IT IS A SCENE from a dystopian nightmare: the Durham miners’ dogs (‘The Pitties’) had rabies. They were roaming the countryside in packs, attacking whatever they saw out of doors. Pigs, cats, even donkeys were killed. Then a child. Without guidance from the Home Secretary, the buck stopped with one man – Robert Smith Surtees. At the time he was chairman of the bench and a justice of the peace, in addition to writing his famous hunting novels. He acted on his own authority and at speed: he had every stray dog in the county killed on sight. The rabies outbreak of 1852 was ended at a stroke. I start here because both the drastic measure and the confidence to impose it give you a picture of the man who helped found The Field just over 170 years ago.
Nearly two centuries later, Surtees’ writing lives on. The north-country wisdom of this hard-riding squire is bouncing around on X, formerly known as Twitter. There, his immortal line ‘There is no secret so close as that between a man and his horse’ pops up on a ‘global network of
