Remembrance

Edward S. “Ned” Bonnie, ex-MFH of the Long Run Hounds (KY), died on Saturday, March 17, 2018, in Louisville, at age eighty-eight.

He was a Master at Long Run from 1988 to 2014 and served terms as a director of the Masters of Foxhounds Association. He was a complete horseman, conservationist, and a leading equine lawyer for top Thoroughbred breeding farms in Kentucky.

Noel Mullins photoThe passing of Michael Higgens earlier this year is a huge loss to the hunting world. He was truly gifted in every aspect of our great sport—exceptional huntsman, horseman, hound breeder, judge, raconteur. He found his true life’s vocation in foxhunting, and he found his true soul-mate in Yvonne McClintock, a partnership that stood the test of time.

Only last November, the Tipperary Foxhounds made a presentation to Michael, their former Master and huntsman, on his fiftieth season hunting with the Tipps. I interviewed Michael on a number of occasions, and he kindly penned the foreword for a book I wrote some years ago on biographies of thirty-one equestrian personalities, some living, and others that had passed on. He described my book as featuring “The departed, those about to depart, and those with no intention of departing”! I don’t think Shakespeare could have matched that for word-craft. Michael could always effortlessly find the most fitting expressions for every occasion.

Willie Gleeson was Helen's first and only boyfriend.

Willie Gleeson, from Knocklong, County Limerick, Ireland, died on November 5, 2017. He was ninety-two.

Willie was known to just about every foxhunting visitor worldwide who ever hunted with the world-famous Scarteen Black and Tans. He hired out well-schooled, athletic field hunters that carried visitors safely over the imposing and sometimes treacherous banks and ditches of the Scarteen hunting country. Many of those visitors had never before faced such obstacles, but Willie's horses knew what to do!

Benjamin H. Hardaway, III, MFH died peacefully at his home on Thursday, October 19, 2017 at the age of ninety-eight. Funeral services were held Tuesday, October 24th. Interment at Linwood Cemetery was private. A memorial service was held at 2:00 pm, followed by a reception at Hardaway Hall in Midland, Georgia.

Ben was arguably the most widely-known American foxhunter throughout the foxhunting world and the most influential American breeder of foxhounds of the twentieth century. He had a passion for hunting all manner of wild game from his childhood days until his last. He hunted small game and birds with a gun, rabbits and coon with hounds, foxes with foxhounds and deer with lurchers.

He established the Midland Fox Hounds (GA) in 1950 and served as Master for sixty-seven years and huntsman for much of that period. He adored the July foxhound for its activity and aggressive hunting style, traits to which he could well relate. Ben’s favorite description of a successful foxhunt was “short, sharp, and decisive.”

Author/historian Ron Black, a fourth-generation foot hunter who strove to preserve the foxhunting history of his beloved Cumbria.I never met Ron Black in person, but I knew him so well. We’d been carrying on an email friendship for years. Ron died of cancer on September 5, 2017.

Over the years our correspondence covered all sorts of subjects—foxhunting, politics, world affairs. (He was for Hillary, all the way.) He scoffed at us mounted foxhunters for our preoccupation with horses and fancy clothing, and he would start most notes with, “How are things in the Colonies?” His sense of history was a huge part of who he was. And it was to preserve the history of foxhunting in his beloved Cumbria, after the despised Hunting Act became law, that possessed him to start a website and begin collecting that history.

That’s how John Harrison became friends with Ron Black. Harrison is currently hunting the Deep Run Hunt (VA) foxhounds, but twenty years ago Harrison was huntsman for one of the storied foot packs in the Lake District, the Ullswater Foxhounds. Ron was writing a book about the Ullswater. It was the hunt of Harrison’s boyhood, and he had returned to England from Toronto and North York (ON) to take up the horn there. It is a hard and dangerous place: climbing borrans (stone piles), crags (cliffs), and crossing the scree beds (fallen stone from the crags). It’s country that would ruin a horse the first time out. Harrison hunted the Ullswater hounds on foot there for eighteen seasons before returning to North America three years ago.

(Front) "Bucky" Reynolds and Kimbrough Nash, MFH, out with the Warrenton foxhounds / Douglas Lees photo

Famed horseman J. Arthur “Bucky” Reynolds died Monday, July 24, 2017, after a long illness. He was seventy-eight.

Bucky grew up in Tryon, North Carolina. His father J. Arthur Reynolds, Sr., a native of Orange, Virginia, was huntsman of the Tryon Hounds at the time. Both Bucky and his sister Betty Reynolds Oare grew up foxhunting and showing. Reynolds, Sr., a professional horseman, ran his own boarding and training facility. Bucky and his sister learned to ride under their father’s instruction, and both siblings helped break and train the sale horses as children. Each of the three—father, son, and daughter—have been inducted into the National Show Hunter Hall of Fame.

Rhoda Hopkins, one of the first female professional huntsmen* in North America, died peacefully on June 18, 2017. She was eighty-eight.

Rhoda hunted the Fairfield County Hounds (CT) for fifteen years, from 1979 to 1994. Her pack of Penn-Marydel foxhounds provided excellent sport in the field, and excelled at the hound shows, winning the Pack Class at Bryn Mawr for seven consecutive seasons. Hers were the first Penn-Marydels I ever hunted behind, and I remember galloping as fast to keep up as I have behind any other pack of foxhounds since.

For all his important accomplishments, Henry Hooker could just crack you up with a story.

Henry Hooker, MFH since 1963 of the Hillsboro Hounds in Nashville, Tennessee, passed away at home on April 24, 2017, following a long illness. He was eighty-four.

Sadly, the world of field sport has lost a genial, enthusiastic, humorous, and visionary citizen. With his deliberate and clear Tennessee-inflected drawl, dry wit, and a sparkle in his eye, he was one of the most amusing raconteur’s ever to unfold a story. From the field or the podium—he was a highly-sought speaker—he could just crack you up.

In his memoir, Fox, Fin, and Feather: Tales from the Field (The Derrydale Press, 2002), he took his readers, on a raucous jaunt—foxhunting, fishing, and shooting—from the dark hills and hollows of the Tennessee night hunters to the exclusive quail-shooting plantations of South Georgia. He connected the “Brahmins of the chase” (English-inspired mounted foxhunters) to their American roots (southern night hunters and field trialers). The characters he ran across in the course of his sporting adventures furnished all the material he ever needed for his hilarious and touching anecdotes. For example...

Randy Rouse on his steeplechase champion Cinzano. The pair went to the starting line 11 times, and won every race. / Douglas Lees photo

Randolph D. “Randy” Rouse—Master of Foxhounds, retired champion race rider, Thoroughbred trainer, musician, and national steeplechase icon, died early Friday, April 7, 2017 at age one-hundred.

He was the oldest trainer in North American Thoroughbred history to saddle a winner, ever. He was ninety-nine last April when his Hishi Soar won the Daniel Van Clief Memorial at Foxfield Spring Races. This season, at age one hundred, just one week before his death, he sent Hishi Soar to the starting line again and won the Open Hurdle Race at the Orange County Point-to-Point in Virginia.

Marion Lee Crosson Scullin with one of her many favorite hounds, Howard County-Iron Bridge Opal.Marion Lee Crosson Scullin passed away peacefully at her Damascus, Maryland home after a brief struggle with brain cancer on March 5, 2017.

Born March 3, 1943 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, to a family of huntsmen (father, grandfather, uncles, and cousins), Marion’s future could be said to have been predetermined. At the time she was born, Marion’s father, Albert “Pud” Crosson, was the huntsman for Rose Tree Foxhunting Club, moving to Huntingdon Valley Hounds, then Whitelands Hunt, and concluding his career with Pickering Hunt where, in 1976, he “died in the hunting field of a heart attack after his hounds completed a splendid run, marking their fox to ground.” Inducted into the Huntsman’s Room of the Museum of Hounds and Hunting, Marion’s father was known for breeding a hard-running pack of deep-throated Penn-Marydels.