Prologue: Statement

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are expressed to Jackie McKenzie for publication assistance and to Andrew Riley for his patient and efficient editorial assistance. All reasonable effort has been made to obtain copyright clearance.

Notes

[1] Sir Henry Newbolt's The Book of the Thin Red Line exemplifies the genre. For a wider perspective, see Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism.

[2]The Field, Special Centenary Edition, 2003, 6–10.

[3] Rose, The Field, 1853–1953, chapters 1–3.

[4]The Field, Centenary Edition, passim.

[5] John Henry Walsh (1810–1888), English writer on sport, pseudonym ‘Stonehenge’. He was educated at private schools and became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1844. The Greyhound (3rd ed. 1875), originally contributed to Bell's Life, was published in 1853. In 1856 his Manual of British Rural Sports appeared, which enjoyed many editions. In the same year he joined The Field and became its editor at the close of 1857. Among books published under the name of ‘Stonehenge’ are The Shot-Gun and Sporting Rifle (1859), The Dog in Health and Disease (1859; 4th edn 1887), The Horse in the Stable and in the Field (1861; 13th edn 1890), Dogs of the British Isles (1867; 3rd edn 1885) and The Modern Sportsman's Gun and Rifle (1882–1884). While editor of The Field Walsh instituted a series of trials of guns, rifles and sporting powders.

[6] Walsh, Rural Sports, vii and Blaine, Encyclopaedia of Rural Sport, preface and 229–30.

[7] Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 171. The ideal of manliness with its links to ‘duty’, was well represented, as is well known, by the legendary Captain Oates. What is less well known is that Eton-educated Oates was a keen and proficient huntsman and attained the rank of MFH.

[8]A. Lang, ‘The Old Sportsman’, Badminton Magazine 1 (1895), 370–5. The life of Sir Peter Scott, legendary naturalist, though less well known as hunter, perfectly illustrates the transition from keen ‘shot’ to introspective rejection of killing for sport. He wrote: ‘I had … given up shooting’ after witnessing ‘seven “guns” shooting at a single goose which staggered in the air, then lost height. It came down far out on the sands, completely inaccessible … both its legs were broken. The following day, the goose remained in the same spot.’ This ‘Pauline' incident compelled Scott to reassess his position on shooting for sport. ‘I had derived enormous pleasure, good health and interest from being on the marshes at dawn and dusk. The birds with their beauty and wildness had been an endless source of delight. If I were advising a young boy I would say to him, of course you will enjoy wildfowling … but I am sure that as soon as the doubts and the disquiet prevent one from enjoying shooting there can be no reason for going on doing it.’ Scott, Eye of the Wind, 236–7.

[9] Watkins-Pitchford, Tide's Ending, 18.

[10] The hunting field was a repository of ritual – from the largesse of liver slices from the hunted beast to hunt followers to the giving of the ‘hunt button’ to dedicated followers, to the wearing of coloured jackets indicating hierarchy within the hunt. Beaglers on foot with harriers tended to wear green jackets. The red coat of the mounted fox-hunter was reserved for the master, huntsmen – or serving military officers.

[11] Quoted in Salt, The Company I have Kept, 168–9. This view was endorsed by Captain Jocelyn Lucas in his 1931 book Hunt and Working Terriers: ‘Blooding, to the uninitiated, is done by smearing the cheeks of a novice, usually a youngster, the first time that he has seen a fox, deer, hare or otter killed by hounds. He is then said to be “blooded a sportsman”, and is generally given some trophy as a measure of the occasion.’ Lucas, Hunt and Working Terriers, 287. Thanks are extended to Jake Miles, former enthusiastic follower of numerous beagle and harrier packs, recipient of the highly prestigious ‘slot’ trophy (stag feet) from the Exmoor Stag Hunt, who now walks Lancashire moors in search of testing climbs rather than the hunting of fox, hare or deer.

[12] Lt. Col.John Mackillop (pseudonym ‘Weatherby’), 1871–1953, contributor to hunting and shooting magazines.

[13] Mackillop et al., Letters, 3.

[14] Parker Gilmore, Accessible Fieldsports, 11 (emphasis added).

[15]‘Boys and Shooting’, The Field 143 (Jan. 1924), 97.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Grogan and Sharpe,From the Cape to Cairo, 172; The Boy's Own Paper 13 (1891), 314.

[18] Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays, 6; Wallace, Hunting Winds, ch. 5; Pease, Hunting Reminiscences, 159–160; Lord Ormathwaite, ‘My First Stag’, Badminton Magazine 6 (June 1897), 119–132.

[19] Creswicke, South Africa and the Transvaal Wars, vol. 6, 207.

[20] The Humanitarian League, 1891–1919, social reform movement with diverse philanthropic ambitions, from vegetarianism to the abolition of hunting to penal reform.

[21] Salt, Killing for Sport, chs 2–3.

[22] Salt, Creed of Kinship, 3.

[23] Salt, Killing for Sport, 86.

[24]‘Big Game Shooting’, The Badminton Library, 1894, 1–5.

[25] National Society for the Abolition of Cruel Sports, Bulletin 37 (Dec. 1939), 2.

[26] Whitson, ‘Sport in the Construction of Masculinity’, 21.

[27] Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, GCMG, KCB, 1858–1927. Imperialist, conservationist, botanist and social commentator, Johnston entered the Foreign Service in 1885 and strengthened Britain's imperial position in East Africa with a sound and thoughtful approach to politics and natural science.

[28]‘The Protection of Fauna and Flora; a Common Sense View’, Humanitarian 12 (Dec. 1904), 17–23 and 25 (Feb. 1910), 78–90; Nineteenth Century 74 (Aug. 1913), 592.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Pester, War and Sport in India, xii.

[31] Alderson, Pink and Scarlet, 1, 8.

[32] See Alderson, Pink and Scarlet; and also, Higginson, British and American Sporting Authors, 253–4.

[33] Alderson, Pink and Scarlet, 187.

[34] Thesiger, The Life of My Choice, 28–9.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Paget et al., Horses, Guns and Dogs, 45–50.

[37] Colonel Wolsely, Macmillan's Magazine 23 (1870), 524–34.

[38] Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 226.

[39] Kempson, The Trinity Foot Beagles, 4–8, 10–13.

[40]‘The Yeoman and the Empire’, Baily's Magazine 80 (1903), 261–3.

[41]The Spectator 94 (1 April 1905), 471–2. The point was later reinforced by Keith Thomas in Man and the Natural World, 39, who emphasized that middle-class humanitarianism, ushered in to protect wildlife, contrasted with aristocratic hunting and ‘warlike traditions’.

[42] MacKenzie, ‘Chivalry, Social Darwinism and Ritualised Killing’.

[43] Madden, Wilderness and its Tenants, vol. 3, 176–7.

[44] Baker, Wild Beasts and their Ways, 376–7.

[45] Winks, British Imperialism, 1.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Gilmore, Manhood in the Making, 219–24.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid,, and Kimmel in Brod and Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities, 120.

[50] Kaarsholm, ‘Kipling and Masculinity’, cited in Samuel, Patriotism, 56–8.

[51] Newbolt, Book of Good Hunting, 22–34. For a more general treatment see, Newbolt, Poems Old and New, 87–90.

[52] Newbolt, Book of the Thin Red Line, v.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid., 218.

[55] Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism; and ‘“The Grit of Our Forefathers”’, 116.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Mazower, Dark Continent, xv.

[58]‘The Spirit of Sport’, The Field 97 (1901), 268.

[59] Mangan, Athleticism, 135.

[60] Abel Chapman, 1851–1929, big-game hunter, ornithologist and conservationist, is widely represented in this book. See ‘Publicist and Proselytizer: The Officer-Hunter as Scientist and Naturalist’ and subsequent contributions in this volume.

[61]Annals and Magazine of Natural History 16 (June 1915), 10–22 and Chapman, Memories, 157–9.

[62] See ‘Martial Masculinity in Transition’ in this volume.

[63] Baden-Powell, The Matabele Campaign, 464.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Colquhoun, Moor and Loch, preface, viii; R. Jefferies, ‘The Defence of Sport’, National Review 1 (1883), 919–32. John Colquhoun, 1810–1885, educated in Edinburgh then at a private school in Lincolnshire run by the Reverend Grainger of Winteringham before attending Edinburgh University. During the 1830s Colquhoun developed a career in the army which enabled him to hunt and shoot in Ireland and Scotland.

[66] Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians, 11–12.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Green, Dreams of Adventure, 389; Avery, Nineteenth Century Children, 145; Avery, Childhood's Pattern, 117.

[69] Ballantyne, The Gorilla Hunters, 48–9. G.A. Henty, a popular children's author, had a ‘horror of any lad … who shrank from shedding blood’. See Fenn, G.A. Henty, 334.

[70] Ballantyne, passim.

[71] Meigs, The Critical History of Children's Literature, 237; Green, Dreams of Adventure, 220, 340; Avery, Childhood's Pattern, 117.

[72] Ibid.

[73] Drotner, English Children and their Magazines, 115.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Lamb, Modern Action and Adventure, preface.

[76] Sandilands, Atalanta, 114.

[77] Salt, Killing for Sport, 150 (emphasis added).

[78] Sandilands, Atalanta, 7.

[79] Morris, Manwatching, 308; Roosevelt and Grinnell, Hunting in Many Lands, 327.

[80] Lindsay Gordon, Sporting Verse, 74 and Edwards, Famous Foxhunters, 74.

[81]The Boy's Journal 2 (1865), 17. Gilmore has asserted that the concept of men and boys ‘at risk’ on the battlefield– and in the hunt – has long been perceived as an un-coded message of masculinity which reinforced participants fitness for rule. See Gilmore, Manhood, 223.

[82] Most period volumes of The Field devoted space to those had ‘fallen’ in the hunting field.

[83] Gilmore, Manhood, 221–4.

[84] Baker, The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon, 5.

[85] Braddon, Thirty Years of Shikar, 2.

[86] John Hearn has suggested this process was assisted by the increasing use of the camera to depict empiric scenes. Hearn, Men in the Public Eye, 188.

[87]‘We English’, according to The Field were ‘nothing if not hero-worshipers’: The Field 104 (10 Sept. 1904), 461. Soldierly heroism is explored in Gibson, Warrior Dreams, 10.

[88] Huxley, Peter Scott, ix.

[89]Baily's Magazine 78 (1902), 4.

[90] Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 70.

[91] Taylor, The Mighty Nimrod. See also The Meteor (Rugby School magazine), 2 July 1917; The Meteor, 10 June 1897, 58–62.

[92]Baily's Magazine 78 (1902), 67–9. For other sporting verse, see Edwards, Famous Foxhunters.

[93] Newbolt, ‘Clifton Chapel', 77.

[94] J.A. Mangan, ‘Moralists, metaphysicians and mythologists: the ‘‘signifiers'' of a Victorian and Edwardian sub-culture', 146.

[95] Newbolt, ‘The Vigil', 80.

[96] Newbolt, ‘The Schoolfellows', 89.

[97] Newbolt, ‘A song for Exmoor', 194.

[98] ‘The Yoeman, and the Empire', Baily's Magazine, 80, October 1903, 261–3. See also, Alderson, ‘Pink and Scarlet', or ‘Hunting as a School for Soldiering', 1, 8.

[99] Austin, Among Swamps and Giants, preface.

[100]‘The Yeoman and the Empire’, Baily's Magazine 80 (Oct. 1903), 261–3. See also Alderson, Pink and Scarlet, 1, 8.

[101] Ibid.

[102] Quoted in Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, preface.

[103] Lankester and Thomas, The British Museum Collections, 20–30.

[104] Bryden, Nature and Sport in South Africa, 281.

[105] The authors are grateful to Hamish Wallace, secretary of the Shikar Club of Little Whirley, Staffordshire, for his advice and letters on the club and its history. Hamish Wallace's father, Frank Wallace, was club secretary during the 1920s.

[106]‘The Shikar Club’, The Field 111 (June 1908), 1006. See Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays, for accounts of Seton-Karr in the field; The Field 111 (1908), 1006, and, Stearn, The Natural History Museum, 79; Watson, King Edward VII as a Sportsman, preface, 10–30; Hyam, Britain's Imperial Century, 57, 122, 135–48, Bristow, Memoirs of the British Raj, 65–6.

[107] Madden, The Wilderness and its Tennants, vol. 2, 8–9.

[108] See ‘Martial Masculinity in Transition’ in this volume.

[109] Seton-Karr, My Sporting Holidays, 6.

[110] Chapman, Memories of Fourscore Years Less Two, 157–9; On Safari, Big-Game Hunting in British East Africa With Studies in Bird Life, vi.

[111] Chapman, Borders and Beyond, 441.

[112] Ibid., 442–4.

[113] MS, Natural History Museum, DF232–14, Letters, Abel Chapman to Oldfield Thomas, 4 May 1908, 44, I and II; Millais, The Life of Frederick C. Selous, 25–40.

[114] W.S. Seton-Karr, ‘The Sports League’, National Review, 1883–4, 838.

[115]The Field 85 (20 June 1885); ‘The Defence of Fieldsports’, Baily's Magazine 44 (1885), 3.

[116]The Shooting Times, 9 April 1927, 1.

[117]‘The Protection of Fieldsports’, The Times, 5 Dec. 1930, 21.

[118] Green, Dreams of Adventure, 344.

[119] J.A. Mangan, ‘Epilogue: Continuities'.