Identifier: englandsoldesthu00fair (find matches)
Title: England's oldest hunt : being chapters of the history of the Bilsdale, Farndale and Sinnington Hunts, collected during several years
Year: 1907 (1900s)
Authors: Fairfax-Blakeborough, J. (John), 1883-
Subjects: Horses Fox hunting -- England History
Publisher: Northallerton : Author, Fox House, Carlton-in-Cleveland Middlesbrough : Jordison
Contributing Library: Webster Family Library of Veterinary Medicine
Digitizing Sponsor: Tufts University

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Text Appearing Before Image:
The Buck is the great centre of erudition. Here
the news of the day is learned, the paper read, here the
letters are sorted and often received ; here, too, the showi
s held, and those little convivial gatherings which periodi-
cally liven up the life of the dale. It was here, too, then,
that I first " clapped eyes on " Bobbie Dawson and his
contemporaries.
They are now, alas ! all amongst the great majority who
joined me at dinner that night. It may seem incongruous
at the outset of a sketch of the old man's life to give an
obituary of him, but I find that by so doing I can best
portray his character and characteristics. I wrote over a
score of these notices of the old man, and have glanced through
them to quote an impression formed when the veteran was
yet fresh in my mind. Of all the articles I have written on
Bobbie—and en passant I may mention that obituary
notices to the extent of some twenty columns were penned
by me in one day and night—none now on a retrospective
glance strike me as being truer and more in sympathy with
Text Appearing After Image:

THE AUTHOR.

BOBBIE DAWSON. 83

the subject than that which appeared in a journal for which
I was at the time writing hunting notes. I take the following
from the article, which appeared the day after the old man's
death, June 18, 1902 :—

A later day Nimrod is dead ! With the demise of Bobbie Dawson,
of Bilsdale, not only the pack with which he was so long identified,
but what he himself was pleased to term the sport of all sport, has
lost its oldest supporter. Bobbie Dawson—he was always called
" Bobbie "—was ninety years old, and was for a period extending over
sixty of them whip for the Bilsdale. Thus it may be imagined that with
him dies not only a veteran, and a character of more than local
note, but also much tradition, and much that is more than interesting
regarding hunting and the methods of huntsmen of a generation of which he was one of the few survivors . . . . From his youth
up his life has been an extraordinary one, and added to this his own
personality has been so original, so similar, yet so dissimilar to his
contemporaries, that it is a question as to whether the old whip earned
his fame because of that personality, and his own characteristics, or
because of his wonderful enthusiasm in matters venatic.

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