HUNT UNIFORMS 89 



And I am prompted to write about this the 

 rather that hunting men in the Shires have been 

 rather exercised in their minds — at any rate, some 

 of them have — by the fact that the Leicestershire 

 Golf Club has adopted the orthodox pink of the 

 hunting man for evening wear. Now, with all 

 respect to my golfing friends, I think it would 

 have been better that they should not have adopted 

 the dress uniform which has become to be con- 

 sidered as especially the fox-hunter's, at any rate, 

 in Leicestershire. Mind, I do not for a moment 

 wish to insinuate that the hunting man has a 

 prescriptive right to scarlet as a dress uniform, 

 but it has been so long identified with hunting in 

 the Midlands that it seems a pity that it should 

 become associated with any other pursuit in a 

 district where hunting reigns supreme. Scarlet 

 has of course been the uniform in which golfers 

 have appeared on the links in Scotland for more 

 than a century, and so, of course, the golf players 

 have in a certain measure custom on their side, 

 though I never heard of any special evening dress 

 being worn by a golf club until now. 



There are some curious hunt uniforms, and 

 though none that I know of come up to the sky- 

 blue coat and canary-coloured shorts of the famous 

 Handley Cross Hunt, there are some which some- 

 how remind one instinctively of livery. The dark 

 green coat with scarlet collar, which was the dress 

 uniform of a certain hunt with which I am 

 acquainted, looked rather curious when it was 

 strange to one, though, when a scarlet silk facing 

 was added, it was becoming enough. Another 

 uniform which was much beholden to its silk facings 

 was a dark blue with white collar. I do not know 



