooms meant that horses were left unclipped or turned out wearing all-weather New Zealand rugs. Oats were scarce, as they were controlled by orders from the Ministry. Flake maize (for the hounds) was difficult to obtain – but on the other hand horseflesh (for feeding hounds) was plentiful, as many animals were being put down.

  Hunting people, though determined, were not happy. New airfields, they claimed, were taking away much of their best country, and so many aircraft were flying noisily around that during a run it was often difficult to hear what hounds were doing, or even to tell where they were. In wild areas huge tracts of land were being set aside for military training: when the War Office announced that it was about to acquire 40,000 acres on Eppynt Mountain, in Breconshire, the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Agriculture feared that ‘this area was likely to assume a Whipsnade for foxes, without the possibility of control by hunts or anyone in particular’.

  People recalled how hounds had been exported to the United States during the First World War in order to safeguard bloodlines if England were invaded; now some packs were thinned out, and some closed down for the duration, but most kept going with skeleton staff and small fields. Some had lucky escapes. When a bomb fell on the kennels of the East Kent Hunt, thirty hounds were blown in every direction, but all were recovered uninjured over the next two days.

  Few men kept going more doggedly than Charles, third Earl of Leconfield, the choleric squire of Petworth Park in Sussex, once described as ‘the most blimpish peer imaginable’. He continued to hunt with his own hounds throughout the war, and his nephew John Wyndham left a memorable description of a visit to Petworth in the winter of 1940. ‘Dinner was, of course, more austere than usual,’ he recalled. ‘Uncle Charles nevertheless drank a bottle of champagne himself and pressed me to do likewise. We then had some port, after which we had some brandy.’ Next day they went hunting:

  We found a fox and lost it, and while Uncle Charles’s huntsman was casting for it we heard a tremendous hullaballoo about two miles away. Uncle Charles abused the huntsman and shouted at him, ‘Can’t you hear a holler?’ and bade him ‘Get going thither.’ So we galloped in the direction of the noise, only to find that it had nothing to do with fox-hunting: it was a village football match. The hounds, the huntsman, the whipper-in, Uncle Charles and I all slithered to a stop. The footballers and the bystanders who had been making the noise all stopped too. There was silence, then Uncle Charles, who had turned red in the face, stood up in his stirrups and shouted: ‘Haven’t you people got anything better to do in wartime than play football?’ We then went on hunting.

  Another incorrigible chaser of foxes was Henry, tenth Duke of Beaufort, always known as ‘Master’. The name derived from his childhood, when, at the age of eight, he had been given his own pack of hounds – and hunting had been his passion ever since. Many people thought him intolerably rude and arrogant, especially when he roared abuse at anybody who got in the way of horse or hound; but others, who stood up to him when he tried to bully them, found him friendly enough underneath his difficult exterior. One such was the sporting artist Raoul Millais, who hunted with the Beaufort in the 1920s and 1930s, and after an exchange of insults, which he won, decided that Master was ‘really a very nice man, but perhaps rather far down the list for Brain of Britain’.

  Whatever his intellect, Master was obsessed with the pursuit of foxes – to which, when not pursuing titled ladies, he devoted a great deal of his time. With his own pack of hounds, and the freedom of a vast country, he carried on hunting through the war with astonishing single-mindedness, as if nothing more important were happening. No mention of global conflict intruded when, on 8 December 1941 – the day after the Japanese attack on the United States’ fleet at Pearl Harbor – he sat down to record his ideas on the subject. Writing in his big, bold hand, he covered sheet after sheet with reminiscences, heading the document Thoughts on Hunting by the Duke of Beaufort and addressing it to ‘My Dear T’.

  ‘I have been reading through my hunting diaries,’ he began, ‘and I need a large piece of paper to write down my thoughts and the few conclusions that I have reached.’ He then divided his recollections into three periods. ‘A’ covered 1920–28, ‘B’ 1928–35, and ‘C’ 1935–40.

  In all three periods we hunted six days a week … In ‘A’ we killed on average slightly over 100 brace of foxes per season. Great was the excitement when we first killed 100 brace, and at the time we agreed we would not approach my father’s record of 153½ brace. There were several good points and good hound hunts, but the average of sport was not on a high level. Foxes, however, did conform to the Rules.

  By ‘the Rules’ Master meant that foxes should run for miles and not go to ground in small earths, from which they could easily be dug out. Period ‘B’ (1931–2) included the ‘best season and the best scenting season’ he had ever known, during which the hunt killed the ‘stupendous total’ of 193½ brace. But doubts were creeping in: ‘I first began to think that foxes were easier to kill and therefore must be getting soft. But still they conformed to the Rules.’

  Not for much longer. In 1938–9 the record was broken again with a cull of 226½ brace, and in the first year of the war the hunt accounted for 204 brace, ‘largely by foul means’. Master claimed that the fox population had ‘increased tremendously during the past twenty years’, and that digging out had become essential to reduce numbers. He had also noticed that foxes did not run downwind as much as they used to, and he complained that his woods were more disturbed than heretofore by ‘a large increase of cur-dogs’.

  In spite of wartime privations, children’s meets were popular in many parts of the country. The Herefordshire farmer Gwen McBryde recorded how one mother, whose daughter aged five and son aged four were mounted on small ponies, once ran and walked with them for two and a half hours. Every time she drew breath there were shouts of ‘Run, mummy, run!’ The ponie
s ‘never batted an eyelash’, even when they got mixed up with an army convoy of tanks and lorries. As Gwen remarked, it was ‘a high test to have an armoured car cutting in under your tail and a Waltzing Matilda tank under your nose. Any hunter would have gone over the hedge into the nearest field.’

  A reader of Country Life noticed what a powerfully tonic effect hunting had on refugee children – better than any amount of cod liver oil, Minadex or rose-hip syrup. Usually, he wrote, they look miserable.

  But when hounds meet, what a difference! A hundred and twenty London schoolchildren … give tongue as hounds move off. It is strange music, and the face of the Master colours; the grim huntsman is a philosopher, but it is a trying moment. The children reach the covert a little before the puzzled hounds, and vanish into it with Bedlam noises. Three hours later they drag back from points four or five miles away, thoroughly tired, covered with mud, and gloriously happy … Good luck to the little horrors, for hunting is one of the few subjects that tiresome pedagogues have not lectured them upon.

  Unlike members of the hunting fraternity, shooting men were much agitated by the question of whether or not they should take up their main winter pastime as usual. The more sensitive among them felt that downing partridges and pheasants might not seem particularly laudable when the nation’s more important targets were German soldiers, sailors and airmen. Besides, war broke out most inconveniently just after the start of the 1939 season: partridges were normally fair game in September, pheasants in October.

  Various factors suggested that shooting should be abandoned. Thousands of birds had been bred for the sport, but food for them was short. Many of the men who would normally have taken part – keepers, beaters, dog-handlers – had disappeared into the services. The scarcity of petrol made it difficult for participants to reach any rendezvous that had been set. Nevertheless, some landowners insisted on carrying on as if nothing had changed, and at the beginning of 1940 the Government extended the pheasant season from 31 January to the end of February, on the grounds that the abnormal number of birds still alive would seriously damage growing crops. Shooting men defended their sport on the rather specious grounds that their bags produced much-needed food, augmenting ordinary rations.

  Surprisingly enough, Bendor, the second Duke of Westminster, was not for carrying on as usual. Owner of the vast Eaton Hall estate in Cheshire, and of many other rural properties, he was normally a glutton for shooting and had always presided over huge massacres of pheasants. In the summer of 1939 the twenty gamekeepers at Eaton had reared thousands. According to Norman Mursell, Head Keeper on the estate for the past ten years, the woods were crawling with birds, and the first major shoot was planned for the beginning of November. Then along came Major Basil Kerr, the Estate Agent, on one of his routine visits, but this time with orders from His Grace that the shoot was to be brought forward into October. So it was – and it was not very successful, no doubt because the leaf was still on the trees and the birds, still young, did not fly well.

  At the end of the day the Duke turned to Sandy Myles, another of the estate staff, and said, ‘No more shooting this season. Catch them all, and make it as soon as possible.’ So the keepers went out and killed all the birds which they had spent the summer rearing, driving them into coops and knocking them on the head. Why the Duke ordered this slaughter it is impossible to say – unless it was because he feared that the feeding of wheat to game birds might be prohibited in the near future, and that the pheasants would starve.

  For Norman Mursell and his assistants, it was a savage blow: all their efforts during the build-up to the season had gone for nothing. So had the tips which they would have got on shooting days. But later in the war Mursell himself had one outstanding success against bigger game.

  Having joined the armed forces, he was posted to a light anti-aircraft regiment, and one dull, misty day in November he was manning a Lewis gun – a machine gun of American design, capable of firing 500 rounds a minute – on the roof of Leyland Motors’ factory, when he spotted a low-flying aircraft. As all British aircraft were obliged to keep flashing a sequence of lights which changed from one day to the next, and this plane was showing no lights at all, he knew it was an intruder and brought his Lewis gun to bear onto it:

  Swinging the gun right round and giving the target a good lead (like a high flying pheasant), I pulled the trigger and emptied the ‘pan’ at it. The magazine was loaded with every fifth cartridge a tracer, so I could see where I was shooting, and the plane was catching some of the bullets. As it disappeared into low cloud I could see flames and smoke coming from one engine.

  Mursell later heard that the plane, a Heinkel, had crashed in the Pennines, away to the east – and surely he must have congratulated himself on the shot of a lifetime. But later, when he went back to Eaton on leave, he found the keepers reduced to ‘a skeleton staff of older men’, one of whom had a strange new task. The gardens of the big house had been made proof against rabbits, either with wire netting or by a water-filled ditch; but one ancient retainer had been told to catch some rabbits alive, as the Duke wanted a few for his new sport of coursing them inside the gardens with his pack of dachshunds.

  The outbreak of war cast gloom over the angling fraternity. On the Wye at Hay (The Fishing Gazette reported on 9 September) ‘owing to the depressing times hardly any fishing has been done’. The Tavy and Walkham rivers on Dartmoor were ‘almost deserted, because with the Navy and Army mobilised and many residents actively employed in ARP and in other ways, there are few people left to fish’.

  A week later the National Federation of Anglers took what it called ‘drastic decisions’, among them to cancel the annual English Championship, in which teams were to have competed on the Trent in Nottinghamshire. This caused huge disappointment to the 700 contestants already selected, ‘several of whom have already paid visits to the Trent at Newark in order to get some knowledge of what tactics to employ’.

  Occasional items of good news brightened the piscatorial scene: on 23 October the record salmon for 1939 – a fifty-four-pounder – was caught on the River Don in Aberdeenshire; and sea anglers were apparently unmoved by the outbreak of another world war. Early in October 122 of them fished off Hastings Pier; at Dartmouth, also, there were no restrictions, and The Fishing Gazette predicted that it was going to be ‘a first-rate season for flatfish’.

  Petrol rationing, and the lack of country buses, made access to rivers difficult; but on some beats the few remaining regular anglers were joined by evacuee boys, often wielding good-quality rods – no doubt the fruit of an appeal to owners to hand in their equipment for use by amateurs. Around Oxford, The Fishing Gazette reported, ‘the fishing fraternity have been disturbed from their haunts by the children with nets and jam-jars; in fact, the banks of the river are literally “swamped” with boys and girls trying their luck’.

  During the Blitz thousands of fish, killed by bombs, could be seen drifting down the Thames in and below London. Elsewhere there was much anxiety that sewage effluent from the new military camps being constructed all over the country would pollute rivers; and the number of freshwater fish licences taken out by members of the public fell sharply from 74,000 in 1939 to 55,000 in 1940. A large number of professional river bailiffs were called up into the armed forces, but their places were taken by volunteers, and occasional prosecutions for poaching show that the amateurs were fairly vigilant. In November 1941 the Lune Fishery Board in Lancashire fined Joseph Parks £2 10s for being in possession of a gaff at night, and the same for possession of a lamp, with £2 1s 9d costs; and in January 1942 Ernest Brockbank was fined £5 for using a snatch for the purpose of taking salmon from Borrowdale Beck in Cumbria.

  The demand for fish was much strengthened by the rationing of most other kinds of food, and when two enormous cod, together weighing ‘three stones and three quarters’ (about 53 lb), were landed at Hartlepool in February 1941, they were snapped up for £2 11s by a local fish fryer, who said that he must have raw materia
l ‘to maintain his connection’ with customers. Attempts were made to persuade people to eat coarse fish: in twelve days of May 1942 250,000 perch were caught in Lake Windermere for an experiment with tinning, and the President of the National Fishing Association pronounced their flavour excellent. Would he have said the same of the six-foot-six-inch sturgeon, weighing 81 lb, which was caught off Ulster and sent to Belfast to be divided among the inmates of the Royal Victoria and Mater hospitals?

  Numerous pundits extolled the therapeutic value of fishing, especially in times of high stress, and when the King invited troops to try their luck in the waters of the Great Park at Windsor, so many other proprietors followed suit that soon fifty rivers were available to service personnel, and the demand for borrowed rods far exceeded the supply – even though, in 1940 alone, more than 1000 had been collected and distributed.

  Terence Horsley, an RAF delivery pilot, wrote lyrically of the release from stress that fishing gave him. Whenever he had to test an aircraft, or take it from one end of the country to the other, he would have his rod on board, so that after landing he could make straight for the nearest chalk stream or Highland loch. To him a river was ‘a place of escape, without harsh sounds or bustle’.

  In time of war, when good men can feel fear and still be good men, a night’s fishing can bring everything again into true perspective. I have stood by the river in the gathering darkness, and as though I was passing through a door, have been taken into the night so that I became part of it as much as the shadows. Out there, where the water is flowing, there is no end and no beginning, but something which goes its way for ever in peace.

  Game birds had to take their chance. The rearing of pheasants was prohibited by an Order dated 29 June 1940, mainly to save wheat, and some landowners, among them Lord Derby, reported that they had given orders for all eggs found on their land to be destroyed. Other estates carried on rearing pheasants more or less surreptitiously, under the pretence that they were breeding the birds for food rather than for shooting. One syndicate shoot in Lancashire was rumbled by an amateur investigator who reported that two young men were secretly rearing 2000 birds, and that in the woods he had discovered huts ‘carefully locked up and screened, absolutely FULL OF GRAIN’.