With the official start of the hare hunting season just a few weeks away, news reaches the HSA that the Sandhurst & Aldershot Beagles – unaffectionately known as ‘SAB’- are no more.
This is excellent news for local lagomorphs as the Sandhurst had a reputation as a fast, effective pack who killed a lot of hares.
Like so many beagle packs, the Sandhurst & Aldershot are a merger of older hunts. The former Aldershot Beagles had a particular nasty reputation: their huntsman Roy Clinkard used to delight in goading sabs with the torn bodies of any hares he managed to kill. In those days the Sandhurst could muster 60-70 supporters and sabbing could often turn ‘eventful’. One veteran sab recalls a lively Boxing Day meet where a large supporter with a broken arm tried to deck sabs with his plaster cast!
But like all beagle packs, their support has dwindled over the years, especially when they started seeing sabs again around 2012. Unable to perform the fiction of trail hunting, they would pack up as soon as sabs appeared and perform the “walk of shame” back to the meet.
It is no surprise that the pack have folded and become a hunt club.
A hunt club is a former hunt – almost always a foot pack – that has given up its hounds. Instead of disbanding completely, the club maintains control of the hunt’s registered ‘country’ and invites other hunts to hold very occasional meets for the entertainment of hunt club members and any visiting supporters.
The hunt club system did make sense around thirty years ago when there were upwards of eighty beagle packs competing for a limited amount of huntable country. This competition could sometimes turn nasty – in the 1980s, for example, the Colne Valley Beagles had regular punch-ups with their neighbours the Holme Valley over territory. Back then, the hunt club was a way of maintaining control over highly prized hunt country.
These days, it is a completely different story. There are less than half that number of beagle packs still going and, as we have repeatedly reported, many of these are merged entities that comprise of two, three or even four original packs. In the case of the Sandhurst & Aldershot Beagles, for example, their neighbours, the (deep breath…) Palmer Marlborough with Clinkard & Meon Valley Beagles now have their own vast hunt country that runs from West Sussex through Hampshire and on into Wiltshire. They really will not need any additional country to hunt!
The modern hunt club, then, is just another way of disguising the fact that yet another hunt has folded. The Sandhurst & Aldershot Beagles are now a hunt in name only – good riddance!
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