we go foxhunting abroad

Here’s a second condensed installment from We Go Foxhunting Abroad: A First Venture with the Irish Banks and English Downs, Charles D. Lanier’s 1924 account of a father-daughter sporting trip to Ireland and England.

We put on our hunting things Saturday morning and climbed into the flivver for our first hunt with the United.

B had taken care to remove from her coat the orange collar of our home hunt colors, and I wore the regulation “visiting” dress of American custom—dark Oxford grey coat, cream colored Bedford cord britches, plain black jack boots and hunting bowler. I have never become an authority on the niceties of hunting etiquette and was simply aware one could not go amiss in these unpretentious togs.

Our flivver soon began to overtake people bound for the meet, gentlemen and ladies jogging along on short-tailed beasts with enormous quarters and hocks, grooms leading horses with their riderless saddles carefully protected by slip covers from the showers, which appear in South Ireland without a moment’s notice or a discernable cloud; showers that pass away, generally, as quickly as they come, with no one paying the slightest attention.

In juxtaposition to these times of fast and affordable air travel to and from England and Ireland for hunting holidays, here’s a look back to a 1924 account of a leisurely (and dramatic) father-daughter sea voyage—their first—to go foxhunting on the other side. It was also a different era for world events, as readers will note.

Author Charles D. Lanier was MFH of the Fairfield County Hounds (later the Fairfield and Westchester Hounds) from 1915 to 1921. His seventeen-year-old daughter, referred to as “B,” was Becky Lanier, later Becky Sharp, MB of the Nantucket Beagles, and still later Joint-MB of the Nantucket-Treweryn Beagles, who, along with her husband Joint-MB David “Bun” Sharp passed away in 1987.

Becky Lanier, 1920

What follows is a condensed version of Chapter 1, “Outward Bound," from Charles Lanier's We Go Foxhunting Abroad: A First Venture with the Irish Banks and English Downs published in 1924. Subsequent chapters in condensed form will appear through the remaining summer months.