The Kettleburgh Chequers
Yesterday, we went for a trip to East Suffolk, an area I know well, as I used to live at Debach. It was also an area, in which I followed hounds for seventeen seasons with The Easton Harriers. If you want to read more about those days in the 1970s and 1980s, read Tony Harvey’s book, Not a Penny in the Post. Hunting in that part of Suffolk, was as much about the community as it was about the hunting. Everybody, and I do mean everybody was totally welcome. It has to said that in those yeas, I learned more about the countryside, famring and wildlife, than at any other time in my life.
We passed the Kettleburgh Chequers.
The Kettleburgh Chequers
On the 10th of February in 1981, we held a gentlemen’s day in this pub to raise money for hunt funds. We met at the Kettleburgh Chequers at eleven and started hunting at about three, after quite a few drinks. C had dropped me and my horse at the meet and in the end, I hacked home to Debach, so there was no danger of drinking and driving. But when you hunted, it wasn’t always like that, but I can’t ever remember anyone getting into trouble, except from falling off a horse.
That day for a bet before hunting, Jimmy Wickham, the kennel-huntsman, actually brought the hounds into the bar.
As Tony says in the book, it wasn’t the best days hunting, but after a meal at Snape in the evening, it will be one of those days I’ll always remember.
For those who criticise hunting remember this. The hunts in those days used to collect and often humanely destroy all those animals that had died or needed to be put down in the countryside. We all come to our time in the end.
I always remember Tony Harvey once saying after a day, when we had hunted three packs of hare hounds in one day; harriers on horseback before breakfast, bassets in the morning on foot and beagles, again on foot, in the afternoon, the following. “We’ve had a very good day, but we haven’t caught anything. Ask a shooting man, if he’s had a good day, when he hasn’t shot anything.” That is the difference between hunting and shooting. I am passionately anti-anything to do with guns, as they kill people. It needs skill and in some cases courage to ride to hounds.
The last epitaph on hunting, is that on my stud since the hunting ban, I never see or even smell a fox. The ban has done nothing for the fox. All sorts of things can be postulated, but remember our foxes are rabies free, so have they been trapped by those who don’t value the countryside for their fur. I don’t know, but they have all disappeared. Or perhaps they’ve all gone to London, where they are a true menace.
Note that in Suffolk, you always name a pub with both the village and it’s actual name. This avoids mistakes, as there are numerous White Horses for example.
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