Pursued by hounds of heaven
Andrew Barrow
FOXHUNTING IN PARADISE by Michael Clayton John Murray, £19.99, pp. 276 Ihave always been fascinated by hunting folk. As a child I was taken to various meets of the Beaufort and other less fash- ionable West Country hunts and remember gazing up spellbound at the complex phys- iognomy of those present. In more recent times I have satisfied myself with occasion- al sightings of fox-hunting journalist Rory Knight Bruce in the lanes and alley-ways around the Evening Standard building in Kensington.
I turned to this up-to-date history of the Quorn, Belvoir, Cottesmore and Fernie Hunts hoping to renew and enrich my knowledge of hunting society and learn in particular how it is coping with what the author Michael Clayton, editor of Horse and Hound since 1973, describes as 'the hateful new elements of class envy'.
A pleasing picture of the Leicestershire `paradise' emerges from the opening chap- ters. The unspoilt woodlands around the semi-industrial Melton Mowbray, the streams, pastures, ancient green lanes, steep valleys, wide grass verges and historic turf, sometimes lit up at night by an eerie glow from Leicester and Nottingham, are vividly described. Picturesque place-names abound and Clayton's use of phrases like `breath-taking', 'delectable', 'highly popu- lar', 'exceedingly pleasant' and other estate agent terms should not be held against him. Estate agents' particulars often make wonderful reading.
The punters themselves, heroes of the hunting-field past and present, come across less convincingly. Names like General Sir Evelyn Fanshawe, Major Chetty Milton- Green, Lord Moppy Manners, Colonel Bobby Swan and Brigadier Dolly Tilney sound jolly good fun and would no doubt delight the boys on the Telegraph obit desk, but I found myself longing for a bit more description and a little less gush. Alas, there are times when this book reads like an interminable end-of-term-prize-giving speech: you need the mellifluous, much- missed tones of the late Dorian Williams to make a panegyric of this sort really come alive. Hundreds more names appear at the end of the book, where present-day sub- scribers and donors to the various hunts are listed, and one can only pray these don't come to the attention of animal rights zealots. Incidentally, I was delighted to find 'G. Stubbs' among last season's sub- scribers to the Fernie.
The author's taste in anecdotes is a bit tame. Most of the legends he relates are second or third hand. Surely he could do better than, 'Look out! Look out! Here comes a loose horse with a lady on it!' and surely he knows that exclamation marks, liberally used throughout, rarely improve a story? There is nothing in these pages that would set a dinner table in a roar, nor any- thing as thought-provoking as Henry Root's claim that there are more foxes in the sewers under Oxford Circus than in the whole of Oxfordshire.
One of the snags of this type of survey is that many legendary figures escape almost unnoticed. The exceedingly interesting Vic- torian madcap Master of the Quorn, Harry Hastings, who died at the age of 26 and whose health was still being drunk in the late 1960s by the playboy Richard Wrottes- ley and his cronies, here gets only a few short paragraphs. On the other hand, I was pleased to be introduced to the still active former Crown Equerry, Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller, a man of 'iron nerve' noted for 'his determination to take his own line across country'. I was also glad to learn that a healthy foxhound can run 100 miles on a good day.
The book has redeeming features. It is attractively packaged, with a very nice Lionel Edwards cover and some fine nos- talgic pencil drawings in the text. It could make a soothing bedside book in a visitor's bedroom and I imagine it will sell quite well in those smart little bookshops which exist in the Shires. It has some excellent photographs, including a side-saddle snap of the former Mrs Fred Barker, now Vis- countess Wimborne, a famous beauty whom I once sat next to at a dinner in Holland Villas Road.
The author offers an embarrassingly jokey section on sex in the hunting-field, which includes a tasteless reference to a horse-box equipped with sleeping accom- modation, but he deals sensibly with the Quorn video furore. His detailed account of those traumatic events of 1991/1992 is painstakingly fair to all parties, including the fox.
Some of the liveliest bits of writing come from Michael Claytbn's own weekly hunt- ing diary in Horse and Hound. The rest of the narrative is persistently hearty and opti- mistic but lacks the grit that the subject merits. Occasional references to the Prince of Wales, whom the author discloses has `supped in many a farmhouse kitchen', are quite amusing and the text is also enlivened by some hilarious printing mistakes. King Edward VII did not abdicate and Major Victor McCalmont, who became Master of the Kilkenny in 1949, could not possibly have 'died suddenly in March 1933'.
Andrew Barrow's novel The Tap Dancer (Picador £5.99) won this year's Hawthorn- den Prize.
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