Leader of the pack?
Hunting writers pointing the poisoned pens.
If I wrote about people out hunting as Surtees did, I wouldn’t last long in the job
One of the founders of The Field in 1853 was Robert Smith Surtees, the creator of John Jorrocks MFH, whose Victorian hunting exploits are hilariously similar to the modern-day sport. So we love Surtees. But we hate Surtees’ arch-rival, Nimrod. Writing as Nimrod, Charles James Apperley’s hunt reports for The Sporting Magazine had a huge following. They were to sports journalism what Hello! magazine is to current affairs reportage. Thanks to Surtees, however, he is best known neither as Nimrod nor Apperley but as Pomponius Ego, the pompous sporting writer who does a hunt report on a day with Jorrocks’s Handley Cross hounds.
The two chapters in Handley Cross that relate this incident sum up not only hunting’s past failings but also its problems today, 15 seasons after the passing of The Hunting Act. Apperley began writing hunt reports for The Sporting Magazine in about 1821, choosing the less than modest pen name of Nimrod, described in the Bible as a ‘mighty hunter’ – but perhaps he was entitled to, as the magazine’s circulation more than doubled in a few years. Rob Williams, chairman of the RS Surtees Society, points out: “Nimrod was stratospherically ahead of Surtees in popularity. Surtees ‘wrote to please himself’ as a landed gentleman. Apperley wasn’t in exactly the same position in society and it is said, perhaps unfairly, that he loved a Lord.”
So Nimrod never missed a chance to namecheck the celebrities he met out hunting, showing an understanding of the realities of journalism that is relevant today. The present hunting editor of Horse & Hound, Catherine Austen, sympathises: “Even though hunting reporting has changed enormously since the ban, you still want to write as well as you can to entertain the reader. Before the ban, that would be about venery; obviously post-ban that is not possible, so the challenge is to entertain and inform but in a different way. And, of course, on a bad day you want to say something positive – which may mean not writing much about the actual day… You put a lot of history of the hunt and how lovely the people are.
“We have to be quite puritan about the way trail-hunting is conducted, which is something they wouldn’t have recognised in Victorian times. And sometimes in Surtees’ day the reports bore no resemblance to what had actually happened. You also have to remember that what your friends find amusing in conversation is not necessarily so funny in print. Thinking of Surtees, if I wrote about people out hunting the way he did, I wouldn’t last long in the job.”
Surtees didn’t last long in the job. Following Nimrod at The Sporting Magazine, he soon left to set up The New Sporting Magazine, where the protection of writing fiction allowed him to tell it like it is in the series Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities. When I was an
MFH for a couple of seasons, I found myself going through the exact same tribulations as John Jorrocks, which made me love Surtees even more.
Unlike Nimrod’s hunting writing, Surtees puts Jorrocks through the mill of real hunting. His horses are dubious at best. They have their going days and their other days, on which Hercules and Multum-in-parvo will walk through a wall rather than jump over it – which suits Jorrocks as he is not much of a leaper.
Under these circumstances, actually hunting and writing about it at the same time is something to be avoided, but when she edited Horse & Hound in the days before the ban, Lucy Higginson bravely set forth for the Shires. She remembers: “I wasn’t hunting my own mare at the time so I was lent horses, but coming from Horse & Hound the
good thing was that people never gave you a duff hireling, so I had some pretty decent horses to hunt. Although I did have a bit of an experience with Gladiator, a horse I hired myself to hunt in Cheshire one Christmas. Gladiator went like smoke over hedges but if there was the slightest hint of a ditch he buried me, and the bugger got me off twice that day. Then the following season I went to do a report on the Bicester and to my horror the horse that turned up was Gladiator. But he was a reformed character who had done the Golden Button race and he went beautifully.
“People think, ‘Oh, Horse & Hound is coming out’, so they show you their best country, which can mean some stiff fences. For example, I know I’m not up for going over the best of the Blackmore & Sparkford Vale following behind Rupert Nuttall [Master from 1995-2016], so I did sometimes pick my days quite carefully. Michael Clayton [author and former editor of Horse & Hound] lent me his famous hunter, Monty, and I went out on a Tuesday with the Cottesmore, and Rosie Vestey was there, who is a friend of mine, and I thought, ‘Oh, I’d love to have a chat and a catch up’, but as soon as we ran she disappeared off into the distance and I couldn’t catch her. With regards to getting names, I would chat with people furiously whenever there was a check and then do a brain dump when I got off.”
These experiences are so much like the day Jorrocks gives Pomponious Ego that you wonder who Surtees was satirising the most. Knowing that Ego, or rather Hego, is coming, Jorrocks arranges for his huntsman, Pigg, to hunt a red herring and then releases a bag fox at the end to simulate a kill. The mounted field includes a lawyer, a plasterer, a farmer, a dandy, a vicar and a saddler – almost none of whom have paid up. Behind the scenes, everything goes wrong but despite having fallen off at the meet, Jorrocks is able to bring the field up along a lane in time to see Pigg celebrating the kill. When Pomponious Ego’s report eventually appears it begins: “All the world has heard of the renowned John Jorrocks – renowned as a citizen – renowned as a wit – and renowned as a sportsman.”
This ‘fictional’ episode is at the heart of the Surtees versus Nimrod debate. As Rob Williams points out: “Nimrod/apperley
was an exceptionally brave rider and lightning fast across even a stiff country, while Surtees was happy not to jump a stick all day if he could see hounds and get to the kill.”
CAUSE OF THE FEUD
At the time, Nimrod’s writing was much more successful than Surtees, whose Handley Cross was a failure on first publication in 1843. So these may be among the reasons for the feud but, in fact, Surtees satirises the riding skills of Jorrocks and Ego equally. Lord Charles Cecil, vice chairman of the RS Surtees Society, reminds: “Surtees did somewhat repent of his guying of Nimrod as Pomponious Ego and in his memoir of
Nimrod, describes him as ‘a zealous and consistent advocate of hunting, and his writings have tended much to the comfort and advantage of that noble animal the horse’.”
The emphatic difference between Surtees’ description of The Pomponius Ego Day and Ego’s pinpoints Surtees’ real problem with Nimrod. Surtees describes a true-to-life hunting field full of ordinary people, while Nimrod’s hunting was conducted by aristocrats and celebrities. This issue was revisited by the Countryside Alliance when attempting to defend foxhunting. The Alliance used a poster showing Sarah Bell wearing a red hunt coat alongside another picture in her nursing uniform, with the tag: ‘Now they hate her?/now they don’t?’. It was recognised that the inclusive world of Jorrocks’ hunting appeals much more to modern sensibilities than Nimrod’s toffs.
In the 19th century, the opposite was true. Writing in the preface to the RS Surtees Society’s replica edition of Handley Cross, the late Raymond Carr, keen hunting man and Oxford professor, explains: “Handley Cross sold badly because it embodies attitudes which did not chime with Victorian sensibilities. Everything that Jorrocks stood for as
a foxhunter ran against the mores and style of the mid-victorian respectable sporting world. Masters were supposed to be gentlemen. Jorrocks is a city grocer not above touting his tea to his field, just as Pigg, his huntsman, tries to sell insurance at meets; he is a Post Office Directory as opposed to a Peerage man. He detests lords and his appalling table manners make him unfit for their society.”
Surtees probably drew on his early life being bored to death working as an apprentice solicitor for some of Jorrocks’ City and suburban tendencies. Yet in many ways it was Apperley’s life that contained most Jorrocksian episodes. Apperley was permanently short of money and managed to get a very favourable expenses deal from his editor, John Pittman, over which they argued constantly, with Apperley writing to Pittman: “Had these difficulties been brought on me by extravagant living, or any other misconduct, I could not hold this language to you; but this has not been the case. I have barely allowed myself the necessaries of life, and have been guilty of no extravagance. My debts have been contracted by my connection with your work.”
Pittman’s executors disagreed and sued Apperley, who fled to Calais, from where he continued his writing – and Surtees has Pomponius Ego going back on the Calais packet after his day’s hunting. Apperley’s life was every bit as rackety as the wonderful Soapy Sponge in Surtees’s Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, and Rob Williams believes: “In a nutshell, I think Surtees was a little jealous of Nimrod’s effortless popularity, and Nimrod was a little jealous of Surtees’ straight-shooting courage.”
If we had met them in real life, out hunting perhaps, I think Apperley would probably have been much more fun. Though random bordering on flaky, his life was far more interesting than Surtees’. Both men were aware of class and status to an extent that would be called snobbish now. What Surtees hated was Apperley’s hypocrisy, and he was right. While Surtees depicted what he genuinely encountered in his sport, including all the grocers, farmers, nouveaux riche and ne’er-do-wells, in all their glorious humanity, Apperley chose to show only the cream of society at play. If Nimrod had written about hunting warts-and-all in the way that Surtees did, attitudes towards hunting and hunting folk might be very different today. At the time it was Nimrod who won, and as a result the public idea of hunting that has been handed down is riddled with Victorian views, leading the sport to be considered elitist, snobbish and archaic. If Surtees had been as popular at the beginning, maybe everybody would now know hunting for what it is: a comedy of errors in which the common man is at his best and worst.
If Nimrod had written about hunting in the way Surtees did, attitudes towards hunting might be very different today