Terrier from the packs
by Colonel David Hancock.
DESPITE the long history of terriers working with the Foxhound packs in the hunting field, not one breed of terrier has the name of a famous Foxhound pack to identify it. We have no Heythrop, Belvoir, Pytchley, Curre or Cotswold terriers by title – perhaps because the hounds were run by the ‘toffs’ and the terriers by the more lowly.
Terriers from the packs have excelled as individuals but have not emerged to form distinctive breeds. In his Fox-Hunting from Shire to Shire of 1912, Cuthbert Bradley, or ‘Whipster’ of The Field magazine, wrote: “For many years the Belvoir had a noted fox-terrier, named Bluecoat, running with the pack; a dog with a wonderful character for work, who never tired in the longest day’s hunting.”
Bluecoat was about as game as they make them… A nearly all-white dog with a few blue ticks in a strong working coat, he was a good stamp of hunt-terrier, rather short in the neck, but good over the back, and through the loin. Known all over the Leicestershire and Lincolnshire district where the Belvoir hunt, he soon established a reputation for work and gameness, keeping up all day with the pack.”
Clearly a terrier running with the hounds in this instance worked well but ‘Bluecoat’ was an outstanding animal with legendary gameness. Appropriately, if sadly, he drowned swimming after a rat but not before siring some excellent offspring.
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