The day an ancient and very wonderful sport died

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the last running of the English hare-coursing classic, the Waterloo Cup. I shan’t start raving on about the perversity of banning a so-called blood sport in which the death of the hare, should it happen, is seen as a failure. Suffice to say that in the last season of legal coursing under English Coursing Club rules, 160 hares were registered as killed — one in nine hares coursed. Three months after the Hunting Act had come into force, 8,000 conserved hares on ten coursing grounds had been shot, including 3,500 on the coursing grounds of the Swaffham Coursing Society (founded in 1776) alone.

In 1997 I was sent up to Great Altcar in Lancashire to report on the Waterloo Cup for a newspaper. To give me the best possible view of the action, the organisers put me in the ‘shy’ with the slipper. The ‘shy’ is a canvas screen hide past which the hares are driven by flag-waving beaters. The beaters encouraged individual hares to move forward by saying to them, ‘Ah! Ha!’ Knowing absolutely nothing, I crouched down out of sight clutching my notebook and biro.

The slipper that year was the great Garrett ‘Garry’ Kelly, slipper of 17 Waterloo Cups. Garry was dressed in cloth cap, hunting frock-coat, jodhpurs, jodhpur boots and ankle covers. While waiting for the first hare to be flushed, he and the coupled pair of coursing greyhounds stood quietly, the dogs’ skin crawling with anticipation. Then a hare made a bolt for it, shooting past the shy and across the open coursing ground. The crowd lining the grass bank roared. Once the dogs had clapped eyes on the hare, 180 pounds of sinew and muscle strained forward towards what has been the object of its desire for 3,000 years.