Masters of Foxhounds. 459 



Some subscription packs have been maintained under one management for a long series 

 of years. Such is the Bramham Moor, in Yorkshire, with which the name of the Lane Fox 

 family is indelibly connected ; while the Holderness had one Master in the late Mr. Hall, a 

 banker, for nearly forty years. As nearly all the excellence of a pack of fox-hounds depends 

 on breeding on fixed principles for a long series of years, it is a great disadvantage when a 

 pack is broken up and for a new Master to commence to hunt the county with hounds collected 

 from east and west, north and south. Such has been the fate of the Quorn more than once- 

 Master has succeeded Master at short intervals ; some managing without and some with a 

 subscription. On each occasion the whole establishment of hounds, servants, and horses, 

 has been dispersed ; while subscription packs of merely provincial reputation have been 

 maintained without interruption for generations. 



The tesselated condition of English society — in which the choicest honours are open to 

 the successful, no matter how born or bred — is faithfully reproduced in rank of Masters of 

 fox-hounds. For example, in 1874, two peers were Masters of and personally hunted two 

 subscription packs of fox-hounds in Oxfordshire; in Essex a Master was a real tenant-farmer; 

 in Holderness the Master was a banker ; in Suffolk, a few years ago, a father and son, 

 brewers — the father an M.P. — managed at the same time two packs ; in Surrey, a pack of 

 fox-hounds, maintained on a very modest scale by local subscriptions, was not only managed 

 but hunted by a genuine London banker — not a retired sleeping partner, but the working 

 representative of one of the oldest City banking firms. 



In the same direction it may be noted that the most celebrated Masters of hounds and 

 sportsmen have been by no means exclusively enlisted from the ranks of noblemen or long- 

 descended landed squires. The late Sir Tatton Sykes — the Sir Roger dc Coverley of York- 

 shire — passed some years of his youth in a solicitor's office in Lincoln's Inn Square, and 

 was the grandson of a Hull merchant. Squire Farquharson, who hunted Dorsetshire for 

 half a century, and looked the character of the leather-breeched, top-booted, country gentle- 

 man as much as his contemporary the Norman-descended Sir Charles Knightley — was the 

 son of. a nabob; Captain I'ercy Williams was son of an East India director. The late 

 Captain John White, who was known, when Master of the Cheshire Hounds, as "Leicester- 

 shire White," and was considered the beau ideal of a sportsman in Melton's most palmy days, 

 was the son of a Manchester physician. Out of living Masters of hounds hunting important 

 countries a dozen examples might be quoted of men whose claim to the position rests on 

 love of sport, and not the least on pedigree. The lineal descendants of that illustrious 

 barber. Sir Richard Arkwright, the founder of the cotton manufacture, which enabled Eng- 

 land to bear the cost of the wars following the French Revolution, supplied Masters of the 

 fox-hounds in Essex, in Bedfordshire, and Warwickshire, in a father and two sons ; and in 

 1874 three Arkwrights hunted a Bedfordshire, a Herefordshire, and an Essex pack. In the 

 same year the Master of the celebrated Heythrop Hounds was a son of Mr. Thomas 

 Brassey, the millionnaire railway contractor, one of his predecessors in the office having 

 been Lord Redesdale, the paid chairman of the Private Bill Committee of the House of 

 Lords. 



The subscription to an established pack of fox-hounds is seldom less than twenty-five 

 pounds, but there are landed proprietors who give five hundred pounds without attending a 

 meet twice in a season. 



The guaranteed subscription in 1874, to one of the best packs in a metropolitan county 

 for three days a week, and an occasional by-day, was two thousand pounds a year; but in 



