“Twilight over meadow and water, the eve-star shining above the hill, and Old Nog the heron crying kra-a-ark! as his slow dark wings carried him down to the estuary.” (First line, Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson, 1927)
A couple of days ago I was walking along Barons Court Road with Bertie when a young couple (early 30s) left their house. As so often happens, she was charmed by Bertie and confided her father has a black Labrador also called Bertie. I told her my grandfather had Labrador bitches with names always starting with B. He looked distinctly bored; so far so normal. But then she noticed I was carrying a Puffin paperback edition of Tarka the Otter and said it is her favourite book. I was really surprised that someone her age had even heard of it but it is still much loved and its author revered. The Henry Williamson Society thrives. Members pay £15, are invited to two meetings each year and receive an annual Journal and Newsletter. Henry Williamson’s family are prominent members.
When I was a child there was a pack of harriers that hunted otters before switching to hares later in the year. The Master and owner of the pack was a good-natured Dutchman and it was said they never killed an otter but enjoyed splashing around in otter hunting shorts, a garment immortalised when Mr Huggins helps Donald Cameron pack for a country house weekend.
“Donald’s protests were overridden tempestuously. For instance, when he pleaded almost tearfully, “I can’t take a pair of grey flannels with a hole in the knee,” the invincible Mr. Huggins whipped out a pair of scissors and instantly converted the trousers into shorts, exclaiming as he did so, ‘There you are! Shorts for otter-hunting. Put them in the otter-hunting suitcase.’ “(England, Their England, AG MacDonell, 1933}
When Henry Williamson was writing in the 1920s otters were plentiful and hunted by hounds. It was not this that led to their drastic decline in numbers from the 1950s but use of organochlorine insecticides and ‘improvements’ in river management. Williamson himself thought otter hunting cruel but joined the Cheriton Otter Hunt to gain information for his book. Disappointingly members of the hunt in 1900 are not wearing shorts.
Otters have been a protected species throughout the British Isles since the 1970s. Co Cork and Co Limerick were the last bastions of the ‘sport’ with four packs (the Bride Valley, Bride View and Cork City Otter Hunts, all in Cork and the Desmond Otter Hunt in Co Limerick) hunting under special licences from April to October until a complete ban was enacted by Charles Haughey’s government in 1990. Foxes are not a protected species in the republic and there are forty-one registered packs of hounds. Fox hunting was banned in the UK in 2004.