Hunting

My grandfather’s Uncle G used to say when he went to Mass in June, “good, we’re in the Trinities, hunting starts in the Trinities”. The 13th Sunday after Trinity approaches and we can now legitimately look forward to the start of the season.
I bought this Munnings print of the hounds being walked out at Belvoir many years ago. It is especially evocative at this time of year when cub-hunting is about to start.  My grandfather thought “cubbing” very common and the modern euphemism “autumn hunting” had not been invented. My childhood was spent in cars, on bicycles and on foot following the hounds. Usually the Louth but also the Meath, the Tara Harriers and, only once I think, the Ward Union. The Louth was owned and hunted by the Filgates from 1860 to 1967. Before that a Lord Bellew hunted them for a year. In all other respects he was an unsatisfactory ancestor, dying in Baden-Baden and bequeathing his body to his mistress.

I remember Billy Filgate as Master and huntsman. On one occasion when we were digging for a fox he threw the reins at me to hold his horse. It took advantage of my naivety and threw itself on the grass to roll on its back. This breaks the saddle, an expensive item. Billy cursed me with a vocabulary quite fresh to my tender ears. That evening, after it was pointed out that he had been highly abusive towards a covert-owner’s grandson, he called my grandfather to apologise. I’m pleased to say that my grandfather told him that I deserved every word and in his opinion I was verging on idiocy. It is true that my grandmother used often to say of me “that boy’s wanting”.

Some years later Billy and his wife Alice invited my mother and me to dine at Lissrenny. The invitation was momentous as they had, as Cromwellian soldiers, taken Lissrenny from the Bellews. I was, according to my grandfather, the first Bellew invited to dine there since that ad hoc house move in the 17th century. A reason for this was the Filgates’ after-dinner toast – Damnation to the Pope – which was hard for a Catholic Bellew to accept. I am Church of Ireland and, in any case, there was no anti-Papist toast on my visit.

On hunting mornings my grandafther was apt to recite this ditty:

Billy said to Alice, I love you,

Alice said to Billy, I don’t believe you do,

Cos if you really love me (as you say you do),

Why do you go hunting while I’m left to make Irish stew?

When Billy retired, the hunt subscribers presented him with a fine portrait by Leesa Sandys-Lumsdaine of him and his hounds drawing the Moss House covert, with Barmeath and the Mourne Mountains in the background; his favourite view in the county, he said. Her work is in the tradition of Munnings. Unfortunately I do not have the Filgate picture but here is another example of her work.

William Waldegrave’s father was opposed to hunting for the unusual reason that he thought it cruel to hunt a nocturnal animal in daylight. This is just one small gem in his memoir, A Different Kind of Weather. I am enjoying it hugely.