Hounds are Running!

I don’t think any other sport has been as well treated by literature as foxhunting has. Some wonderful authors have included hunting scenes in their books, including Armitage, Conan Doyle, Sassoon, Somerville & Ross, Surtees, Trollope, and Whyte Melville. Of these, my personal favourite is Marigold Armitage. She beautifully evokes the very tail-end of Anglo-Irish life in Southern Ireland in the years after the war, and her descriptions of Irish hunting are unbeatable, even by Somerville & Ross. Take this example from A Motley to the View, describing the excitement of an Irish hunting morning:

“A steel-coloured sky; dark blue hills; no-coloured yet perhaps faintly green fields gleaming palely between brown-grey plough and grey-brown tattered lines of blackthorn topping the sodden banks; rooks blowing like ragged leaves in the air; real leaves trampled into the rain puddles, which reflect the steel sky in their muddy depths; and a sudden, small, dramatic splash of scarlet at the corner of the straggling covert. Smells of leather and mud and rain-water and sweating horses; a wind with a rumour of snow and dried bracken in it; wet chocolate turf freshly cut into by eager, plunging hooves; sounds; inexplicably stirring, shivering the spine, tingling the scalp; the crackling of undergrowth; the first hound speaking, in a voice shaking with eager uncertainty; the swelling, thrilling chorus, confirming, asserting – and then the high, heart-halting holler splitting the cold air, and all the blood leaping, with a fierce, joyous, frightening atavism, to the exultant, triumphant horn blowing them away.”

Hunting gets people

The thing about hunting is that it gets to people, and this is fully reflected in the literature, as with Stephen Colwood, in Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, who declares: “I’d sooner chase a pack of Pomeranians after a weasel from a bath-chair than waste my life making money in a blinking office.”

Well, hear, hear – but some of us do have to earn a living!

And there’s a lovely Whyte Melville passage that again reflects the hold that hunting can have on people. It’s about the impossibility of making a train journey without constantly scanning the passing countryside with a view to hunting across it. The narrator in Market Harborough writes:

“As I speed along the level embankments, which give one such a commanding view of the surrounding country, I cannot help imagining myself on the back of a good horse, sailing away from field to field after a pack of hounds. How well I can see my way! – how easy the fences look! What a run I have in my imagination!”

Memorable characters

Hunting fiction is full of memorable characters with arguably the most memorable springing from the fertile imagination of John Surtees. The roll call of Surtees’ memorable characters is astonishing, from Soapey Sponge (“whose dexterity in getting into people’s houses was only equalled by the difficulty of getting him out again”] to the great John Jorrocks himself.

Jorrocks really is the most astonishing creation. A rotund, prudent businessman who could hardly ride and hated discomfort yet who dedicated his life to, and squandered his money on, hunting. His joy on receiving the invitation from the Handley Cross to be a Master is wonderful.

“O, John Jorrocks! John Jorrocks! you are indeed a most fortunate man! a most lucky dog! O dear! O dear! Was ever anything so truly delightful.”

Later that morning, we’re told, as Jorrocks went about his normal business he had a smile on his face “enough to illuminate the dial of St Giles’s clock in a fog”.

And, despite all the many mishaps and discomforts of his Mastership, he never lost his enthusiasm for the chase, telling his hearers in one lecture:

“Oh, my beloved ‘earers, summer is a dreadful season. Whoever talked o’ the winter of our discontent, talked like an insane man, and no sportsman. Summer is the season of our misery.”

One of my favourite Surtees characters is the “tolerably virtuous Lucy Glitters”, with whom both Soapey Sponge and Facey Romford fall in love. She is a fearless rider who leads from the front, and just one of a long line of wonderful female characters in the hunting literature, from Sassoon’s Mrs Oakfield to Trollope’s Miss Tristrams. And it is no accident that the literature should have so many wonderful female characters as there is a serious point to be made about women in the hunting field.

In their non-fiction book The Sweet Cry of Hounds, Somerville and Ross tell us that it was sport, particularly including hunting, that got women out of the house and into the male domain. As the authors put it: “The playing-fields of Eton did not as surely win Waterloo as the hunting-fields and lawn-tennis grounds of the kingdom won the vote for women.”

Foreigners!

Uncomprehending foreigners are another stalwart of the literature, from Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard to Trollope’s American Senator.

Brigadier Gerard was a French Hussar during the Peninsular War. On a reconnaissance mission his horse is shot but he manages to steal another – an English officer’s hunter. While fleeing he runs into a group of Wellington’s officers participating in a hunt. But then he entirely misunderstands the purpose of the exercise, and when he sees hounds are hunting a fox he charges through the field, then past the huntsman and whip, and finally through the hounds themselves only to draw his sabre to decapitate the hunted fox. He then gallops on, misinterpreting the screams of execration from behind as approbation for his astonishing feat!

Perhaps in all the literature there is only one other foreigner whose misunderstandings come close to challenging those of Etienne Gerard, and that is Kommandant van Heerden in Tom Sharpe’s great satire on apartheid South Africa: Indecent Exposure. Van Heerden is a policeman with social aspirations. He tries to ingratiate himself with the ‘English set’, and as part of this effort he wants to join the local hunt, but then, when it is explained to him that it is a drag hunt, he assumes this is some kind of gay activity, and thus illegal. The misunderstanding occurs during a conversation with Major Bloxham.

“‘It’s illegal,’ he said, ‘I suppose you realise that.’

‘What is, old boy?’ asked the Major.

It was the Kommandant’s turn to look round the bar hastily. ‘Drag hunts,’ he said finally.

‘Really? How extraordinary. I had no idea,’ said the Major. ‘I mean, it’s not as though anyone gets hurt or anything.’

The Kommandant shifted uneasily on his stool. ‘I suppose that depends which end you’re on,’ he muttered.

‘A bit exhausting for the poor bugger out front, I mean, running all that way, but it’s only twice a week,’ said the Major.

Kommandant van Heerden shuddered. ‘You just tell the Colonel what I’ve said,’ he told the Major. ‘Tell him it’s strictly illegal.’

‘Will do, old boy,’ said the Major, ‘though it beats me why it should be. Still you’d know about these things, being in the police and all that.’

They sat and finished their drinks in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts.

‘Are you absolutely sure it’s illegal, old boy,’ Major Bloxham asked finally, ‘I mean it’s not as though it’s cruel or anything. There’s no actual kill.’

‘I should fucking well hope not,’ said the Kommandant, highly incensed.

‘We just pop a kaffir out after breakfast with a bag of aniseed round his middle and an hour later we all go after him.’

‘Aniseed?’ the Kommandant asked. ‘What’s the aniseed for?’

‘Gives him a bit of a scent you know,’ the Major explained.

Kommandant van Heerden shuddered. Scented kaffirs being chased across country by men in their fifties dressed as women was more than he could stomach.”

Oh dear!

Bad days, Good days

We’ve all experienced bad days hunting, and there are plenty of them in the hunting literature as well. Jorrocks, for instance, is forever getting caught up in appalling weather and wishing he were anywhere other than on his horse. Take this scene after a famous late run into strange country:

“‘Oh, dear! oh, dear!’ muttered he, ‘wot a most momentous crisis – lost! lost! lost! – completely lost! Dinner lost! ‘ounds lost, self lost – all lost together! Oh, vot evil genius ever tempted me from the lovely retirement o’ Great Coram Street?’…

‘Well; I thinks this night will be the last of John Jorrocks! Best master of ‘ounds wot ever was seen. ‘Orrible termination to a hactive life; starved on a common – eat by wolves, or shepherds’ dogs, which is much of a muchness as far as comfort’s concerned’…”

And in From a Motley to the View, the narrator Anthony talks about days when “your whole being is one long, silent, earnest plea to be transported immediately to southern Italy, which you will never leave again under any circumstances – or certainly not under any circumstances remotely resembling these…”

But there are also, of course, many wonderful descriptions of good runs in English literature, and none better than the great hunt in Armitage’s A Long Way to Go. There is no better way of getting excited about the beginning of a new season than reading this, the best of all fictional runs. It can be read again and again, and it will continue to enthral. It is incomparable. Here is a taster:

“It was at this rather confused moment that hound voices suddenly rang together like a peal of bells from far down the road…A pause, then one hound speaking…Then the triumphant chorus clamouring out again, shaking the cold air. Then the long, wild crying of the horn. The chills began in my spine, the thumping of blood…

The voices clamoured on, ringing out, gay and confident…

‘Look!’

The fox stood a few yards away, in the middle of the road, staring at us…We froze…

Like a red blown leaf he slipped up the far bank and was gone…

The voices were faltering slightly.

‘Holler, Roger,’ [Anthony urged his brother.] ‘They’ll have to bustle him to get through Kilgarvan.’

Roger jumped on the bank, stuck a finger in his ear and produced a noise of ear-splitting intensity…

Three fields away towards Drumanagh the sound reached old George who, already thinking of Kilgarvan, decided to take a chance on its authenticity. He lifted his lovely deserving hounds and galloped straight to it.

They came pouring towards us over a wall and up the field, tense and eager and effortless.

‘Where to?’ old George was bawling as he galloped.

‘Straight down the wall – making for Kilgarvan.’

Hounds flowed around us…George was cheering them on to the line under the wall and they owned it at once in a crashing chorus and were off…”

Anthony, the narrator, goes on:

“On this day, at this time, over this piece of country, Mike’s theory about good scenting conditions seemed to be right. Hounds were racing, flinging, driving forward like a dappled cloud. There they went, over the bloody great ditch, leaping, falling short, splashing, scrambling out and on without pausing to shake themselves. There went old George on his neat, wise horse, jumping cleverly, not an inch too far, not a second too soon, his ears cocked. Then Gillian, gloriously leading the field, going at it wildly…Then Tommy Dwyer, still crying encouragement to the tail hound, now streaking just behind old George, a personification of silent, bitter determination to catch up with the pack…

A snorting horse came up on my right hand, Father Carrigan tucked like a jockey behind its withers on a ragged racing saddle, his eyes gleaming wildly, his spectacles crooked on his nose, his bowler on the back of his head.

‘Follow me now, Anthony,’ he shouted exultantly. ‘Sure, I know this felly, he wouldn’t mind how many miles he’d run. If he can’t go down in Kilgarvan he’ll go across the bog and make for the hills’.”

There then follows a series of astonishing only-in-Ireland adventures during which Old George’s horse can no longer go on, and Anthony has to give him his mount, but then, just as Anthony is cursing his luck, Conor Molloy’s loose horse comes galloping up and he commandeers it. Anthony continues:

“I have no very clear recollection of the rest of that hunt. I realised at once that I had no hope of holding Conor’s horse…Twice he was nearly down – more times than I care to remember I was nearly off…

Now, as I went, I saw hounds again for the first time since we had crossed the bog, driving across a low ridge above and to the left of me. They had had a view, for the high screaming for blood had come into their voices…

We came up with Tommy Dwyer, leading his beaten horse, almost in tears.

‘Sure, don’t they deserve him, if hounds ever did? But he’ll get into the rocks above and then he can run the whole inside of the hill – the bloody place is hollow – who’d ever think they’d bring him to here from Drumanagh?’

Away in front, abruptly, the voices died. Then they clamoured again, but singly, brokenly, mournfully, informing us of frustration and a thirst unassuaged. Old George’s horn told us the same - and round the spine of the ridge we came upon them, a little above us, milling and crying around the great earth in the rocks…old George’s face glowing like a lantern through the deepening dusk.

‘By God, they nearly had him, the darlings, they were running right into him – ten yards more, five even and he wouldn’t have made it.’

‘A good fox,’ I said. ‘A marvellous run, George. You’ve made history today.’

‘And only the locals up,’ said old George with immense satisfaction. ‘Leave him, leave him now, my darlings. Count ‘em Tommy – I think they were all on.’

We stood around idly, enveloped in an immense tiredness and content. Old George and Tommy were murmuring endearments to their lovely hounds as they counted them and pulled thorns out of sore pads.

There was a smell of sweating horses on the evening wind, and a star was out above Sleivemore.

Old George put the horn to his lips for the last time and blew the long, heartrending ‘Home’.”

[This article is based on my book Hounds are Running - a celebration of the best of foxhunting literature, available via Amazon.]