Country Fair. Max Hastings
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hours’ fishing. I set out from Berkshire the other day to shoot in Devon, and came home easily enough the same evening. I am untroubled by driving to Wales to throw a line, then returning to sleep in my own bed. We can journey to Sutherland – or for that matter, to Russia or Iceland – inside a day.
We pay a price, in that some of the thrilling remoteness has gone from these places. So, too, has the intimacy which attached to a shooting party when guns, beaters and pickers-up lived within a few miles of the meeting place. Everybody knew each other, and the coverts. Today, one often meets a picker-up who has come from thirty miles away, or beaters who travel regularly from distant towns. Shooting and fishing parties forge their own sense of community, but this is seldom now rooted in local geography.
We are much better equipped to face the elements than earlier generations. My father shot in a tailor-made tweed jacket cut loose at the elbows. Waterproof it was not, any more than were his canvas Newmarket boots. Today, conditions must be very damp indeed for water to penetrate to the places where it made our grandparents so uncomfortable. Guns have not changed at all – indeed, many of us shoot with weapons built almost a hundred years ago. As a child, I enjoyed watching my father performing alchemist’s rites with powder and shot as he loaded his own cartridges. I occasionally experimented with the process myself, much to the alarm of anyone who later found my overcharged rounds in his gun. But it would be hard to argue that sporting life is poorer now that everybody fires factory-loaded ammunition. When did you last see someone having to use a cartridge extractor?
Fishing rods are wonderfully improved. One would have to be very sentimental to prefer an old greenheart to a new Sage. I am no longer even convinced that old reels are better: I would rather play a modern salmon on a modern reel. Of my father’s old tackle, I use only a couple of cane brook rods on chalk streams. Thank heaven fishermen no longer have to grease silk lines or dry gut casts at the end of a day!
Edwardian shooting parties provided opportunities for an orgy of adultery, facilitated by the fact that in large Norfolk or Yorkshire country houses, husbands and wives occupied separate bedrooms. Nowadays, when most of us inhabit more modest quarters, it requires considerable ingenuity for a couple bent on infidelity to find space to swing a cat, never mind themselves, amid a houseful of visiting guns. A friend once told me that a billiard table provided the most discreet rendezvous that she and her weekend quarry could commandeer for naughtiness. Edward VII would have been proud of her. A big shot like Sir Ralph Payne-Galway would have deplored her bloke’s frivolous attitude to more serious purposes.
My father sought to convince me that only activities in which one engages actively and individually – notably hunting, shooting and fishing – can properly be described as sports. Soccer and rugger, he suggested dismissively, are mere games. Most of those who call themselves ‘sports enthusiasts’ are content to spectate, usually from an armchair at home. The old boy has lost that argument, I am afraid. Games reign supreme in public esteem, however dismaying the behaviour of some of those who play them.
The saddest change since father’s era is the fungus-growth of hostility towards traditional sports. The other day, I was driving a car full of guns along a bridlepath on the Berkshire Downs. Our convoy was careful to slow and steer aside from ramblers we met. I tried ‘Good mornings’ out of the window to each of them, but was rewarded only by stony stares. They had seen and heard us banging away, and did not like it. The sight of a pheasant falling wounded or dead from the sky is repugnant to many such rural visitors. It seems sensible to spare their sensitivities by seeking to shoot discreetly. It is no longer a good idea to run drives within sight of a public road.
The banning of fox-hunting signals a threat to the future of all English field sports, as well as a body-blow to the historic life of the countryside. For centuries, hunts have provided a focus for the social lives of many rural communities. At a stroke, and with malice aforethought, the great tradition reflected in the art of Stubbs, Alken and a thousand lesser brushes, and by the pens of Trollope, Surtees, White-Melville, Siegfried Sassoon, has been swept away. Now that Parliament has established the principle that it is wrong to kill one species of wildlife for pleasure, there is no logical reason why politicians should not move against shooting and fishing also.
I am not optimistic about the prospects for sustained defiance of the hunting ban. Those against whom it is directed are instinctively law-abiding people, even if they are now also angry ones. Some symbolic meets will continue for a time. Drag-hunting may prosper. Essentially, however, fox-hunting and legal hare-coursing – the Labour Party is indifferent to illegal coursing by travellers, which raises no class-war blood-lust on its Commons benches – will atrophy. Many of us whose own lives are not directly affected feel a surge of sorrow for what this measure says about the society to which we belong, in which halal butchery remains acceptable and the use of soft drugs is tolerated, but testing horses, riders and hounds in pursuit of a fox is not. The hunting ban is the act of an urban dictatorship, intolerant of minority cultures which exist outside parameters determined by itself.
There is nothing new about the contempt of intellectuals and radicals for rural pastimes. Joseph Addison remarked scornfully almost three centuries ago: ‘Hunting is not a proper employment for a thinking man.’ The unwelcome twenty-first-century novelty is the determination of an urban-based ruling political class to regard a belief in its own moral superiority as sufficient mandate to persecute a rural minority which it despises. It cares nothing for the wise observation of Plato a couple of millennia ago: ‘There can be no more important kind of information than the exact knowledge of a man’s own country; and for this as well as for more general reasons of pleasure and advantage, hunting with hounds and other kinds of sport should be pursued by the young.’ The hunting ban is the act of a government set upon creating a new Britain in its own image, confident that it faces no political opposition strong enough to frustrate its purposes.
We become a drearier and less diverse society with the loss of the pageantry of English fox-hunting, its thrusters and eccentrics, its beaux and belles, its happy meets and silly squabbles. The challenge now, for those who cherish the traditional countryside, is to do everything in our power to ensure that sport with horse and hounds is not altogether lost, and that the other great rural pastimes continue to prosper. The government assures us that it has no intention of legislating against shooting and fishing. We would be rash to swallow such bromides from an administration which has shown itself chronically deceitful on a host of other issues. I have often written about the importance of supporting the countryside organisations, both those which are responsible for sport – the Countryside Alliance, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, the Game Conservancy – and those which fight for our rural landscape and character, notably the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Today, when so much is at risk, this seems more important than ever. Sceptics shrug: ‘What’s the point? Nobody has been able to stop the hunting ban, and nobody can stop this government attacking shooting, or building millions more houses on green fields.’ Yet, just as no thoughtful countryman regrets the struggle to save fox-hunting, which delayed legislation for years, so we cannot now succumb to defeatism about shooting, fishing and uncontrolled housing development. If we do not fight, then our sports and our landscape do not deserve to survive.
We must make strategy in the consciousness that we might be ruled by Labour governments for a decade. Tony Blair’s party thinks so, too. Political arrogance fortified Labour’s enthusiasm for banning fox-hunting. It imbues the party’s MPs with a dangerous boldness about the possibilities for going further in their crusade ‘irreversibly to change the nature of British society’. On our side, in seeking to resist new encroachments, we should fight a non-party battle, on an environmental and libertarian platform. Economic arguments about jobs and rural income at stake butter few parsnips with our opponents, for the numbers are too small.
If field sports ally themselves explicitly with the Tories then, bluntly, we anchor ourselves to a party which cannot for the foreseeable future offer useful aid. We face a cultural issue, which extends far beyond field sports. Britain is changing. Those of us who live familiar rural lives amid our rose gardens and the routine of planting broad beans, casting a fly for trout, pursuing grouse, decoying pigeons, should perceive that we inhabit a precious yet increasingly isolated social capsule. It is magnificent, but in the eyes of many of our fellow-countrymen, it represents a charade