Belle Meade Master Charlie Lewis Steps Down after 21 Years
Charlie Lewis whipped-in at Belle Meade for fifty years. / Bella Vita Photogaphie
Charlie Lewis announced his retirement as Master at the Annual Meeting of the Belle Meade Hunt (GA) after twenty-one years of service. Charlie has whipped-in to Belle Meade huntsmen for fifty years―to Master and huntsman Epp Wilson and before that to Epp’s late father, James, the hunt’s founder, Master, and first huntsman.
Over the years, Charlie has mentored several Belle Meade youngsters in the art of whipping-in, crossing the country, and growing into responsible adults. He served on the Belle Meade Hunt Committee as well.
“Charlie has been the go-to guy for fifty years,” said Epp Wilson. “He will tackle any problem for the Hunt. Whatever the problem or challenge, anyone in the Hunt could go to him and get wise counsel and advice. From landowner challenges, to friction between certain members, to building new hunt barns after fires.
Robert A. Kinsley, MFH
Douglas Lees photoRobert Allen Kinsley, MFH of the Elkridge-Harford Hunt (MD), passed away peacefully at his Pennsylvania home on Wednesday morning, June 10, 2020. He was surrounded by his wife Anne (Whalen) Kinsley and his family.
Bob loved his time in the hunting field and on the wooded trails of his farms—riding, fishing, and hunting. He will be remembered for his unfailing love for animals. He created an amazingly successful business, was a hunting member of the Elkridge-Harford Hunt for thirty years, served as Joint-Master for sixteen years, and he ran steeplechase horses.
A Hound Show for All, Covid Notwithstanding
Here’s a first in the centuries-old history of hound shows—an International Virtual Hound Show!
Hound associations around the world have signed on so their member hunts may enter hounds in classes for staghounds, foxhounds, deer hounds, beagles, basset hounds, and mink hounds, and let the champions be crowned. Fourteen hunting associations are supporting the event, including the Masters associations in North America, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and France. Entry Forms are ready upon which to record entries in thirty-six divisions in nine separate catalogs.
A Fabled American Foxhound and His Legacy
Potomac Jefferson 2005, the toast of North American Foxhounds, winning the Grand Championship at the 2007 Bryn Mawr Hound Show one week after capturing the same honor at Virginia. (L-R): George Hundt; Vicki Crawford, MFH, Potomac Hunt; Larry Pitts, huntsman, Potomac; Lance Taylor; Jake Carle, ex-MFH, Keswick, judge. / Karen Kandra Wenzel photo
At breakfast this Thursday morning, Joan reminded me that Memorial Day was just a few days away. Boy, it sure didn’t feel like it.
Normally, we’d have been recently back from our hunt’s kennels having watched the practice hound show, afterwards assessing our hounds’ prospects for ribbons and trophies at the Virginia Foxhound Show. Which should have been on the calendar for this weekend. We would have been looking forward to seeing old hunting friends from across North America, and I would have been assuring Joan that I had remembered to send in our reservations for the reception at the Museum of Hounds and Hunting and the dinner under the tent at Morven Park (whether I had, in fact, remembered or not). In short, I would have been looking forward to an important and unique weekend of camaraderie and foxhound study.
A Best Buy for Ladies of Discernment
Ladies, if you’ve been at a loss as to where to find a silk hunting veil for your side saddle habit, Foxhunting Life has solved your problem with the help of Daphne Wood, MFH, Live Oak Hounds (FL), who has sent us this image with her highest recommendation for fit, wear, and quality. And such […]
Looking For Something to Read?
Now? This instant? Free of charge and legal? Something by a world-class author?
Edith Somerville, MFH, West Carbery Foxhounds riding Tarbrush. She was the first female MFH in Ireland, an author and artist as well, and, with her cousin Violet Martin, wrote some of the most hilarious and literate books on Irish foxhunting ever published. / Wikimedia Commons photo
Something perhaps by Somerville and Ross, G.J. Whyte Melville, and other brilliant writers of foxhunting stories as well as classic works of English literature. Many are in the public domain and may be downloaded and freely reproduced.
In 1971, Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, conceived the most wonderful notion. He had access to a computer that was part of the government sponsored research network that ultimately became the Internet. He set himself a goal to make the ten thousand most consulted books available to the public digitally by the end of the twentieth century. He plucked a copy of the Declaration of Independence from his backpack, and it became the first Project Gutenburg e-text. Hart named the project after the German printer Johannes Gutenburg, who revolutionized the printing press.
Today, there are about forty thousand texts in the Gutenburg collection. For most works you have the option to download the full text as an epub to be read online (even with images); you can download Kindle files with or without images; or simply download plain text.
MFHA Cancels Spring Events
MFHA President Tony Leahy has prudently announced the cancellation of several popular spring events due to the world-wide Covid-19 pandemic.
Canceled are the Virginia Foxhound Show; the National Horn Blowing Championships; the Ian Milne Huntsman’s Award presentation; the Professional Development Program graduation ceremony for the class of 2019/2020; and the ceremony for those huntsmen selected to be inducted into the Huntsmen’s Room at the Museum of Hounds and Hunting this year—all previously scheduled over the Memorial Day weekend.
Racing Time: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Liberation
Book Review by Steven D. Price
Racing Time: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Liberation, Patrick Smithwick, Dementi Milestone Publishing, Manakin-Sabot, VA, 2019, cloth, illustrations by Sam Robinson, 481 pagesIn 2006 Patrick Smithwick published Racing My Father, a memoir of his legendary steeplechaser forebear, A.P. “Paddy” Smithwick. Six years later came Flying Change, the account of the author’s youth as a race rider under his father’s tutelage before leaving the track for a writing and teaching career until the sport’s siren song drew him back.
Now comes Racing Time. Subtitled A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Liberation, it is at once a celebration of the author’s appreciation of family and friends, both human and equine, and an elegiac recollection of three men with whom Smithwick’s life was as closely entwined as the braids on a hunting whip lash: the late former-jockeys-turned trainers Tom Voss and Dickie Small (names familiar to all race enthusiasts) and groom Speedy Kiniel.
Dartmoor and Doyle
Janet Ladner photo
Photographer Janet Ladner was out following the Mid-Devon Foxhounds when she came across these wild ponies taking shelter from the snow. I have hunted on Dartmoor, in England’s West Country, and found it to be a fascinating landscape of bleakness and beauty, with visible reminders of cultures that serially take one back in time all the way to prehistory. While hunting, one comes across ditches left by tin mining activity that began in pre-Roman times and continued to the twentieth century, evidence of farm tillage going back to the Bronze age in the parallel rows running across the slopes, and standing stones erected in prehistoric times. During quiet moments when hounds check, one can allow the imagination to soar.
For me, Dartmoor also conjures memories of cold winter boyhood days at home, reading the spooky mystery, Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. It was the third of his Sherlock Holmes novels to be published, and this Dartmoor mystery filled my young head with delicious terror.
By coincidence, Janet Ladner’s photos of the ponies on Dartmoor arrived just as writer/editor Steve Price sent me this foxhunting poem, written by Arthur Conan Doyle. A confluence of Dartmoor and Doyle. Who knew he wrote such poetry?
Who Is This Horseman?
Horseman on a US Cavalry mount at Fort Riley, Kansas
The earliest time-stamped email from the reader who correctly identifies the horseman in the image will receive a year’s Combination Electronic/PDF Subscription free of charge. If the winner curently has an unexpired active subscription, the free year will be added to the end of the current term.
Update: we have a winner.