Country Topic

In a straight line

Michael Stourton

Pursuit is the word for it. A pursuit within the pursuit. An example of such single-minded occupational dedication that it ought long ago to have arrested the attention of the watching world. It all happens in a beautiful part of the countryside, where the planners can, by and large (and, God knows, there is little enough room for complacency with the existing pressures on what remains of our unspoilt rural areas), claim to have succeeded. An area of lime stone buildings, hills, walls and hedges and, tell it not in Transport House, merchant bankers.

To put you on the map it takes place in north Oxfordshire and east Gloucestershire. In a word, the eastern arm of the Cotswold Hills. That area of strange and poetic place names like Bourton-on-theWater, Stow-on-the-Wold, Moreton-in-the Marsh, Lower Swell, Upper Slaughter, Yatt and Little Tew.

The man is called Ronnie. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone in this area of some 600 square miles who could not tell you the surname. His business is riding horses, to follow the hounds, to chase, lose or catch a fox It sounds a simple pastime, and in some ways it is. As carried out by Ronnie it is a highly evolved business; and it is not unreasonable to speculate that this practitioner of venery is one of the most talented organisation men of his generation, apart from being the acknowledged virtuoso of the day as an amateur huntsman. Except for the war — and not entirely excepting that because, like Wellington, he managed to take some hounds with him some of the time — when he served with the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, and was seconded to. Monty's forward eyes and ears, the Phantoms, his life has been, in the immortal words of the Inland Revenue, "wholly and exclusively and necessarily" devoted to the chase.

Monday is a hunting day, so are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Thursday is a day for administration: not rest. For Captain Wallace, joint-master and huntsman of the Heythrop Hunt, a hunting day, in terms of physical involvement, means riding two supremely fit horses across country each day from 10.45 a.m. until dusk. This, in turn, means forgoing food and drink for that period and taking the weather as it comes. It also means one set of senses directed towards the progress of foxhounds and another towards the controlling of between fifty and upwards of 200 mounted followers.

Simultaneously, he must have in his mind a complete knowledge of who owns or occupies the land on which the hunt may be at any given minute. The problem, central to any ordinary foxhunter, of maintaining contact with his horse is to him an occupational incidental.

You might think that a lifetime of foxhunting at this level could have blunted the finer edges of Ronnie Wallace's enthusiasm for the chase to the extent that the ground conditions, frost say, distance from home or even a heavy cold might enable him, just occasionally, to find an excuse for returning home a little early; or even for not starting at all. No one has ever known this happen.

Indeed, he ensures that not a precious moment is lost by invariably jumping, with a display of rare nimbleness, straight from the back of his first horse on to that of the second horse, without ever descending to the ground.

It could be apocryphal, though it's just as likely to be factual — but there is a well-established story that when, one evening, some lesser mortal nervously drew Wallace's attention to the almost total lack of light, with no sign of the hunt being abandoned, he received the laconic reply, "Things should improve when the moon gets up."

If September to March appears to account for only seven months of the year one would be mistaken to conclude that hunting business does not fill most of the waking hours of the other five. Hunting business of a social, national and international kind.

Visits are.made to the foxhounds of Canada and to the many foxhunting establishments, of the United States. In addition to his duties as Chairman of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, Wallace is in demand to judge at hound shows in Great Britain and Ireland, and in divers ways to represent the foxhunting connection: in, for example, parliamentary, agricultural, horse-racing and naturalist spheres. His gifts as a witty and adroit public speaker have become well known.

This preoccupation with hunting started at school when Ronnie Wallace hunted his school pack of beagles, before taking the beagles at Oxford University, before starting his military beagles; all of which was a prelude to his foxhunting career that started seriously when Hitler no longer presented a threat to the institutions of British country life.

The media and the entertainment world have not altogether overlooked this career. Ronnie Wallace was a technical consultant for the making of the film The Belstone Fox. He also played a leading part in the recent documentary programme, Hunting and the Farmers, produced by ATV, that showed how, by goodwill alone, it is possible for over 200 packs of foxhounds, not to mention harriers, stag-hounds, bassets, beagles and buckhounds, in Great Britain today to hunt over land that is privately owned, mostly by non-hunting people, with no legal or paid-for rights whatever.

During a television session he was asked by the producer what qualities one needs to be a successful master of foxhounds and amateur huntsman. "A strong constitution," came the brief reply. Pressed for elaboration, he added, "Well, one mustn't be too disheartened by setbacks." He could have added that a prodigious facility for remembering names and faces has been of inestimable value.

At the local level is Wallace's own kingdom. The flavour of autocracy is there, but decentralisation, some devolution even; is practised for the better operation of the whole. Committees, representatives, secretaries, treasurers, deal with some of the financial, operational, social and administrative matters, but' at every remove the link with the palace can be ,detected.

For Wallace's foxhunting organisation does not cater simply for the mounted followers. For every horseman that pursues the Heythrop Hounds there will be three or more people in cars, on motorbikes, bicycles or foot, many of whom will belong to the hunt supporters' club, and all of whom share the equivalent enthusiasm, knowledge and local loyalty of a leading football club. Then there is the Pony Club, with its myriad Thelwell equitators that descend on the hunting field in the holidays. The commercial ramifications are no less comprehensive. Tailors, forage merchants, garages and horsebox suppliers, vets, grooms, male and female, saddlers, blacksmiths, horse breeders and dealers, printers, bootmakers, livery stables, builders and estate agents: the latter losing no opportunity of including the magic words 'in the Heythrop Hunt' for their national advertising of farms and houses.

Should you chance to be travelling through that part of the Cotswolds that lies roughly between Oxford and Cheltenham, on almost any day between autumn and spring, and you happen to see a mounted figure of somewhat Napoleonic cast, booted, spurred and wearing a green livery coat with gilt buttons, following intently in the wake of a pack of hounds, you can be tolerably certain that you have spotted one of the most single-minded, successful, undeviating and engrossed men in the history of specialists.

Michael Stourton is a partner in a leading firm of land agents