Richard Sumner
Popular hard-riding joint master of the Heythrop hunt and judge and prize-winning breeder of hounds
RICHARD SUMNER, who has died aged 74, was a joint master of the Heythrop for 28 seasons and one of the hunt’s finest field masters of the past 50 years.
His ability to thrill – and terrify – the hard-riding Heythrop field was combined with a deep love of foxhounds and a passionate interest in their breeding. Often, great masters are horsemen or hound men; Sumner was both.
Richard Ward Sumner was born on July 27 1944 in the Heythrop country on the border of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. His father, Richard, was a fighter pilot who was killed towards the end of the Second World War, and he was brought up by his mother Viola (née Gregory) and his aunt Nancybelle.
Viola and Nancybelle farmed at Dunthrop, just outside Chipping Norton, and were formidable women. They were ambitious, enterprising farmers, and Nancybelle was often interviewed on farming programmes on the radio. They hunted with the Heythrop, and Richard and his sister Ann were given ponies to ride from a young age.
Soon they were competing at local shows, with Nancybelle driving the tractor that pulled the pony trailer. After one unsuccessful outing, Richard and his aunt returned to Dunthrop to find a single magpie fluttering about near the stables. Viewing this as a harbinger of bad luck, Nancybelle shot the magpie and Richard won his class the following day.
He began hunting with the Heythrop at the age of eight. The legendary foxhunter Captain Ronnie Wallace was master and huntsman, and the pack was in its golden era.
In an interview with Horse & Hound in 2012 to mark his retirement from the Heythrop mastership, Sumner recalled: “Captain Wallace took me under his wing. I’d go on and open gates for him from when I was about 13. He taught me everything without telling me and, as I got older, I could see what he meant by it all.”
Captain Wallace, although the sternest and most imposing of figures, could be very kind to young people, and it was he who bought and gave 16-year-old Richard his hunt buttons.
Schools, of which there were several, came and went without making much of an impression. Richard left at 16 to work at home on the farm, and showjumping began to come to the fore.
He won a lot on the county circuit with horses such as Goldbar, Amos, Kilcallow Prince, Tusker Rock and Temple Wren.
He retired from showjumping in about 1990, but in 1993 he rode the home-bred Cherry Bay in the Foxhunter and Grade C finals at the Horse of the Year Show and was placed in both. He married Patsy in 1972, and
their children, Gerald and Kerry, were brought up at Dunthrop surrounded by horses.
He hunted every day he could, and acted as amateur whipper-in for two decades before the call-up to field master came. It was Christmas Eve 1981, and Robert Cookson, then Saturday field master, was stuck in Ireland and could not get back for one of the most important meets of the season.
Stephen Lambert, then master and huntsman, asked Sumner to do it and, after some demurring, he agreed. Anyone who was fortunate enough to be hunting that day will never forget it; hounds flew, scoring a four-and-ahalf-mile point and killing their fox.
In 1984 he joined Stephen Lambert, Valerie Willes and Oliver Langdale in the Heythrop mastership, and from then on field-mastered four days a week for 20 years. When Lambert retired, Captain Wallace advised that Anthony Adams should be employed to hunt the hounds, and Adams and Sumner formed a working partnership that produced first-class sport.
Sumner had learnt from Captain Wallace that organisation was the key to excellent hunting, and he made the country – and kept it – as open and crossable as it could be with the help of the Heythrop’s fencing man, Joe Osman.
“He was a ‘no-frills’ master – straight down the line and respected for it,” said his son Gerald, now master and huntsman of the East Sussex and Romney Marsh hounds. “He was totally driven by the job being done right.”
When the farming partnership at Dunthrop was dissolved in 1990, the Sumners moved to Poplars Farm at Evenlode, where they developed a smart equestrian establishment that was later sold to the New Zealand eventer Mark (now Sir Mark) Todd.
Their horse-dealing business thrived, with all of Gloucestershire’s smart set buying their hunters from their stables. They stood the popular Irish Sport Horse stallion Ballyskip, whom Sumner hunted two days a week at Poplars, and bred and sold quality young horses.
During his long mastership, Sumner became a highly respected judge of and breeder of hounds. He greatly enjoyed the summer hound shows, and his car always returned home rattling with the silverware the Heythrop hounds had won. The highlights were seven championships at the Peterborough Royal Foxhound Show – the Olympics of hound showing – starting with Glazier 90 and concluding with Mellow 10.
Although the Heythrop are traditionally a Modern English pack, Sumner used an outcross to the Old English in Belvoir Poacher, whose daughter, Poplin, took the Peterborough championship in 2003. His draft hounds were eagerly sought after, and bitches from far and wide were sent to the Heythrop stallion hounds.
After he and Patsy divorced in 1997, Sumner moved to Penhill in Salperton with Libby Cooke, and then to Cowleaze in Little Compton. In 2012 he retired from the mastership.
There was much sympathy for Sumner at the end of the year when he and the Heythrop’s former huntsman, Julian Barnfield, pleaded guilty to finding and killing a fox with hounds in contravention of the Hunting Act 2004 in a case brought by the RSPCA. The charges were the result of animal rights activists following the Heythrop for months on end and the two men accepted that on four occasions they had allowed hounds to chase foxes that had jumped up while they were hunting artificial trails, as the law allows.
The district judge in the case noted that in 500 hours’ hunting in the previous season, the allegations concerned a mere 15 minutes. He fined the hunt just £4,000, Barnfield £1,000 and Sumner £1,800, and ordered them pay a mere £19,500 in total towards the £326,980 the RSPCA had spent bringing the case to court.
Sumner’s gruffness concealed shyness and a kind heart. A word or two of praise from him meant so much more because they were not liberally dispensed. His hawk-like profile was a fixture in the front row at all the major hound shows and many puppy shows. He was hunting last season until the sudden diagnosis of the brain tumour that was to end his life a few months later.
Around 1,000 people attended his funeral in Heythrop church. Hounds and horses were present, and liveried hunt staff carried his coffin over the wall into the churchyard – not through the gate; Sumner would never have stopped to open a gate when hounds were running.
Richard married his partner, Liz, shortly before his death. She survives him with his two children.
Richard Sumner, born July 27 1944, died April 10 2019