AN ACTIVE MAN ON HIS FEET

Fred Buzzaway, whose name has just cropped up casually, was a totally different type of sportsman from that reticent local magnate Sir John Ruddimore ( of Rapworth Park).  Always fond of a joke, Fred Buzzaway was a blue-jowled, dog-faced bachelor, who habitually dressed up as though it were going to be a pouring wet day.   

Bowler hat well-down over his ears; dark whipcord coat and serviceable brown breeches; tight and skimpy stock; such was his rig-out, wet or fine.  I see him now, splashed with mud, his collar turned up, and his head bent against the driving rain.  His boots were usually muddy owing to his laudable habit of getting off his horse as often as possible to give it a rest, and during a slow hunt he was often seen leading his mount and even running beside it.  He was an active man on his feet and when he wasn’t riding to hounds he was following a pack of foot-harriers. 

 

Stag-hunting he despised.  “Jackasses hunting a carted jackass,” he called it.  In his youth Buzzaway had been called to the Bar.  His friends always said that when he got there he asked for a bottle of ‘Bass’ and never went back again after he discovered his mistake.  From this it may be inferred that he had a wholesome belief in good liquor.

Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man, 1928.

What Does The Fox Say?:  Ylvis (Link) 

SUNDAY MORNING STABLES

  ‘Sunday morning stables’ being one of his favourite ceremonies, the Colonel now led us from one loose-box to another, commenting affectionately on each inmate, and stimulated by the fact that one of his audience was a stranger.  Each of them, apparently, was a compendium of unique equine qualities, on which I gazed with unaffected admiration, while Stephen chimed in with “Never seen the old chestnut looking so fit, Colonel,” or “Looking an absolute picture,” while Dumbrell was deferentially at hand all the time to share the encomiums offered to his charges.  The Colonel, of course, had a stock of repertory remarks about how each one of them, including how they had won a certain point-to-point or (more frequently) why they hadn’t.   

  The last one we looked at was a big, well-bred brown horse who stood very much ‘over at the knees.’  The Colonel had hunted him twelve seasons and he had an equivalently long rigmarole to recite about him, beginning with “I remember Sam Hames saying to me—(I bought him off old Hames of Leicester, you know)—that horse is the most natural jumper I’ve ever had in my stable.  And he was right, for the old horse has only given me one bad toss in twelve years, and that was no fault of his own, for he landed on a stump of a willow tree; it was at that rough fence just outside Clout’s Wood—nasty place too—you remember I showed it you the other day, Steve;” all of which Stephen had probably heard fifty times before, and had been shown the ‘nasty place’ half a dozen times into the bargain.  It was only when he heard the distant booming of the luncheon-gong that the Colonel was able to tear himself away from the brown horse’s loose-box.

 

Upper:  Glyn Warren Philpot, Portrait of Siegfried Sassoon, 1917.

Center:  John Frederick Herring, Sr. (1795-1865), A Bay Hunter In A Loose Box, date unknown.

Lower:  Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man, 1928.