Hunting

The ‘Hempstead Invincibles’

Hempstead is close to the boundary between the Essex and Puckeridge Hunts. Boundaries are, of course, not strictly policed in foxhunting terms – hounds in hot pursuit can hardly be expected to pull up short at the ‘county line’! Nevertheless, there is an etiquette which is supposed to stop one hunt from making deep incursions into the territory of another.

In the late 18th / early 19th centuries, when permanent Hunts were beginning to be established, foxhunting was still substantially carried out by private packs of hounds owned by local squires. One such was the ‘Hempstead Invincibles, whose Master was Mr Thomas Andrews (1765 – 1847) of Wincelow Hall.

Neither Mr Andrews, nor his hounds, were great respecters of boundaries. According to the author Michael Brander, in his book Portrait of a Hunt (1976),

It is said that one one occasion, George Willis, Mr Andrews’ kennel huntsman, reported to his Master that the hounds had escaped from their kennel in the middle of the night and he could hear them running in Hempstead Wood. He was promptly ordered to saddle up his horse and collect them. Fortunately for him, the conditions were in his favour, for it was a bright moonlit night and there was also snow on the ground, so that he was able to follow their tracks, but even so it was not until he was at Hare Street, close to Buntingford, in the middle of the Puckeridge country, after close on a sixteen-mile point, thhat he was at last able to pick them up.

Colonel John Cook, who replaced Thomas Panton as Master of the Newmarket and Thurlow from 1800 to 1804 (and who was subsequently Master of the Essex and of the Hambledon) was a victim of the somewhat cavalier behaviour of Mr Andrews’ Invincibles. Nevertheless, he expressed a grudging admiration:

Althouh they were occasionally a great annoyance to me, and disturbed the cream of the country formerly hunted by the late Mr Panton, I could not be displeased with them; the farmers who managed them were respectable people, fond of the sport and had as much right to hunt as I had.

One of Thomas Andrews’ hounds, Chaunter, performed the unusual feat of hunting and killing a fox single-handed. Andrews was so proud that, in 1810, he commissioned a portrait of Chaunter, a Favourite Hound, to be painted in oils.

COUNTRY LIFE ARTICLE ON ‘THE HEMPSTEAD INVINCIBLES’, 12 DECEMBER 1936