The Ride of My Life: Memoirs of a Sporting Editor by Michael Clayton, Merlin Unwin Books, $30Before his retirement, author Michael Clayton probably had the best job in the world—editor of Horse & Hound magazine in Great Britain. He led the magazine for more than two decades—from hunting’s heyday through the bad times, when laws were passed to prevent hounds from chasing a fox. Now Clayton has given fellow foxhunters a chance to share his adventures in his memoir, The Ride of My Life: Memoirs of a Sporting Editor. And we are lucky to get to go along for the ride.
Clayton writes that he once read that a happy adult is one who feels he made his childhood dreams come true. An only child, his youth was overshadowed by World War II, and he remembers nights dashing to the family air-raid shelter at the foot of the garden. “If this sounds grim,” he writes, “it was not. We were generally safer in Bournemouth than those living in London.…”
But horses beckoned. When he was seven, Clayton, an only child, announced that he wanted to learn to ride, and to his surprise, his parents agreed instead of saying wait until after the war. The Longham Riding Stables, a bit run-down and shabby, were just a thirty-minute bike ride from his home and were “my first gate-way to horsemanship and the hunting field.”
Bernard Brown, owner of the yard, did not give Clayton formal lessons—most of the Longham horses were leased out for hacks across the countryside—but instead sent the boy across the moors with a ride leader. Clayton, to his delight, learned to post the trot almost immediately. Brown, whose horses always received excellent care, was shrewd in matching novice riders with the appropriate mount. Soon, Clayton was mucking stalls and leading adult riders out for the opportunity to spend more time on horseback.
At age fourteen, he joined the Portman Pony Club, which gave him free access to the Portman Hunt under the direction of Lt. Col. Sir Peter Farquhar. Clayton understood nothing of the reputation and background of Farquhar, but he always remembered what the Master told him: “If you understand what the huntsman and the hounds are doing, you will learn to love hunting for a lifetime.”
Clayton’s first hunt was all it took to make a believer out of him. The proud owner of a saintly New Forest pony named Mac, he was in at the kill and properly blooded by Farquhar. “As I hacked Mac slowly home, I was in a reverie of bliss, recalling every foot of the way in the hunt, every check, every incident leading to the kill,” he writes. “Was this a barbaric, dreadful way of recruiting a child to a blood sport?”
Nah … he couldn’t get enough of it. Clayton went on to become a trainee reporter on small local papers, working his way up to a position on Fleet Street at age twenty-three as a reporter for the London Evening News. Along the way, he managed to ride and hunt whenever he could. He eventually spent a decade as a staff correspondent for the BBC, still finding the time to hunt when he wasn’t covering news in other parts of the world.
Then, in 1972, he was invited to lunch by Walter Case, the long-serving editor of Horse & Hound. Case was retiring, and the job of editor was Clayton’s if he wanted it. Saying yes instantly—“I gave the impression that I would have taken over that afternoon if necessary”—not only opened the door to a new career path for Clayton, but it made his childhood dreams come true.
Clayton went on to lead the magazine from a quaint time when a tea lady visited the editorial offices every afternoon into the computerized digital age. The index of Clayton’s memoir reads like a Who’s Who of foxhunting and English royalty. Over the years, he had the opportunity to hunt with more than two hundred packs, riding with everyone from Ronnie Wallace to Prince Charles to Ben Hardaway III.
In 1976, Clayton published his first book, A Hunting We Will Go. Many others have followed, including Endangered Species: Foxhunting – The History, The Passion and The Fight for Survival; The Glorious Chase: A Short History of Foxhunting and The Hunter: Horse, Cob and Pony.
As Horse & Hound editor, Clayton was on the front lines of the many issues facing foxhunting today, from loss of countryside to the U.K.’s ban on hunting. He gives a concise, factual history of how foxhunting lost what he calls “The Battle,” ruing that perhaps more could have been done. The one large protest by Countryside Alliance in 2004 wasn’t enough, he writes. There needed to be more sizable protests between the second reading of the bill and the final vote.
“Perhaps I was wrong in believing that the Hunting Act was not inevitable, but I still have grave doubts over the decision not to accept a Middle Way solution for hunting in 1998, and again in 2002, whereby the government offered Hunts a future under license run by an independent authority,” Clayton writes. “It would have been much better than the current situation under the Hunting Act.”
My takeaway from Clayton’s book? If hunting is to survive, teach children to ride and hunt and to value the countryside, he says. Teach them true horsemanship, through Pony Club or a caring, intelligent trainer so that they “respect their mounts as friends to be cherished, rather than exploited solely as a means to rosettes and glory.”
Clayton summed up his career in this sporting poem, “The Good Grey Mare,” by George Whyte-Melville, whose words gave Horse & Hound its name:
I have lived my life—and it is nearly done—
I have played the game all round;
But I freely admit that the best of my fun
I owe it to horse and hound.
Posted January 26, 2017