How the Experts Judge a Class of Foxhounds
Hillsboro Godfrey 2016 was last year’s Grand Champion at the Southern Hound Show, hosted by the Live Oak Hounds (FL) / Leslie Shepherd photo
With the foxhunting season closing, and a new season of hound and puppy shows approaching, I always determine to improve my eye for a hound by judging from ringside just for fun. I would encourage any foxhunter to try it. The exercise not only makes the day more interesting, but educational as well. Especially when you can collar a friendly judge after the class and ask him why he didn’t like the hound you adored, or why he picked a hound you thought was ordinary.
It can be intimidating when you watch a procession of foxhounds enter and leave the ring and wonder how in the world the judge can sort them all out. For example, how does he compare a hound he is looking at to one he saw ten minutes ago? I have asked, and it seems there are almost as many methods as there are judges.
Mo Baptiste and Fifty Grand Win Virginia 2017 Field Hunter Championship
Moe Baptiste and Fifty Grand representing the Piedmont Fox Hounds negotiate a seven-board coop during the individual test on their way to winning the Virginia Fied Hunter Championship. / Catherine Summers photo
Mo Baptiste’s handsome bay Thoroughbred, Fifty Grand, has played the role of bridesmaid for years. He was Reserve Champion to Virginia Field Hunter Champions in 2012 and again in 2015. This year he was, finally, the bride. And the Champion.
Reserve Champion honors go to Marilyn Ware, Deep Run Hunt. The annual Virginia Field Hunter Championship is noted for the quality of the competing horses. The Masters of every Virginia hunt receive an annual invitation to nominate up to two horse and rider combinations which have been hunting regularly with that hunt. Chosen by the Masters, twenty-one riders from eleven hunts competed. They were:
William Faulkner and the Farmington Hunt
(l-r) William Faulkner and Farmington huntsman Grover Vandevender share a flask. / George Barkley photo
William Faulkner, two-time National Book Award, Nobel Prize, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, came to Charlottesville, Virginia from Oxford, Mississippi in the last decade of his life. He arrived two years after his daughter Jill moved to Charlottesville with her husband Paul Summers, who graduated from law school at the University of Virginia and was working as city attorney. Soon, Faulkner, Jill, and Paul were hunting with the Farmington Hunt. Jill would become Master in 1968 and serve in that capacity for forty years.
Faulkner had a reputation among hunt members for being game and fearless to his fences, despite having taken up serious foxhunting only since his arrival. He’d ridden since childhood, foxhunted in Tennessee, and loved it. However, he experienced a couple of serious riding accidents, and died in 1962 at the age of sixty-four from complications arising from a fall.
Huntsmen On the Move: 2017
As we approach the 2017/2018 season, Foxhunting Life makes its annual report on the recent moves of eight huntsmen across the North American hunting countries.
Retiring huntsman Hugh Robards, wife and first whipper-in Julie, and the foxhounds of the Middleburg Hunt / Chris Cancelli photo
Round I:
Hugh Robards’ decision to hang up his hunting horn after fifty-five seasons in hunt service got Round One underway. Fully half of those seasons, and certainly the most visible, Robards spent in Ireland’s challenging ditch-and-bank country as huntsman for the County Limerick Foxhounds. There, he provided world-class sport for Master Lord Daresbury (whom he succeeded as huntsman), the hard riding members, and a constant stream of hunting visitors from around the globe.
For the last three seasons, Robards has carried the horn for the Middleburg Hunt (VA). As difficult as his personal retirement decision must have been, the Middleburg Masters and members paid Robards such a stirring tribute at their Hunt Ball that he had to have felt the sincere respect and affection in which he was held, notwithstanding his short tenure there. The members made certain that the ball revolved about him with mounted photographs of his career, the showing of a specially produced video, and speeches—sincere and well-earned, to recognize an illustrious career.
Why Worry’s Heythrop Rachel Is Grand Champion at Carolinas
Why Worry Hounds’ Heythrop Rachel 2011 is Grand Champion of the 2016 Carolinas Hound Show.
Why Worry’s Heythrop Rachel 2011 was judged Grand Champion at the fortieth annual Carolinas Hound Show held at the Springdale Racecourse in Camden, South Carolina on May 7, 2016. It’s one thing for a visiting MFH to pick up a nice draft to bring back to the home kennels; it’s another thing entirely to know what to do with it. Here’s where George and Jeannie Thomas, MFHs, Why Worry Hounds (SC), showed their breeding acumen.
While visiting friends in England and judging a puppy show at the Heythrop kennels, George mentioned that he needed a bi*ch* to introduce new bloodlines into his breeding program. We have just the hound for you, he was told. So he brought home a nicely-bred entered bi*ch, Heythrop Rachel 2011.
Hugh Motley, ex-MFH (1955–2016)
Hugh Motley, MFH with the Keswick foxhounds / Courtesy of the Motley Family
Hugh Douglas Camp Motley, ex-MFH of the Keswick Hunt (VA) and a highly-regarded horseman who started his own bloodstock agency and sold Thoroughbred horses at many of America’s premier racing sales, died in Wellington, Florida on January 9, 2016 of complications from pneumonia. He was sixty.
Hugh foxhunted all his life and served as Master of Foxhounds for the Keswick Hunt (VA) from 2000 to 2005. He also played polo for many years as a member of the Charlottesville Polo Club.
Jake Carle, longtime Master and huntsman at Keswick, remembers Hugh from the time he was hunting ponies. “He was game as hell,” Jake recalls. “He would go anywhere on his pony.”
“We bonded instantly because we both stuttered as kids, so I understood. Later, he whipped-in to me. When it was time to name a new Joint-Master, he was the only person I trusted to maintain the standards. And he did.
“He hired [huntsman] Tony Gammell, and they had a bond. He had the most wonderful sense of humor, and we all will miss him terribly. He’s one of only a few people I know who was liked by everyone who met him.
Junior Field Hunter Championships: More Than a Competition
Heather Feconda, Loudoun-Fairfax Hunt (VA), was Champion, 13 & Over, on Yogi. / Richard Clay photo
The Junior North American Field Hunter Championship competition that began modestly twelve years ago between a handful of geographically-close Virginia hunts continues to expand in scope. This year’s competition involved juniors from twenty-seven hunts located across six MFHA Districts.
The program is succeeding because it’s purpose rises above just competition. Founders Douglas Wise, MFH, Old Dominion Hounds and Iona Pillion from the Blue Ridge Hunt had a larger dream: bring children to new hunting countries and open their eyes to the fact that these playgrounds don’t just happen to be there for them by chance, but have been nurtured and conserved for the perpetuation of wildlife, open space, and for those who treasure the natural world.
“We want these kids to know what a conservation easement is,” said Marion Chungo, one of the organizers.
A New Keswick MFH: Her Story
Sandra Forbush photo
If you are wondering where in the Keswick countryside the cover picture was taken, you are observant. It was not taken in Keswick but at Massie’s Corner in Rappahannock County where I grew up. My father, Wade Massie, loved to hunt foxes. My Uncle Jim tells how Pop used to get on the school bus in the morning and get off a few stops later where there would be a horse waiting for him. He would hunt all day with Ennis Jenkins, Larry Jenkins’ father, and get back on the bus in the afternoon. His parents were none the wiser.
Later Jack Bruce helped Pop put together a pack of hounds which Clint Eastham, son of famous hound breeder C.C. Eastham, would hunt for him. (It is kind of fun to think about how I would hunt with hounds and people with a lot of the same bloodlines sixty years later).
Pop also hunted with Rappahannock and was a whipper-in there. Current Rappahannock Master Oliver Brown likes to tell a story about how Pop could make any horse quiet. One day a visitor from New Jersey had come down to hunt. The visitor’s horse was rank, while Pop’s was going along well. Halfway through the day Pop offered to switch horses. By day’s end Pop’s new mount was going along on the buckle, and the visitor’s horse was jigging all around.
Hillsboro Graphic Is Grand Champion at Carolinas
Grand Champion Hillsboro Graphic ’14 with professional whipper-in Leilani Hrisko. Judges (l-r) are MFHs Tony Leahy and Dr. Jack Van Nagell / David Traxler photoHillsboro Graphic ’14 was judged Grand Champion of Show at the thirty-ninth annual Carolinas Hound Show held at the Springdale Race Course in Camden, South Carolina on May 8 and 9, 2015.
Whelped to royal bloodlines—American on the sire’s side and English on the dam’s side—it should have been no surprise to see Graphic garner top honors. Her sire is Hillsboro Jethro ’08, son of the magnificent Potomac Jefferson ’05, Grand Champion Foxhound at Virginia in the year of the MFHA Centennial celebration, 2007.
On the dam’s side, Graphic goes back in tail female to North Cotswold Grapefruit ’95, a Peterborough Champion and dam of several influential foxhounds in North America including Iroquois Grundy ’98, Master Jerry Miller’s all-time favorite foxhound, and Mid-Devon Grocer ’00, sire of Virginia and Bryn Mawr champion hounds from Blue Ridge.
Foxhounds from fourteen hunts and five states trod the flags at Carolinas: Aiken, Camden, DeLa Brooke, Green Creek, Hillsboro, Keswick, Lowcountry, Moore County, Red Mountain, Sedgefield, Tennessee Valley, Tryon, Whiskey Road, and Why Worry.
The Keswick Hunt…In Motion!
Here’s Phil Audibert’s cleverly edited video montage of the Keswick Hunt’s 2014/2015 foxhunting season, set to the music of the Ryegrass Rollers. The fox, the hounds, huntsman Tony Gammell, Masters, staff, and the Keswick field members all play the starring roles in this fast-paced romp through the Virginia countryside.