Henry Hill
Horse dealer and point-to-point rider who rescued the Cambridge University Drag Hounds
HENRY HILL, who has died aged 76, was a character from the pages of Surtees, a horse dealer, hunting enthusiast, keeper of horses and hounds, stalwart of East Anglian point-to points, and chairman for more than 40 years of the Cambridge University Drag Hounds (CUDH), the only student-run pack left in England.
Its survival owed everything to Hill. At his stables in Great Gidding he liveried and provided horses for the CUDH masters every year and latterly kept the hounds. There are not many who have hunted with the Fitzwilliam or the CUDH since the 1970s who have not bought (always in cash), hired or borrowed a horse from Hill in their time.
Henry Hill was born in Peterborough, in the shadow of the cathedral, on April 20 1942, to Lillian and Harry Hill. Harry was a wellknown character around the Peterborough cattle market. He kept dairy cows which he would milk by hand, carting the milk round in churns and ladling it into people’s jugs on the doorstep.
He was known locally as “Mustard”, because he was “keen as”; Henry became “Young Mustard”, and as a child could often be seen, smartly dressed and wearing a flat cap, trotting behind his father. He latched on to a Peterborough market dealer who went by the name “Lumpy Snow” and became known as the little lad who would always be prepared to help loading stock.
Under the guidance of Lumpy and Mustard, Henry developed the dealing bug at a young age, beginning with donkeys. He attended school, but left barely able to read or write. However he got all the way through to the finals of the All-england schoolboys’ boxing championships, losing by knock-out.
When Henry decided that he wanted to go hunting, his father told him that he would have to earn the money to buy himself a pony, which he did, but he could not afford a saddle and bridle as well, so went out for his first day’s hunting with the Fitzwilliam with a rope bridle and a saddle made out of an old sack. At the end of the day Sir Marcus Kimball, the master and huntsman at the time, took him back home and presented him with his first proper saddle and bridle.
Unfortunately Henry’s father assumed he had stolen them and gave him a good hiding. Henry would present many other young riders with their first saddles throughout his life.
After leaving school, a two-week stint as a carpenter’s apprentice ended when Henry jumped out of a window and ran off to Burleigh, where he got a
job in the stables and doing a bit for the Marquis of Exeter’s private pack.
There he got to know Reg Hobbs, secretary of Lord Exeter’s hunt, who had trained the American horse Battleship, the only horse ever to win the American and British Grand Nationals, and who imparted his love of racing to his young friend.
Hill’s career at Burleigh ended one morning when he punched a man who had pulled him out of bed by his feet when he overslept, and he was “demoted” to working in stables on the Fitzwilliam (Milton) estate.
He then got a job working with a gang of Irish navvies on a housing estate, and with the money he earned he set up in business in his own horse yard at Farcet, near Peterborough. There, in 1970, he married Christine and settled down to married life in a caravan which he had acquired in exchange for two cows.
Meanwhile, Hill developed his riding skills, winning the Foxhunters’ showjumping at Wembley on a chestnut horse called Tina and building a hunter trial course near his home. He continued to deal in cattle, horses and anything else on four legs, and he and his lorry became a familiar sight around Cambridgeshire. By 1973, now with a daughter in tow, the Hills graduated to a two-bedroom caravan with electricity and running water.
The death of a second daughter, aged one, in 1974, prompted a move, and two weeks before Christmas the Hills moved into a caravan, and later a house, in Great Gidding, where they started work on a derelict stable yard behind the Fox and Hounds pub. A son was born in 1976.
The young men and women who spent time at the yard over the years were well-rewarded for hard work. “You got to hunt, event, show jump – anything you wanted a go at, you could,” one recalled. Hill’s main passion was racing and everyone got the opportunity to ride in a point-topoint if they wanted to.
Hill trained winners of every main amateur race, except the Foxhunters’ at Aintree. Once, he bought a horse from a trainer which he found had been already entered in a race at Sandown, so, despite the fact that he had no permit, he declared it anyway. When his jockey, Henry Bellingham (now Conservative MP for North West Norfolk), pointed out that if they were caught, they would get into trouble, Hill told him: “Just don’t get it placed – and if you look like winning, unseat yourself.”
Unfortunately the horse was recognised in the paddock and Hill and Bellingham were both summoned by the Jockey Club for a reprimand.
Hill’s involvement with the CUDH began in 1974 when Major Warre, master of the Fitzwilliam at the time, asked him to come to the rescue of the drag hunt, which looked as if it was going to fold. Starting with Henry Bellingham in the mastership, Hill kept it going from then on, launching the hunting careers of many people who would go on to become masters and/or huntsmen of other packs.
Hill was deeply involved in Gidding village life, serving as chairman of the village hall committee, on the friends of the village school committee and on the parish council. He raised money for the doctor’s surgery, helped organise the local fete and ran fundraising auctions. Once, transporting a pig for a hog roast, he installed the butchered animal in the passenger seat of his white BMW and delivered it wearing a seat belt and a straw boater.
Hill eventually largely stopped hunting, but could not resist the opportunity to tease his friends one day when the Fitzwilliam were hunting from Gidding. He had in his stables a “horse of a lifetime” called Millie, which he mounted wearing a hat over his normal clothes and trotted down to where the field were lining up to jump the hunt jump. Pointing Millie at the hedge, he rode in and cleared it with style. “You all thought I’d lost it didn’t you?” he said.
Hill was a lifelong smoker, a 60-a-day man who always answered the telephone with a “Herrr-lo” followed by a pause while he took a couple of drags. He claimed, however, that his lungs were “clear as a bell” and that smoking had nothing to do with his final illness. He was buried with a packet and lighter in his top pocket. Some 500 people attended his funeral.
His wife and children survive him.
Henry Hill, born April 20 1942, died April 13 2019