Schools and beagling
Many years ago I used to work for an airline. I’d joined as Cabin Crew so that I could go birdwatching around the world. Which I did as often as my jet-lagged body would allow. I left (on health grounds, there’s only so long you can keep trying to fit a square peg into a round hole) a decade ago, but one of my enduring memories of my job is of giving out free copies of the Daily Mail in Business Class.
We crew would push out a trolley loaded with papers before take-off. ‘Customers’ (we were taught not to call them ‘passengers’) used to make a slight pretence on whether to take the Mail or something more weighty like the FT or less weighty like the Sun, hovering over the choice as if deciding on a first course at Le Gavroche. Almost inevitably, they’d take the Mail. While reading it, they’d hold the pages between thumb and forefinger, pinky extended, like it was Yellow Gold Tea in an eggshell porcelain cup rather than an (even then) rather gossipy right-wing diary of rising house prices, potholes, and who had been seen with who at what racecourse.
For some ‘customers’ the Mail seemed oddly aspirational, reading it an inky affirmation of ‘Club Middle England’. Minutes later, the ‘expert opinion’ digested, it would be tossed on the floor for the likes of me and my colleagues to sweep up and dump in the bin.
I’m exaggerating of course, and feel free to accuse me of inverse snobbery, I can take it. Naturally enough, the owners of the Mail won’t give a stuff about my take on their product. Its online version is globally read, its oddly resilient dead-tree circulation is still in the high hundreds of thousands, and its hate-filled readers’ comments column rampant in its tearing-down of the BBC, Europe, and celebrities wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes at events its readers weren’t invited to but ‘wouldn’t-be-seen-dead-at-anyway’.
So, why the over-written preamble? Well, an excuse to sound off really, because while I really dislike everything the Daily Mail stands for, the actual focus of this blog is that yesterday it printed a headline to a ‘news report’ that in just one deliberately-triggering sentence took in privilege, its current obsession with ‘woke’ (it takes a special sort of person, think Clarkson or Botham perhaps, to be proud of an ability to denigrate 21st century thinking on issues like slavery and gender), and wildlife crime in the guise of so-called sport.
That sentence?
“Eton schoolboys launch protest over fears that £42,000-a-year public school's woke leadership wants to scrap its 160-year-old hunting society”
Pro-wildlife campaigners, sabs, and monitors know all too well that hunts operate in defiance of laws that ban hunting with hounds. Hunts have always denied undue influence, but observations on the ground are undeniable: police force after police force appear to be working to instructions to watch sabs and monitors rather than hunters breaking the law, while MP after MP line up to defend the ‘tradition’ of hunting. (I wrote about it just last week in ‘Hunting petitions 'debate' in Parliament.)
The near-pointless article below the Mail’s headline tells a story that the rest of the world could happily skip past, but is actually a clear explanation of why we struggle to enforce the Hunting Act and get rid of hunting once for all, of who is pulling the strings, and why hunts seem impervious to enforcement.
A handful of sentences clarifies all. The “prestigious institution”, for instance, “failed to recruit a new Kennel Huntsman for the Eton College Hunt (ECH) to replace the previous incumbent who recently left for another role”. “Trustees of the ECH, made up of former Etonians and the Hunting Office….” Headmaster Simon Henderson who (gasp, is reported to wear chino trousers and open-necked shirts) had relocated the school’s hounds “as a 'temporary measure' despite many parents offering to keep the pack together at their own estates.” The college will continue “its search for a new Kennel Huntsman, at which point the hounds will return to Eton”.
Yes, as the Mail tells us, Eton students have their own Hunt, own kennels, and parents wealthy enough to house hounds on their own estates. The trustees of their Hunt include Old Etonians (Eton is the alma mater of former and current lawmakers like Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Jacob Rees-Mogg and eight other Tory MPs remember), and the Hunting Office – the “executive arm of the Governing bodies for Hunting with hounds” and the organisers of the infamous ‘smokescreen webinars’ where senior hunting staff discussed how to use ‘trail hunting’ to disguise law-breaking.
Whilst we are talking here about beagle packs (traditionally used to hunt hares, not foxes), what the ‘journalist’ is revealing is that Eton is training children to hunt.
In much the same way that it’s common knowledge that Pony Clubs funnel young riders through to fox hunts, that a select few private schools use beagles as a gateway to a lifetime of hunting is hardly a secret. Post-2004’s Hunting Act, hunting has regularly patted itself on the back for ingraining a culture of bloodsports in young people.
A laudatory article titled “An education in hunting: the role of school and college packs” in April 2021’s ‘Horse and Hound’ by columnist Andrew Sallis*, for example, runs with the ‘train ’em young’ theme and in paragraph after paragraph described how beagle packs like Eton’s, Radley’s and Stowe’s provide today’s law-breaking foxhunters.
“The beagles naturally attract children from hunting backgrounds but, more importantly, they offer a great opportunity for all children to get involved in a community beyond the school gate”, Sallis writes, adding that “for generations, “young gentlemen” (and now some ladies) have followed the well-worn path of masterships from school beagles to college beagles before taking a pack of foxhounds”
A certain Captain Ronnie Wallace (a former senior trustee of the ECH) is described by Sallis as considering the “careful placement of school and college kennel huntsmen vital for the future of hunting.”
An encomium to outdoor sports in something called ‘School House’ published in October 2019 quotes yet another Old Etonian wistfully remembering schooldays hunting. Rory Buchanan (a fine fly fisherman and shot apparently), became Master of the Eton Beagles in his final year, hunting 50 days a year and overseeing the club’s day-to-day running. Beagling, he recalls, was “a real highlight of his school days”, which must sound utterly other-worldly to kids whose highlight is a weekly trip to the rec to kick a football about.
A crowing 2011 article from The Field, says that “packs are full of vitality and are essential for training the future generation – be they hunt staff, Masters or politicians”, and quotes Phillip Kennedy, then kennel huntsman for the Stowe pack, claiming, “I think Stowe has provided more Masters in the last 30 years than any other school pack.” The same article states that “When it comes to graduating as a bona fide huntsman or fledgling Master, the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester is where many gain their apprenticeship.”
Most of the organisations and articles bragging about converting children into adult hunters (there are many more online) are careful to mention ‘legal hunting’, by which they typically mean so-called ‘trail hunting’, which as a famous schoolchild might say ‘as any fule kno is a smokescreen for illegal hunting’. Like the sort of ‘trail hunting’ the Eton Beagles were taking part in when filmed by the League Against Cruel Sports ‘apparently’ illegally hunting a hare in North Yorkshire in October 2015?
None of these eulogies to hunting trouble themselves, though, with why there is so much lawbreaking across the country week in, week out. Or why hunts are so unpleasantly arrogant and sure of themselves. Or why many police forces and many Police and Crime Commissioners turn a blind eye to illegal hunting. Or why so many Conservative politicians want to repeal the Hunting Act (or why others understand the Act so well that they’re happy for it to exist in its current weakened form rather than killing it off).
But then again, they don’t really need to because anti-woke attacks masquerading as journalism like the Mail’s article actually lay it all out for us to read…before we toss it on the floor to be swept up and thrown in the (recycling) bin of course.
But before we do that, how about we take a moment to imagine how different that article would have been if the Daily Mail had covered a protest at a state school by pupils who wanted to go hare coursing…?
*Sallis recently stepped down as master and huntsman of the notorious Kimblewick hunt, which was filmed in December 2020 entering private property and killing a fox, and whose followers were sentenced to 12 weeks in prison at Oxford Magistrates' Court in 2019 for causing unnecessary suffering to a fox after releasing it "into the path of a hunt".