Captain Tom Morgan (seated) presents the Isaac Bell Perpetual Challenge Cup to South Tyrone Foxhounds Honorary Whipper-In Paul Kinane and huntsman Ryan Carvill for Beauty, winning un-entered female hound, at the National Irish Masters of Foxhounds Show. / Noel Mullins photo
The above photograph caught my eye because of the man in the wheelchair, Captain Tom Morgan. The photo is one of several sent by photo/journalist and author Noel Mullins, a regular contributor to Foxhunting Life, reporting on the National Irish Masters of Foxhound Show held on Sunday, July 6, 2014.
Captain Morgan, now in his mid-nineties, is one of the few people still alive who intimately knew and worked closely in his hound breeding program with the late Isaac “Ikey” Bell, father of the modern English foxhound. The only other living individual I know who knew and benefitted from his relationship with Ikey Bell is Ben Hardaway, also in his mid-nineties.
If it weren’t for Ikey Bell and Tom Morgan, Ben Hardaway would not have his Hardaway Crossbred as we know it today. And if it weren’t for Bell, we wouldn’t have the modern English foxhound as we know it today.
Isaac Bell
Ikey Bell was half-American. Born around 1880, he was at times during the first half of the twentieth century Master and huntsman of the South and West Wilts in England and the Kilkenny in Ireland.
Bell surely rates as one of the greatest foxhound breeders of all time not just because of his product—the forerunner of the modern English foxhound—but because he was forced to endure the censure of most of the leaders of the foxhunting establishment for his heresy. As Daphne Moore wrote in her excellent book, Foxhounds:
“At a period when, due to the fashion of the day, massive, heavily built, fleshy-footed and broad-chested hounds were being bred, and admired, in almost every kennel in [England], his was the voice crying out in the wilderness, ushering in a type diametrically opposed to the fashionably bred animal of the early 1900s….He was accused by his opponents of being a ‘menace to foxhounds,’ [and] he suffered censure, derision, even rank hostility. Nevertheless, he continued his policy of producing an altogether more active, lightly built foxhound which was the forerunner of the type with which we are all familiar today.”
Tom Morgan
In 1949 after Captain Tom Morgan retired from the Army, he and his late wife Elsie settled in the West Waterford foxhounds (IRE) country. They hunted with that pack, and in 1953, both Tom and Elsie became Masters. Elsie, a brilliant horsewoman and a natural with hounds, took over as huntsman.
Ikey Bell, as luck would have it, lived nearby at the time. He was no longer hunting, but when he saw Elsie’s gifted way with hounds, he determined to help her breed a pack worthy of her abilities.
Bell had been impressed with the Fell hounds that hunted on both sides of the English-Scottish border and was anxious for an opportunity to use them as an outcross, rather than the Welsh bloodlines that he had used to breed his own pack at the South and West Wilts. He procured some excellent hounds from the College Valley in Scotland which Elsie used in her breeding program to enormous success.
Ben Hardaway
Ben Hardaway was totally happy hunting his cherished July foxhounds—an American type directly descended from two Irish hounds, Mountain and Muse, brought to Maryland in 1812. The Julys had everything Hardaway wanted in a foxhound: cry, nose, activity, and fierce drive. Then the deer arrived in his Georgia hunting country, and, finding that the Julys could not be reliably deer-broke, he decided that he had to find a biddable outcross that would make his pack deer-proof.
Hardaway experimented widely with various outcrosses that would deer-proof his pack and still give him the thrill that he experienced hunting his Julys. In 1962 he made his first hunting visit to Ireland. He also wanted to see if he could find hounds of the original Mountain and Muse type, hoping they might be more biddable than his Julys.
Hunting with Evan Williams, Master and huntsman of the Tipperary, he learned that Ikey Bell, living in Dublin at the time, had helped Williams put his pack together. It’s well worthwhile reading the details in Hardaway’s memoir, Never Outfoxed, but after a couple of weeks of Hardaway’s questions, Williams announced they were all going to Dublin to have dinner with Ikey Bell, “who will talk hounds with you all night”!
That was the first step in what was to become the Hardaway Crossbred. Hardaway and Bell talked hounds all night; Bell took Hardaway to see Tom and Elsie Morgan, they had a day’s hunting, and Hardaway loved what he saw in the pack. Bell urged the Morgans to give Hardaway a good stallion hound, and it was the outcrosses from the West Waterford that put Hardaway on the road to a deer proof pack and today’s Hardaway Crossbred.
Amazing, the stories can be dredged up by a single photo!
Posted July 17, 2014