The Wartime Journals by Hugh Trevor-Roper

Author:Hugh Trevor-Roper [Trevor-Roper, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857730114
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The Great Whaddon Row

Nov 1943

I was staying with the Wheelers at Whitchurch,341 before hunting with the Bicester; it was after dinner; I was alone with Mr Wheeler; and it seemed a good opportunity to hear the complete tale of the great Whaddon Chase row which, for twenty years, had split the solid-seeming society of Buckinghamshire to its foundations. So I reminded him of our unfinished conversation on the way back from Botolph Claydon one hunting day, and he agreed to resume the topic, and animate, with circumstantial details, that spectre which still haunts so many country houses in the district. After a pause, therefore, in which he probed silently into the vast backward abysm of Time, ‘Let us go back forty years’, he began, ‘to 1901, when I first hunted with the Whaddon. There were two packs of hounds in the country in those days, the Rothschild staghounds at Ascott, and the Whaddon Chase at Whaddon. Both showed good sport, and they worked in well together; for the staghounds drove all the foxes into the coverts, and the foxhounds hunted them out again. Now the Whaddon Chase was the family pack of the Selby-Lowndes;342 the old squire owned it, and Bill Lowndes was field-master; and very good sport he showed for several seasons. But the Lowndes were a poor family, as things went, and, frankly, they lived by the pack, which they hunted as parsimoniously as they could, mounting the servants cheaply, and taking as big a subscription as they could, and always refusing a committee, or any audit of the accounts; for as long as they showed good sport, and the subscribers were satisfied, whose business was it how the Selby Lowndes administered their property? Unfortunately there came a time when the subscribers were not satisfied.’

For after a while, Bill Lowndes thought of reducing still further the expenses of the establishment by disposing of his huntsman and hunting the hounds himself; and then the trouble began, for the sport began to decline, and the voice of discontent arose, and over many a bottle of old port the demand for a hunt committee and more regular management was heard. But then the war came, and Bill Lowndes joined his regiment, leaving the hounds to one Murray343 to hunt; and when the peace was restored the situation had crystallised; for Murray had quarrelled with the Lowndes and had gone over to the dissidents, who had formed up behind Lord Dalmeny;344 and since the Rothschild staghounds had been disbanded, Dalmeny had the Ascott kennels at his disposal. All that was lacking was a pack of hounds to put in them, and with money this was easily come by.

There was a man Nell,345 he went on, who, during the war, had hunted part of the Duke of Beaufort’s country, and, being a good kennel-man, had bred an excellent pack; and this pack Dalmeny bought from him, and taking advice from Boddington, whom he imported as huntsman from, I think, the VWH,346 he drafted into it a number of hounds from the Berkeley, and made a first-class hunting pack.

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