The Last English Poachers

by Bob

  Speaking of the Codringtons, I remember ferreting in Old Sodbury, which is near their land, with my two sons, Brian and Robert. Robert used to come out with us sometimes when he was younger, but now he likes to do things nice and legal like – he ain’t what you might call a true poacher, like me and Brian. He also works now, at a regular job, so he don’t do it full time, like us. He conforms to society more than us but that don’t make him no less in my eyes. He’s a strong man and he stays close to his family and never complains about anything we does and he don’t compromise with the shysters and shadowmen.

  Anyway, we’re on a bank overlooking a church, with a bridle path at the bottom. We’re after live rabbits to use for droppers and we’ll sell ’em to people who wants to do a bit of drop-coursing for £5 apiece. We has eleven in hessian sacks when a couple of saddle-bumpers come along on hunting horses – a man and a woman. He shouts at us with a plummy accent.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Ferreting.’

  ‘Ferreting?’

  He says that like he don’t know what it means.

  ‘Aye! Can you be quiet!’

  ‘I’m going to ride round my land and, when I come back, you’d better be gone.’

  ‘Do whatever you want.’

  We carry on and take no notice of the ponce. They ride round again and we can see a police car coming along the road, down near the church. Then another police car pulls up, then another, and another, and another, and another. Six police cars altogether park in a line down on the road, with the saddle-bumpers pointing up the bank towards us. I’m thinking we better do something here, so I let the rabbits go and we get the ferrets back out of the burrow and gather up the nets and sacks. The coppers climb up to the top of the bank and one of them speaks to me.

  ‘We’ve had reports of someone ferreting.’

  The rabbits is gone, so there ain’t no evidence there, but we still has a couple of ferrets in a sack and the nets. More coppers come up, and one of them’s a big mouthy clobhead – a bully, the type that would punch you in the bollocks in a police cell when he’s backed up by his mates. He snarls at us.

  ‘What you lot doing?’

  ‘Piss off!’

  Brian snarls back at him, then runs off with the ferrets and the nets. One of the coppers tries to stop him, but Robert puts his foot out and trips the twerp and he goes rolling down the bank.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’

  Now there’s no evidence at all. But a police van’s turned up, with a dog and handlers. The big copper grins all over his horrible chops.

  ‘This is a bad dog. He’ll catch that bastard and chew him up.’

  I just grin back at him.

  ‘Bet you a fiver he don’t.’

  Brian has a good head start and he runs and runs, with the dog and handlers after him – through a wood and across a main road and into a field with a load of sheep and cattle, in and out of ’em to lose the scent, and down into the valley. He runs for about five miles without stopping, carrying nets and sacks and ferrets.

  Meanwhile, back at the bank, all the evidence is gone and some of the coppers is having a chummy chat with me and Robert. The local police know us well and one of them asks if he can come round and see our dogs, because we has about thirty of them at this time. ’Course, he’s only pretending to be interested and all friendly, like, and he really wants to nose around and see what he can report to his sergeant.

  ‘As long as you ain’t in uniform.’

  The dog couldn’t catch Brian and the handlers brought it back and they let me and Robert go home. Brian always carried change for a phone box, in case he got come upon and chased for miles. So he went into the first public box he came to and called me and told me where he was. I went over and picked him and the ferrets up. We’d lost the rabbits, but we’d won the bet.

  The mouthy copper never did pay me the fiver.

  Bob with ‘Wickwar Sharky’, who won the Quainton Plate in 1985-6 season, Oxfordshire Coursing Club

  8

  Bob – Hare Coursing

  Coursing a dog after a hare or a rabbit is a sport that’s been around for hundreds of years in the countryside. Let me explain. There’s spot coursing, which is a dog after a rabbit for a kill. Like, if I’m out poaching across the fields with my dog, I might not get a run all day. So, to keep the greyhound interested, I do a bit of spot coursing, especially around Christmas time when people would have a holiday and some time on their hands. That meant catching maybe forty or fifty rabbits with ferrets and keeping ’em alive. Then I’d go to a nice big field with my dogs and maybe a group of others would come with me. I’d drop a rabbit out of a sack on a spot and give it about fifty yards start before letting one of the dogs after it. The rabbit’s out of its familiar runs and don’t know where to go, so it’s at a disadvantage and gets caught nearly every time.

  This gives the dogs a kill and bloods ’em and they stays interested when I’m out hunting with ’em. It may sound cruel to them who knows no better – and I’ve seen some cruel bastards who’d burn a rabbit’s eye out with a cigarette, or tie their back legs up to give their shit dogs a better chance – but I never engaged in cruelty of any kind and I has no truck with them who does. The rabbit’s killed quickly, much quicker than it would be by that evil disease myxomatosis, introduced to cull the coneys by so-called ‘humane’ people.

  But the rabbits are just a warm-up for the real thing: hare coursing. Hare coursing’s banned now, of course, but there was a time when it was widespread. There was two kinds: being just out for a run and a bit of sport across the fields, and competition coursing, for trophies and prize money. Competition coursing started off as park coursing, which got banned eighty-odd years ago. A park course was held in a special field where hares was caught and kept in an enclosure. They were trained to run down the field to an escape at the other end. Two greyhounds would be slipped after each hare and the one that scored the most points before the hare escaped or got caught was the winner of the course. A lot of horse racing tracks started off as coursing parks for greyhounds – Haydock Park and Kempton Park and Sandown Park and others too, and you can still see where the dog courses was run in them places, if you looks closely enough.

  Lord Lonsdale, who donated the original boxing belts and who was also known as The Yellow Earl, because he liked to wear that colour, had his own park course at Barleythorpe Hall in the East Midlands. They had an enclosure with a five-foot wall round it where the hares would be kept after being netted. They’d be local hares and put into the enclosure a couple of days before the course, which would be held on a nice long flat field. There was a chute in the wall that would be lifted and a hare driven out and they had their course – all nice and easy. The earl had first-class railway carriages to keep his dogs in and he was a man who had enormous wealth from the exploitation of the Cumberland coalminers and he devoted hisself to the outdoor life. But the likes of poachers never would have got a look in at something like that back then. We was classed as low-life, scurrilous characters – and you’ve seen how poachers is depicted in books and stories down through the years: sly scoundrels, slipping darkly along the lanes and in and out of crouched corners – evil outlaws, not to be trusted, who would skin a man as quick as an animal. Even though, in reality, we was nothing of the kind.

  In any case, park coursing wasn’t a proper countryside pastime like open coursing, which replaced it when it got banned. Open coursing didn’t have penned hares and the animals had to be driven in onto the course. It needed a lot of ordinary people: beaters, flankers, slippers, judges, spectators and dog-owners. Beaters would take their flasks and their sandwiches and you were out in the clean air with the fields under your feet. Open coursing wasn’t as exclusive as park coursing neither, even though the dogs that got run always belonged to the toffs, but it was a day out for everyone. Except for the hares, some people might say, but most of the hares escaped and many more died of disease caused by intensive farming methods and by shooting
than was ever killed by coursing dogs. You might get as few as two hundred hares killed in a whole year’s coursing – you’ll get that many killed on the roads in a month. There was no cruelty involved, despite what people who never knew nothing about the sport might say.

  Gradually all British coursing became open meetings, where hares native to the ground and knew where they were going were driven onto the course. The course was always in the shape of a horseshoe and beaters would drive the hares forward and flankers would keep ’em in. A slipper would have a brace of dogs on a double slip-lead behind a shy and, when a hare went by close to it, he’d give it a 150-yard lead, then slip the dogs. The dogs had to be clearly sighted on one hare or the slipper wouldn’t let ’em go. Or if too much mud was accumulating on the hares’ feet, so they couldn’t run properly, the course was stopped. A judge on a horse would keep up with the course and award points to a dog every time he turned the hare – either white collar or red collar, to tell them apart. Four points was awarded for the first turn – one for the turn and three for speed, then one point for each turn after that and one point for a kill. The course would continue until the hare was either caught and killed by the dogs or it escaped. The dog with the most points at that stage won the course and went on to the next round.

  But the sport was never about catching or killing the hare; it was about the working ability of the dogs. Some greyhounds would run clever to try to catch the hare, one in front to turn it back to the dog behind. But the hare’s even cannier and could usually avoid these tricks and outsmart the dogs. A good strong hare could outrun two greyhounds any day and the ones who got killed were usually sick or old and would’ve died soon anyway – and much more slowly. Like I said, it was a great day out and attracted all sorts.

  I even remember one time having my fortune told at a hare course by an old duckerer, as the Gypsies calls their crystal-gazers. He told me to sit while he looked at the palms of my hands. I tells him I don’t believe in this stuff and he laughs at me.

  ‘We all wants to believe, mister, even if we say we don’t. We wants to see what’s in the stars.’

  I know Gypsies is superstitious, with their four-leaf clovers and rabbits’ feet and horseshoes and their old sayings – like never argue in the morning and the hawthorn blow’s for bad luck and better never to have been born, than cut your hair on a Sunday morn.

  He asks for all the details about when and where I was born and he says them newspapers is all liars, they gives everyone born under a star sign the same horoscope. But Gypsy horoscopes needs dates and times and even places of birth. He says newspapers know nothing about astrology.

  ‘Astrology, mister, was invented by three wise men, two shepherds and a Gypsy chal.’

  And he knows things about my father being a butcher and my mother dying young and me being an only child and he says I’ll live to be seventy-seven and never be filthy rich, but will sometimes be happy and frequently content. Which is all a man can reasonably ask for, ain’t it? He tells me everyone has a good spirit and a bad spirit and life’s only a dream and it really begins when you die – when your spirit leaves your body. And some people, like me, dreams in black and white and others in colour, and it’s them who dreams in colour that’s the prophets and the peacemakers. We talk afterwards and the old fortune-teller says he don’t know his exact age, but it’s in the region of ninety-nine, and his birth certificate’s on a tree, somewhere in Spain. His words drift back to the old days, when he’d be away on the tramp as soon as the blossom came and the thrush began to sing. And how he buried his grandmother outside Budapest with her pipe and an ounce of baccy to see her on her way – and how, when she was young, the yawn of her voice in song had a culture all its own.

  ‘I thinks about it, mister . . . at fresh of the morning and at balance of the day, I thinks about it.’

  That was twenty-five years ago, when I was Brian’s age now – and I’m still alive. I wonder if the old duckerer is. Anyways, before hare coursing got banned, people used to say to me, ‘Why don’t you muzzle the dogs and that would make hare coursing more humane.’ In the first place, like I said, not many hares was caught by the dogs and them that were got killed quickly. If the dogs was wearing muzzles, they couldn’t get a bite on the hare to kill it quickly, but the muzzle would crush it in their attempts to do so – the hare would be lying there with a broken back and its guts coming out of its earholes, and it would still be alive – is that more humane? It’s just one example of people talking through their arses about something they knows nothing about. But, even with the open coursing, it was really a sport of the well-to-do, just like fox-hunting. Coursing clubs would turn down ordinary men who tried to join, calling them low-class or poachers or thieves or suchlike. When I first started going to hare coursing meetings under National Coursing Club rules, people wouldn’t talk to me or my sons, even though we was long-netting for them. They tolerated us because we could get them the hares they wanted, but they wouldn’t let us join their ‘we’re-better-than-you’ clubs.

  The Waterloo Cup was held at Great Altcar, near Liverpool, and this was the blue riband event in the coursing calendar. A three-day meeting with a sixty-four-dog stake and a purse runoff for first-round losers and a plate run-off for second-round losers. Over a hundred courses altogether. You needed a lot of hares for that because it’s not just one hare for one course; you has to take into consideration the ones that gets out the flanks and doubles back and don’t go through the course, and the ones the slipper thinks ain’t right, and so on. For every hare that’s actually coursed, there might be ten or twenty that gets driven, but not coursed. With television cameras there and sports writers and all sorts of gentry, it would have been an embarrassment if they ran out of hares halfway through – they’d look like right mugs altogether. Now, the Waterloo Cup wasn’t supposed to use netted hares, unless they was local or had been relocated the season before – that’s because newly relocated hares wouldn’t have had time to settle into their new surrounding and would run all over the place and knacker the dogs that was unlucky enough to course one of ’em. But that’s not the way it worked.

  They couldn’t keep a population of hares the size they wanted and they needed a couple of thousand hares to be put down every year beforehand, so they’d be sure to have enough for the whole competition. We netted hares at Newmarket for the meeting and them hares were taken to Great Altcar and we’d feed ’em on crushed oats and carrots and let ’em out as near as two nights before the Waterloo Cup was run. Sometimes we’d even go up there in Transit vans the night before, when there was nobody about, to avoid saboteurs who’d try to disrupt the event and because coursing laws stated that netted hares had to be released into the area six months before. Like I said, hares that weren’t native didn’t know where to go – if a dog got a big strong one, it’d go round and round and try to get back through the beaters and it’d take the dogs with it, so your chance of getting through to the next round was gone because your dog would be proper fagged out, if you see what I mean. Unlike a greyhound that got on a native hare and had a quick run, up the field and a few turns and out, like on a park course. It was a matter of luck if you got a good local hare that would give your dog a short chase or if you got a hare that was brought in from somewhere else.

  Understand?

  You also needed to be nominated to run a dog in the Waterloo Cup by one of the sixty-four nominators, who were all bloody freemasons and the like. We got a dog called ‘Solo Concorde’ in once because we netted the hares for them, but it had to go in under someone else’s name, someone who was associated with the club, because they didn’t want it known that the likes of us was allowed to run a dog in such an elite competition as the Waterloo Cup. And, even after getting the dog in, we wasn’t treated fairly. You see, the slipper can favour one dog over the other – if he’s got lord so-and-so’s dog up agin’ mine, he can twist my dog round so the lord’s can get an advantage and be first to turn the hare and get four points.
Or a short slip will favour a dog with early pace and a long slip will favour a bigger dog that takes a while to get into its stride.

  Our dog was up agin’ an Irish bitch in the first course and she was the third favourite to win the competition. But the course was flagged ‘undecided’ because the judge deemed that the Irish dog was unsighted and didn’t see the hare. It was a Newmarket hare that ran and ran and ran for a mile and a half, back through the beaters, and our dog’s tongue was round his bollocks and Brian had to get him out of a ditch. The Irish bitch was buggered too, but the masons was probably glad about that, her being third favourite for the cup, and they wouldn’t want her winning any more than our dog. Being undecided, the course had to be re-run, and our dog won it the second time out. But he was knackered, and in the next course – agin’ a dog that’d had one twenty-second run after a local hare and was fresh – he had no chance and was out! There was all sorts of dirty tricks to lessen an ordinary man’s chances of winning anything – that’s if he could get his dog in in the first place.

  In the end I got fed up with the discrimination so I organised my own course – the Yeovil and Sherborne Coursing Club. I was secretary and Brian was a steward. We’d get permission from landowners to hold a meet on suitable ground and the course would be inspected to make sure it was safe and that the hares would get fair play. There’s a lot of work involved in open coursing; you got to get the beats and the right conditions for slipping and keep dogs from fighting; it takes a long time. It’s an all-day sport. The meet would start at about 9:00 a.m. and the first brace of dogs would be in the slips by 9:30 a.m. I released a lot of hares where we’d be coursing the following season, giving them time to settle into their new surroundings, so there was always plenty for the meets and they was easy to run out. We usually held eight-dog stakes, with four pairs of greyhounds. The winner of the first pair met the winner of the second pair in the semi-final and the two winners of those met in the final. That meant a dog had three runs in the day. Pickers-up would go out onto the field to retrieve the dogs after a course and, if the hare was caught, it was their duty to make sure the animal was dead.