Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 173

Michael Clayton is uniquely placed to write the history of late twentieth-century foxhunting. Having taken up hunting in his teens, as he tells us in this book, part history, part memoir, he began a career in print journalism, made the leap to television and then from television news reporting for the BBC to the editorship of Horse and Hound in 1973, which he also served as its hunting correspondent, Foxford. This way Clayton found the perfect combination of career and hobby. He claims to have hunted with 200 packs at home and abroad (and on expenses too!). His previous books have established him as the leading commentator on foxhunting over the past thirty years.

This book falls into three parts. The first four chapters offer an account of hunting in the twentieth century. The middle chapters are more thematic. Chapters Five and Six discuss the hound and horse respectively. Chapter Seven offers an account of some huntsmen, past and present, Eight discusses hunting abroad. Chapter Nine is really a memoir of Clayton’s time in the field as both a young man and as Foxford, and here one suspects some reworking of his clippings. Chapter Ten represents a change of gear and forms the third part. It offers an account of successive attempts to legislate hunting with dogs out of existence, taking the story to the passage of the 2004 bill and the illegalization of hunting in at least its traditional form from 18 February 2005. Clayton of course wrote too soon to know of the failure (so far) of the legal challenges to the act, but equally the common agreement that the act has – so far – failed in its purpose of suppressing foxhunting. Nor could he know that the leader of the Conservative party elected at the end of 2005 had hunted and was reported to be sympathetic to hunting. The story is plainly not over yet.

Clayton’s book comes with glowing testimonies from The Field, Country Life and the Daily Mail. It contains much useful information, but given his vantage point over the past thirty years as an observer and participant, the book – shot through as it is with nostalgia, valedictory comment and uncertainty about what will happen – is a disappointment. It is a journalist’s book – short snappy paragraphs, occasional good jokes, a tendency to mention everyone – but no inside stories, no r evelations of personality clashes, of the lobbying of ministers – not even the odd revelation on who was sleeping with whom (although he quotes the adage that a mistress was ‘something between a Master and a mattress’, p. 86). Occasionally it is a little vague – about dates for instance – which suggests that Clayton is perhaps writing from memory rather than his files. It lacks sociological observation. Was the field as socially wide as claimed? Did it change over time? Who were the MFH as the supply of men and women with private incomes ran dry? Clayton tells us that Foxford was criticized for writing too much about Leicestershire: ‘I pointed out that newspapers gave far more space to Arsenal than minor Third Division clubs’ (p. 196). Something of the same criticism can be made of this book which, to me at least, has more to say about the cream of the hunting fraternity than the problems of the socially non-U farmers’ hunts. Where Clayton does lift his guard a little and offer pithy opinions is when he displays sympathy with those figures who realized the need for the sport to raise its public profile, dispel its aristocratic and landholding image, and counter the drip of anti-field sports propaganda. And he repeats criticisms (which he has made elsewhere) of the Quorn’s conduct in the digging-out scandal of 1991. One wonders whether Clayton might yet write his memoirs and tell us more about the internal politics of hunting as it came under pressure from the anti-field sports lobbies.

As a book by a leading practitioner written with other members of the hunting fraternity in mind, the book will doubtless be enjoyed by many and achieve a wide circulation. Rural historians will find it to be an interesting source with some good leads to be followed up rather than the definitive last word. We lack an academic study of any twentieth-century field sport despite the fact that for long periods, sporting uses of the countryside have plainly been a significant factor in determining land use (this can perhaps be seen more plainly now that the post-war productivist revolution has run its course) and public attitudes to field sports have coloured larger attitudes to the countryside, farmers and farming. Indeed, to make a political point, one feels that since 1997 the smoke generated by pro- and anti-hunting lobbies has often disguised the lack of real thinking about other rural issues. I have already argued that foxhunting (and field sports) is an area in which rural historians should have something to say. Until they rise to that challenge, Clayton is as good as we have.