Leather fetish
Rory Knight Bruce
Everyone should have a talisman personal, meaningful or useful, a symbol by which we measure our worth to ourselves. In Graham Greene’s The Comedians the ultimately courageous ‘Major’ Brown carried around Haiti a leather-bound silver cocktail-shaker which he had stolen from Asprey’s. Lord Sebastian Flyte had his teddy bear.
For the past 20 years as a hunting correspondent I have had several such items. There was the silver button hook for doing up the front-leg buttons on my britches, a penknife I bought for £3 at the Bishop’s Castle Steam Fair in Shropshire for cutting gate string, and an ancient appliqué stock, received in love but never returned in parting.
All have been comforts in their need and necessity. But above them stand my Davies hunting boots, saved up for and treasured since the time I drove deep into mid-Wales on a wet day in 1990 to have them made.
The journey from my cottage without electricity in the woods near Craven Arms rented when I was joint master of the United Pack foxhounds in unspoilt Border country took me through Hereford to an industrial estate south of Abergavenny at Brynmawr. Like Patey’s hunting caps, made in a gluebubbling sweatshop in south London, Davies’s business is far removed from hunting and more like a workshop in Northampton, once the hub of the shoe-making industry.
I parked my incongruous vehicle, a 1969 gold Lancia Vignale convertible, in front of a simple corrugated door. Inside I met Dennis Davies, the softly spoken bootmaker, and his daughter Elizabeth Withey. Dennis Davies, who was then in his late fifties, and his wife Margaret, two years his junior, met at the Tuf boot factory in the town. They made men’s working boots together in the factory. But Dennis’s love of hunting — he was an amateur whipper-in to the Monmouthshire foxhounds — made him break from factory life to set up on his own. He started making bespoke waxed calf-leather hunting boots for his friends, then dressage and riding boots as his reputation spread. That was 28 years ago, since when the hunting world has flocked to his door.
I eased myself into a moulded classroom chair to have my measurements appraised by Elizabeth. ‘Quite a normal calf,’ she said to her husband Lyndon, who had just joined the family firm. I felt the glowing confidence of Malvolio being sized up for cross-gartered stockings. Above me, the labels on the boxes of boots for dispatch to Badminton or Brocklesby gave an indication of the grandeur of their literally well-heeled customers.
I cannot remember what the boots cost then, perhaps £600 with trees — about the quarterly service bill on the old Lancia — but today they are £595 for the boots and £325 for the trees. I thought the trees were an extravagance but, as Ruskin wisely observed in ‘The Veins of Wealth’, ‘A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.’ Until then I had hunted in my father’s boots from Peel’s, the great Leicestershire bootmaker who went under when the standards and correct expense of hunting started to slide. Today only those who wore them know the magnitude of their loss.
Six weeks after my fitting a box was delivered. Out of the cardboard case came the mahogany-topped boots, in a cocoon of crêpe. It was more like a christening than Christmas. I unwrapped them and inhaled their smell of tanned leather.
Why had I bought them? I once asked an impecunious surfer on a campsite why he had seven surfboards in his seashore tent and he replied, ‘Because I’m worth it.’ I felt the same, because I saw, in these boots, qualities that would protect me on hunting days. I’ve seen riders out hunting in rubber boots who have their legs kicked half-off by passing fly-bucking horses. I’ve seen narrow wicket gates slice through kneecaps. Leather boots are both smart and safe.
But ownership of a pair of Davies hunting boots is just the beginning of a partnership that should last for years. The first important step is to scuff the soles to stop you slipping on polished floorboards. Then take a toothbrush and black the instep or welt of the heel. This should be the most highly polished part of the boot, as foot followers first notice it when you are on your horse. The late Duke of Beaufort, universally known as ‘Master’, insisted his hunt servants wore bags over their boots to keep them clean as they hacked to the meet. Sprinkling the inside of the boots with Johnson’s Baby Powder ensures that the trees always go into the boot after hunting and — more importantly — come out again beforehand.
In earlier times, hunting boots were ‘boned’ with a deer’s shinbone to remove any scratches from the leather after hunting . This is a skill I have never perfected.
Pulling on these boots before hunting is like entering a stronger armour than just your own courage will provide. They are part of the uniform of battle. Once, changing into them in a small post office for a meet of the Ballymacad in Ireland, I slipped and was concussed by a public telephone receiver. When I came round I walked out and met the hounds following a funeral procession. Hunting boots are a great companion and silent witness to our hunting follies.
There is no need to take them off before entering a farmhouse for tea. Simply wash them off with a farmyard hose. I have even slept in them, although once an attempt to get them pulled off by an Australian nanny resulted in her pulling off the heel of the left boot. When I take them off at home, and leave them casually upright by the boot-pull, spurs by their side, I sometimes think it’s my late father standing there. Peach Borwick, master of the Pytchley Hunt, used to sleep in his Peel’s. He would invite his wife up to bed, dressed only in hat and whip, to ride him side-saddle as he re enacted the day’s hunting. ‘Not as scary as galloping side-saddle downhill’ was her verdict.
In Greene’s book, ‘Major’ Brown died with his Asprey’s cocktail-shaker by his side. There are worse ways to die than wearing your hunting boots. I would like to say that nothing comes between me and my Davies hunting boots. But for maximum comfort and warmth it is important to wear black tights under your britches and silk pop-socks to keep them in place. Peach Borwick would have liked that.
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