Featured Download
Speak Like a CEO
This chapter describes ten helpful actions and behaviors that will bring you...
Content provided in partnership with
HUNTING
Contemporary Review, May, 2000 by Allan Ramsay
It is, perhaps, precisely because hunting is incapable of neat classification that it seems right to some that an attempt should be made to tidy it away through legislation or by some other means, along with the city vagrants and school dunces or 'under-performers'. 'Hunting belongs to the history books' said the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Anne Widdecombe magisterially 'and there it should remain'. How generations of Widdecombes must be turning in their Dartmoor graves, simple men whom hunting with one of the unpretentious local packs must have given so much pleasure, at finding one of their own speaking thus. Among the 250,000 or so who marched, or more precisely ambled good humouredly, along the prescribed route in the warm spring sunshine in London on 1 March last year, among the Barbours and the cloth caps and snappy brim Trilbys, amid the fanatics wielding hunting horns and past the gentle applaudissements of onlookers on the steps of Brook's and Boodles, not owning to an affiliation to any hunt nor allegiance to anyone except himself, was a small man from Lancashire pushing a home-made wooden trolley carrying a defiant message and escorted by two Staffordshire bull terriers. The whole assemblage was politically incorrect to a degree, most of all perhaps the dogs. He epitomised for me the inveterate and priceless bloodymindedness of the English, their objection to being pushed around and placed in pigeon holes, and those who were perceptive enough could feel that underneath the friendly tolerance something essentially serious was at work and that the picnic atmosphere concealed a deep resolve, and that even if, against the odds, everyone else were to capitulate tomorrow, there would still be the problem of Albert Elkins to deal with.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
For there is, undeniably, a magic about hunting and not all the loutish behaviour, the bad manners and lack of consideration occasionally displayed by those who hunt can do more than lightly tarnish its surface. It may say nothing to that part of the population which has arrived on these shores since the end of the Second World War and its hold on the public imagination may be declining; but it says enough still to a sufficient number to be regarded as part of our living heritage. It has at least as much emotional appeal, for its supporters, as football to its fans. It has its own mythology. In a well known incident of the First World War an officer of the East Surreys led his men across a piece of ground in Flanders by kicking a football in front of them. Colonel Campbell of the Coldstream Guards rallied his and earned a VC in the process with the aid of a silver hunting horn presented by the men of the First Battalion. 'And now, Gentlemen, I wish you good hunting' said General Montgomery to his officers on the eve of Alamein. And he concluded his address to all ranks on the eve of Overlord in 1944 with the words 'Good luck each one of you. And good hunting on the mainland of Europe'. Just so much history? Or did Montgomery, that supreme professional with an instinct for the popular touch, choose words that would strike the right emotional chord, with just that right degree of [acute{e}]lan? One can make what one likes of such examples. Jeremy Paxman in his book The English describes the East Surreys' officer as' [ldots] quite clearly mad'. But then so was Wolfe, George III was asked to believe. But I wonder what it is that makes us, normally a tolerant and good humoured people, so censorious; and why the drip, drip, drip of denigration is so persistent today? Or is it only a minority, unrepresentative of any wider feeling, least of all those which lie buried deep inside us, who feel that they have the right to pronounce so dismissively on the instinctive recourse of men and women in times of difficulty and dan ger to things that are familiar?
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Reference
- Academe
- African American Review
- African Arts
- African Studies Review
- Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Alabama Heritage
- Alabama Review
- American Mathematical Monthly, The
- Anglican Theological Review
- Annals of Dyslexia
- Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ)
- Auk, The
- Australian Journal of Anthropology, The
- Christian Century
- Natural History