The case for fox hunting
Margot Asquith, the second wife of the Liberal Prime minister, was a passionate fox-hunter till she was over forty, riding powerful horses very dashingly, frequently falling, breaking bones, and getting back on her horse as soon as possible.
Some of the Liberal Party’s Nonconformist voters may have thought it an unsuitable, self-indulgent pursuit for the wife of a leading Liberal politician, but on account of the company, she mixed with, not because they felt for the fox.
How different things are now. Hunting scenes may still make for popular Christmas cards, and the local hunt still plays an important part in some lives, but compared with days of old, hunting is a sadly diminished sport, surviving on sufferance; for how much longer, one wonders.
It would be a brave politician who rides to hounds now. Presumably, one or two still defy the anti-hunt zealots and the League Against Cruel Sports. Yet, I think that the last member of the House of Commons to be a Master of Foxhounds was the somewhat unusual Labour MP Reginald Paget in the 1960s; he was also an Old Etonian and a QC.
There’s a well-known photograph of Enoch Powell dressed in full hunting gear (the red coat always called pink) and travelling on the tube or a suburban train to some meet – perhaps in Essex? – not so distant from the House of Commons that he couldn’t be in the Chamber after a day with the hounds.
I have never hunted. This is something I regret, though I would never have been half as bold in the hunting field as Mrs Asquith. When I was sixteen or so, I read Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and was enchanted, thinking the life and world he portrayed utterly desirable. He wrote this memoir in the Twenties, after his experiences on the Western Front and followed them with the Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: a swift descent from Heaven to Hell.
October’s full moon is the “Hunter’s Moon”, but fox-hunters are now a more endangered species than the fox, which isn’t actually endangered at all having, like most English people, adapted to city, town or suburban life. Fewer people and fewer foxes are country folk, and the number of people who know that in the language of the hunt, the fox is, or was, known as Charlie (on account of the Whig politician Charles James Fox) must be vanishingly small.
Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, by the Victorian novelist, R S Surtees, gives a less golden, more true to life, picture of fox-hunting society than Sassoon; it’s a wonderfully bracing novel, quite devoid of sentimentality. Surtees’s most popular character was Mr Jorrocks, the Cockney grocer who discovered he had a passion for hunting which he memorably called “the image of war without the guilt”.
Nowadays, it is far less war-like, and those who hunt are told they should feel guilty. The sport has already fallen victim to a repulsive combination of sentimentality, ignorance, class prejudice, self-righteousness and intolerance of others’ pleasures. One wonders how much longer it can survive even in its present, and I fear it is a question of when, not if.
That will be a sad day. Not only because the loss of anything that deprives people of innocent pleasure – pleasure that doesn’t harm those who don’t share it – is sad, but also because the sight of hounds and hunters on horseback is one of the most beautiful of country scenes. Similarly, the sight of beef cattle – Aberdeen-Angus, Shorthorns, Herefords – knee-deep in grass is beautiful – and that too is threatened by those who would have us or our grandchildren eat mock beef created in a laboratory. It will be sad, too, because another link in the chain that binds us to the past will have been severed.
Brought up in the tradition of the Scots Presbyterian Kirk, I have always been suspicious of those whom Robert Burns identified as the “Unco’ Guid”, convinced of their own superior virtue. They are as rampant today as they were in an eighteenth-century Ayrshire parish and even more obnoxious, for they no longer have the excuse of believing, poor fools, that they are the Chosen favourites of an Almighty God. Even so, they flourish today as abundantly as weeds in a neglected garden.
Nevertheless, one can, for refreshment and comfort, turn back to Sassoon or Surtees. I recommend Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour to anyone weary of the world we have survived into. It also has perhaps the only heroine in Victorian fiction to have been described as “tolerably virtuous”. It is harsh, bracing and very funny. Mrs Asquith was like that too, saying of one rival hostess, “she tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake”, and that Lloyd George couldn’t see a belt “without hitting below it”. She broke her nose in a fall in the hunting field. Now it is the times that are out of joint.
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