Still honouring old virtues
Raymond Carr
THE GREEN COLLARS: THE TARPORLEY HUNT CLUB AND CHESHIRE HUNTING HISTORY by Gordon Fergusson
Quiller Press, £28, pp. 512
For those who hunt in Cheshire, this exhaustively researched and magnificently illustrated book will be obligatory reading. Those who do not may well find that it shares some of the defects of so many hunt histories, manifest in detailed descriptions of runs meaningless to those unfortunate enough not to have been out with the local hunt. Mr Fergusson makes two wider claims for his book. It is intended to be a `contribution to the social history' of Cheshire and at the same time to give `the antagonists' (of fox-hunting) 'second thoughts'. The social history of fox-hunting is a serious subject to which I have devoted much of my life. Alas, fox-hunters do not always supply the right sort of stuff for the social historian: even less do they exhibit the sensibility now considered de rigueur for the proper pursuit of social history. When the author discovered that in 1805 the Tarporley Hunt Club engaged a 'care- ful man' to pour out the wine he was rebuked by the club secretary, 'Scrub that out. Who cares about the bloody butler?' It is a deplorable fact that for fashionable social historians, butlers are more interest- ing than those whom they serve. Alas, fox-hunters have not always lived up to their claim that their sport is 'demo- cratic', open to all. The distaste of the sub- scribers of the Cheshire Hunt for the incursion of 'Manchester and Liverpool businessmen' is understandable, in that they swelled an already overcrowded field; but attempts to limit the field were regard- ed by the press as exhibitions of oligarchic snobbery. One of the 'Manchester brigade' got short shrift from the Master when he rode over a favourite bitch. 'Go home Sir, and if I had my way I would have you publicly buggered by six Irish navvies'. The Manchester Brigade included Friedrich Engels, who not only financed Marx but subscribed to the Hunt's Covert Fund. `Fox-hunting', he wrote to his father, who had given him a hunter for Christmas, 'is the most magnificent bodily pleasure I know' — a sentiment shared by Trotsky. It is odd that the disciples of Trotsky and Engels now figure in the ranks of the Hunt Saboteurs. Did they but know it they are in the tradition of those defenders of laissez- faire capitalism, Cobden and Bright, who regarded fox-hunting as the 'feudal sport' of backwoods booby squires, blind to the benefits of the factory system and free trade. It was 'men like that disgusting radi- cal John Bright', the Hunt Secretary wrote in 1866, who were stirring up the farmers against the hunt.
No hunt has not had its squabbles. Mr Fergusson has a long and interesting chap- ter on the 'Cheshire difficulty' of the 1850s. The MFH, Captain Arthur Mainwaring, had written an embarrassingly sentimental letter arranging a clandestine meeting with a Mrs Parker which was misdirected by the Post Office to the offended husband. The Hunt Subscribers decided that Mainwaring must go, a painful example of the propriety enforced on rural society by the Evangeli- cal movement. Mainwaring stuck to his contract with the hunt, and when some of the larger subscribers warned him off their coverts, he hunted the country that remained with success. The case was
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referred to the Boodles Committee, then the disciplinary body of fox-hunting. It decided that Mainwaring must go on 'fox- hunting grounds,' i.e. that he could not show sport in his truncated country. Main- waring dismissed this as nonsense; he was being sacked on the grounds of his private conduct. The row became a public cause celebre at a time when MFHs attracted the press attention now devoted to football managers.
Fox-hunters have always regarded the presence of royalty in the hunting field as sanctifying their sport. A classic case was that of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who sought relief from the tedium of her husband's court in the hunting field. Mr Fergusson describes in detail her exploits in Cheshire. Proud of her 18-inch waist, kept in trim on wall bars and trapezes, she wore no underclothes other than a chamois leather garment sewn on next to her skin, and covered her face with honey for two hours before hunting. Not surprisingly, she was often late for meets. Even worse, as `one of the first royal personages to attract the paparazzi' — from whom she hid her face with a leather fan attached to her saddle — she drew undesirably large crowds.
Royal patronage survives. The Prince of Wales contributes a foreword to this book. It celebrates 'the kind of people who, throughout the centuries, have made this country what it is' and whose sport is 'daily threatened by the agents of ignorance and prejudice'. Should they triumph we will find ourselves 'deprived of those cultural roots which have always inspired this coun- try's greatness'. How refreshing to find a disciple of Burke in St James's Palace lamenting that a 'timeless pattern' may be `broken on the wheel of fashion'. His Royal Highness deplores the passing of 'charac- ters larger than life'. Hunt servants come out of this book as heroes. Joe Maiden (Huntsman 1832-44) fell into the boiling copper. His calf fell off, exposing the bone, and when his leg was amputated he rode with the stump attached to his saddle.
Fox-hunters must truly bless the Prince of Wales. In the present inclement climate, to defend fox-hunting demands the moral courage that exercises in conspicuous com- passion do not. The Prince is patron of the Tarporley Hunt Club, founded during the club mania of the 18th century. Like many such dining clubs for the local gentry it indulged in after-dinner singing, and Mr Fergusson has a long appendix devoted to the compositions of the club's bard. The club's traditions were jealously preserved: correct dress — a scarlet coat with a green collar — was enforced by fines; in 1979 a member was mulcted of £1 for turning up in a soft shirt. When, in 1991, an ecologi- cally minded president proposed that the traditional turtle soup be abandoned on the grounds of cruelty to turtles, the motion was defeated. The club has remained part of a timeless tradition.
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