The Buried Treasures

By R. W. F. Poole

R W F Poole has had a long a varied career as a columnist and author, with a unique viewpoint and writing style. The Buried Treasures or R. W. F. Poole brings together more than 100 articles from his columns from various (and varied) publications on subjects as different as Hunt Balls and dancing to black pudding and homemade cider.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781326128401

Book preview

The Buried Treasures

The Buried Treasures

Copyright

First Edition

Published by Razoredge Productions Ltd

Copyright © 2013 R. W. F. Poole

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any other means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the publishers and copyright holder.

ISBN: 978-1-326-12840-1

Cover Photograph by Mike Forster

Introduction

In 2006 Willy Poole decamped to France. Along with his other possessions he took a large archive of his writings. At last he managed to find the box and promptly decided to drop them on me - with the instruction to sort them out for a possible book.

Well, here it is, doubtless people will take me to task for what I’ve included or discarded - but you’ve bought the book so just enjoy it.

It was suggested that I should edit Willy’s works but as I live in the real world and Willy’s reach is long I have confined myself to including the ones which elicit the usual response to Willy; pleasure, laughter and admiration of someone whose writings so brilliantly bring the countryside, the people and the animals to life on the pages. Also someone with a healthy scepticism when it comes to politicians and their ways.

Stuart Halsey

Somewhere in rural England

December 2013

Country Diary

Howway, man! I’m away to the hills

Daily Telegraph - Weekend, Saturday, February 3 1996

I KNOW that life in the hills interests people who read this column. I love the hills and would not want to live anywhere where I could not look up to the long hills and find peace for evermore.

I am fortunate because I see them every day from my house. Indeed, I have had to block out part of the window in my office. The temptation for the eyes to stray when I should be watching my word-processor has sometimes proved too great.

It is a view that never palls because it changes all the time with light and shadow and season - the first springing of the green bracken in, the early summer, the old gold of the whins, the sight (and the smell) of the flowering heather, the multi-hues of the bracken beds in autumn and the black-and-white bleakness of the snow-covered hills in winter.

There are days when working in the hills is pure pleasure. When you cut the strings on a bale of hay on a frosty morning and there is a sudden brief scent of sun-baked summer grass. There are the clear, still mornings, brilliant with frost, when the air really is like wine and you look away across miles of country to the North Sea.

There are the long evenings gathering in the summer, when the scattered knots of sheep from the high tops are brough together into a long, snaking, bleating line down to the home fields. The good moment when the gate is finally slammed behind them and collies pant and tired men mop their brows.

I love the winter sport in the hills, with hounds sweeping like a flock of gulls across one of the great open hillsides, their cry coming fierce and wild on the wind. I love to see the lithe, loping form of a fox - a killer but a beautiful one.

I enjoy the hunting and I enjoy the craic that goes with it - the gossip, the banter with friends and neighbours and the Howway, man! Git it doon ye! when the flasks come out. Then there are the moments at dawn and dusk when, solitary and motionless, you wait for the elusive roe deer which always seem to materialise out of nowhere.

The hills are a place for thinking. If I climb the long hill, there is a sheltered spot with a small rock face that neatly fits the back. A stunted little rowan-tree grows from a crack in the rock. Far below, the little burn tumbles over the rocks.

On a still day you can hear its chatter but usually all you can hear is the wind sighing in the bents and heather. This is a great place to sit with the dog curled up at your feet and your chin resting on the horn heid of the stick and to think.

Over the years I have tried to communicate the magic that I feel in the hills to those who read this column. From what you have been kind enough to tell me, I have had some success.

It is nearly nine years and more than 350 articles ago that I started working for The Daily Telegraph. The paper has been good to me. Thanks to it I have travelled to many parts of the world - the US, New Zealand, India and the Continent - and have met many fascinating people. Apart from the Weekend section (of which I was a founder member), there have been features, food, obituaries and sports. It has all been the greatest fun.

Most of all I have enjoyed writing my diary column in Weekend. I am sorry to say this is my last piece in this slot. The original remit was to write about country life and this I have done to the best of my ability. I have also done my best to represent the views and traditions of the indigenous countryman.

You have been most generous in your response and your letters have given me enormous pleasure. Indeed, it is only because of your support that my column has lasted as long as it has. But we live in changing times and now is a time for fresh faces and fresh ideas.

So what now? My first novel, The Hounds of Heaven, is in the shops and the second, The Black Madonna (both Nyali Press), is on the drawing board. For the rest, I do not know. All good .things must come to an end. So - good, bad or indifferent - here endeth my column. Goodbye, thank you and God bless you all.

Time to mount up again

It is nice to be back. May I thank all those kind people who wrote to me. Your letters made me feel sad, glad and very humble, Thank you.

Daily Telegraph - Weekend, Saturday, March 16, 1996

IN THE South sometimes have Lawn Meets (or Lawners). This means that the staff and hounds and all the followers parade on the lawn in front of the house - or in the field below the ha-ha.

The squire in his best shooting suit and his lady in a huddle of Huskys have their pics taken for a glossy horse magazine and the local paper (if it has not become too virulently left wing) alongside the joint masters. The butler circulates with thimblefuls of port on a salver and there is the inevitable scream, as some old doghound (a crafty veteran of many of these occasions) helps himself to a plateful of dainty sausage rolls. All good fun and it gets the day’s hunting off to a good start.

Up here in the North, things tend to be somewhat less manicured and a lot of us do not have lawns, let alone butlers. We have House Meets instead and everybody piles into the kitchen and the front room.

This does not mean that people are any the less hospitable. The table will groan with home-baked pies, tarts, rolls and cakes - good substantial fare for people who are going to spend many hours out on the high hills. Nor will the spirituous needs be neglected.

Of course, you will take a dram (not wishing to give offence by refusing, you understand) and, (after a fit of coughing, reach for the kitchen tap and a drop more water. The alternative to whisky might be a Percy Special, which is a whisky and cherry brandy cross and probably the nearest you will ever come to swallowing a hand grenade.

We had a great meet yesterday at Jim and Evelyn’s. Jim is the local coal merchant. I was sorely tempted by Evelyn’s egg and bacon pie but no, I said, I am on a strict diet … but it did took good … and, after all, one does not want to give offence.

In fact, I still had a handful of pie and a handful of whisky when I heard hounds running. The master had sneaked away and got the hounds out and they had found at once in a rusher bed in the field below the house.

They were screaming away. Such a commotion of people with their mouths full. Such leaping on to quads and hauling of backsides into saddles, and there were hounds gannin’ like stoor (smoke) along the hillside behind the village.

It was a lovely day on the hill, especially after the weather that we have had since Christmas. Indeed, one man, who lives remote and high oot, said that he got the first snow at the end of October. We have had an awful lot of snow and really bad days of cruel easterly weather. The master had told me that he had lost more than half the usual number of hunting days since Christmas with the weather.

Yesterday was a real March day, with a drying wind and bright sun, It was the first day that I have smelled spring and I was not alone. The rooks were courting in the fields as I drove on to the meet. Out on the open hill, the skylarks were ascending in their aerial dance. I reckon that I saw about 20 on one stretch of rough pasture - truly a rise of larks. The hills are the only places where larks thrive now - I cannot remember when I last saw one in-bye. The hares were at it, too, performing their complicated mad March ritual of flight and fight…

All in all, it was the sort of day to make one start wondering just where on the farm you had left the chain grass drags (harrows) last year. I know where mine are - I fell over them last week.

But what of the hounds in all this? They were doing rather well in the conditions - a drying easterly wind is never very good for scent. They hunted well and perseveringly and caught three foxes.

The last fox found in the afternoon was a very small fox that hounds could not hunt at all - I suspect it was a vixen. Heavy vixens carry little or no scent - Mother Nature’s protection.

What with work, weather, and worry, it had been nearly a month since I had managed to hunt on the hills. It was wonderful to be out there with the sun shining and the snow gone - and it is wonderful to be able to share the day with all of you again.

Carry on feuding: bowler vs panama in the finest rural tradition

Daily Telegraph - Weekend, Saturday, August 17, 1996

IT IS, I fear, war to the knife. Readers will know that I am the innocent victim. I am a slow-moving, slow-thinking creature. A man who pats widows and orphans on the head and always chucks a copper to itinerant street musicians, but push me too far and my Viking blood starts to simmer - then look out.

Many of you will have read Bobbin’ Robin Page’s scurrilous attack upon my person and character in his column (July 28). The trouble occurred at the Peterborough Royal Foxhound Show, where Page was doing his performing monkey act for Anglia Television and he had dressed up for the occasion by digging out his granddad’s old bowler hat.

Now I happen to know from friends in the televisual business that Page is a TV man’s nightmare. He is all right when he is capering in front of the camera (although, in my opinion, they could get the same effect with a glove puppet). But when he is off camera the trouble starts - he simply cannot be let loose. I gather that the normal practice is for him to be herded into a corner by two of those large ladies with stopwatches and pens round their necks. They feed him bananas and hit him with a clipboard when he gets stroppy.

At Peterborough he escaped. I was coming round the corner of the stand, minding my own business, mentally composing some scatological lyrics to the Ode to Joy (what does rhyme with Hogg?) and heading for a gin and tonic, then I saw - it.

The first thing I saw was a bowler hat - no, correction: a BOWLER HAT, the biggest I have ever seen. From underneath the hat flowed a torrent of hair and whisker - like a quarter-acre of brambles - from which poked a rather shiny pink nose which was whiffling like a rabbit. All this was set on a small globular body.

My first thought was: Aargh! My second thought was: Where’s its toadstool? My third thought was: My God! It’s Page! And so it was. Of course, I realised that it couldn’t be allowed to wander round loose - it was frightening the hounds. I crept up and knocked on the hat.

Page appeared in the undergrowth: It’s Poole! he cried. Blimey, but you’m getting fat, boy. Now this was way out of line. I know that I am big. All we Vikings are big. You have to be big for all that rapin’ and pillagin’. But I am not fat! And anyway, I ask you to consider the photograph: Page looks like a three-legged cooking pot with one leg missing. Well, that started it. I threatened to jump, on Page’s bowler. He threatened to eat my panama (Old Etonian ribbon and all). I do not know where it might have ended, but luckily an Anglia TV posse, panting and dishevelled, arrived in the nick of time.

They prodded Page into a corner with a sound boom. A lady with a coffee cup hung round her neck boxed his ears with a clipboard, pushed his hat down over his nose and led him away snivelling quietly. Well, I thought, serves him right, but that’s an end. Nobody calls me fat and gets away with it.

Feud is in a fine rural tradition. The English countryside, placid and peaceful to the casual observer, seethes with internecine strife. Behind the hollyhocks and climbing roses, ancient hatreds bubble and fester. They are passed down generations like the family Bible and the long case clock. On to this dark and bloody ground incomers stray with wide-eyed innocence.

I remember the retired inner-city school teacher who came to live in Rose Cottage with a great sigh of relief and dreams of rural peace. He swelled with pride as he told me how he been asked to become secretary of the village Leek and Produce Show.

Like most incomers he was impervious to advice and I could only watch sadly as he disappeared under a bloody welter of warring clans and factions, whose feuds went back since time out of memory. He went back to inner-city teaching - it was less stressful.

So you see, the country is not always Eden. Anyway, I reckon I have seen Page off.

Power to the peasants means they can pay for it themselves

Daily Telegraph - Weekend, Saturday, October 26, 1996

POWER to the parish councils! Power to the peasantry! Gosh! Is it not marvellous? It really looks as though the penny has dropped with the Government that it is deep in the manure with its rural supporters.

The Ab-original country people who have traditionally supported the Conservative Party have been underwhelmed by a party whose candidates have lately consisted of secondhand-car salesmen and spotty youths fresh from Central Office. Now, it seems, That Nice Mr Major has seen the amber light and ordered all sorts of goodies to be handed to the Abos, to be administered by the local parish council.

It is probable that John Selwyn Gummer’s hand shaped many of the proposals. In particular, the proposals to combat rural crime are rumoured to come from his fertile imagination. The first thing to be said is that there is no such thing as rural crime - as near as makes no difference anyway. Country people on the whole are law-abiding. There are occasional outbursts. There was a crime wave in the next village - petty thieving, breaking and entering and vandalism. The culprits were a small band of teenage and pre-teen children With nothing to do between school and getting their fish fingers for tea. The community brought its own subtle pressures to bear on the parents of the wayward.

Most of the crime in the countryside is urban crime exported. Poaching is not a simple matter of Old Seth pinching a few of His Lordship’s pheasants for the pot. Now it is a matter of highly organised and dangerous gangs from the conurbations. It is the same with burglary and farm thefts.

Almost everybody round here has had the farm quadricycle nicked, but where do they go? Customs officers found four quads under a load of wheat heading for Eire. The police already know the identities of most of the urban villains who operate in the countryside - the obstacles are proof and lenient magistrates. However, there is an answer to this problem.

A friend of mine (after an interesting military career) became responsible for the security of a large estate. He caught some poachers one night and had a quiet word. That estate is now a crime-free zone.

On first sight, the proposals for parish constables is a good one. People look back with nostalgia to the days of the old village bobby. He knew that a thick ear solved more juvenile delinquency than all the probation and outreach officers ever could. But these were professional policemen. No one yet knows what sort of beast a parish constable might be.

The proposals also suggest video surveillance and other security measures. A splendid suggestion. But who would operate the system? How many cameras would you need to cover the average village? What are you going to see apart from Old Bert staggering out of the Squire and Strumpet and Him sneaking into the cottage of Her - the wife of a long-distance lorry driver. What would it cost?

Aye, Masters, there’s the rub - who is to pay? The proposals talk grandly about funding from the parish precept. Ever heard of it? Not many have. The precept is medieval in origin. It was a tax levied on the parish. When the county councils were formed they took on the collection through the rates and then handed some money back to the parish council. It now goes with the Council Tax. At the moment the average charge per Parish Peasant is around £3.40 per head - say £1,000 per annum for the average parish. Now, how many video cameras, constables, taxi fare concessions, parish bus services, et al would that pay for?

There is a hidden agenda and it is clever. All district and county councils have had their spending capped by government. Parish council spending is not capped, so they can spend what they like out of the precept. So the more expenditure county and district can pile on the parish, the more money they have for important things like fact-finding visits to Paris. The size of the precepts will soar and so will the size of the Abos’ tax bill.

The bottom line of these proposals is a Peasants’ Poll Tax - that should really swing the rural vote for the Conservatives.

40,000 will answer the call to arms

Daily Telegraph - Weekend, Date Unknown

There is much talk among country people about civil disobedience in the face of a law banning hunting. No such law was proposed in the Queen’s Speech, but that was a matter of political expediency, not of repentance. It is almost certain that a Bill will be brought forward at a time to suit the Government. Mr Blair has described it as a matter of trust, which, because the man has told more porkies than Pinocchio, cannot amount to much.

It will whizz through the Commons. It is to be hoped that whatever ragged remnants of the Upper House remain will put up a spirited last stand. But the Government can eventually work its wicked way by use of the Parliament Act. This may be unconstitutional, but this Government does not give two monkeys’ whatnots for Parliamentary constitution. So what do we do?

We can resort to direct action, which would certainly result in innocent people being hurt. The last option is civil disobedience.

What is civil disobedience? Two examples are often cited: the poll tax riots of 1380 and of the 1980s. But they were riots and a riot by its nature involves violence. Civil disobedience should not. Civil disobedience certainly means breaking the law, but there has to be an overwhelming belief that the law concerned is rotten and unjust and should not be obeyed.

But it is the law that must be broken, not plate-glass windows. Civil disobedience means overwhelming the law not by force, but by choking it with the sheer weight of peaceful protest. Think of Gandhi. Peaceful protest means carrying on doing what you believe to be right and submitting to the due process of the law and the courts. We must use the law to draw attention to the injustice of a law that is bred by ignorance out of malice.

About 40,000 people have signed a Declaration of Intent to carry on hunting if it becomes banned by a law that strips humble people of everything they have ever known and worked for, of their property and their livelihoods and their histories.

So just suppose that all those 40,000 people say: Sod the law. I’m going hunting. What would happen?

You might assume that they would be arrested en masse and chucked in the slammer. But just consider the logistics of this. As Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, said: The House of Commons chose a Bill that is simple to explain rather than a Bill that is simple to enforce. Or as the Burns Report put it: Legislation implementing a ban might well pose some enforcement difficulties for the police.

And hear what the police have to say. The Chief Constable of Suffolk: Police have neither the money nor the manpower to hound illegal fox-hunters. It is impractical to stop and arrest huntspeople on horseback and seize the hounds and horses they use to commit the offence.

The Chief Constable of North Yorkshire: If I do arrest people, I am going to have to look where I put their horses and dogs, which I would have to seize as evidence, and I am particularly concerned about the cost.

The Chief Constable of Thames Valley: We are not geared up to seize horses, hounds and the sort of equipment that goes with the hunt. Neither do I think that it’s our proper business.

The police have, of course, twigged that they would be responsible for the welfare of any animals seized and of maintaining them in the same good condition that they were in when seized. If the logistics of arrest are difficult, consider the problems in the court.

A House of Lords amendment to the Bill provides a clear requirement for the prosecution to prove specific intent. The word intent does not appear in the last Bill. Alun Michael has supplied a definition: To hunt is the intention to pursue a wild mammal. Without that intent, a person is not hunting and is not covered by the offence in clause 1.

It would be the job of the prosecution to prove intent. The situation is opaque, to say the least. After all, you could just be hacking about the countryside; you could just be on your way to the shops and have stopped for a chat with some chums; you could just be on your way to look over the stock - the spade is to dig out a ditch and the terrier just loves a ride on the quad.

Hounds could be out for a constitutional. Hounds could be running heel, in which case they would not be pursuing a wild animal. Remember you are innocent until proven guilty. You may want to plead guilty as a political statement. You will be fined £5,000. You will refuse to pay and will be sent to jail. I am told that it is no worse than Eton.

The courts and prison system of this country are already clogged like a blocked sewer. It is very doubtful that they could cope with 40,000 political prisoners.

A final quote:

We are fighting for the inalienable right to be free as long as it does not impair the freedom of others. Mr Blair in, his speech to the US Congress.

I rest my case.

It is nearly 17 years since I began writing this column. This will be the last. May I take this chance to thank you for the support and cheer you have given me. Go well with God. Bless you all. Goodbye.

A Week in the Country

I am on record...

Country Life, March 17, 1994

I AM on record as saying that I look forward to winter - and so I do - but I am heartily sick of this one. In Northumberland, the winter since the middle of December has been a wretched stop-go affair - a bit of snow, a bit of frost, a thaw and then snow again. The weather has been thoroughly unsettled and out of sorts: bad for everything.

Bad for hunting: we seldom get stopped for frost on the hills. The rough grass, heather and bracken tend to keep the frost out of the ground, although bare ground and tracks can be treacherous for horses. But who needs horses? We have our hardy quadricycles, and those most precious items - hounds’ feet - do not suffer.

It must be said, however, that descending a steep, bare, frozen slope on a quad has its adrenalin-laden moments. Rolling downhill with a quad is not recommended - I know. Deep snow does stop us. The quads cannot travel in snow of more than a certain depth and the vital gateways get blocked by drifts. We have hardly been stopped, but the unsettled conditions have