Bridging the gap
WHEN the northeasterly Yorkshire wind was blowing at the Middleton, an 18-year-old Luke Tomlinson briefly let himself imagine his fellow school leavers lying on a Thailand beach.
“But I was living the dream really,” says the England polo player, who arrived to help then-master Frank Houghton Brown in the summer after finishing school nearly 25 years ago, staying for the season. “The weather up there was obviously pretty tough, but it was magical when you had a good day’s hunting.”
While spending a gap year volunteering with a hunt isn’t official training, “it is extremely good work experience for the future if someone either wants to go into hunt service or hunt their own pack of hounds”, says the Hunting Office’s Alice Bowden. “You are usually given accommodation, a
