Following hot on the heels of one of the regular but increasingly pointless meetings between Surrey Police and local hunt saboteurs, this meet was interesting due to a tip off forewarning us of trouble from the hunt. Apparently Mark Sprake, one of the hunt masters, and probably the worst horn blower ever heard, was going to engineer a confrontation and then demand (as usual) that the police arrest the sabs. Just imagine: If we told the police that our express intention was to start some trouble and physically drag people around, we would undoubtedly be arrested at the very least for causing a breach of the peace. However if you are the master of a hunt in Surrey, you have tacit police support to do it!
Arriving early at the meet, I checked the fox earths and badger setts near the meet alongside the River Wey, which the hunt terrierman takes great delight in blocking up with fertiliser sacks. Whilst moving quietly among the undergrowth, it soon became apparent that hordes of police were in attendance patrolling the fields around the meet, so it seemed our source had not let us down.
Not being perturbed by the large numbers of police, the main body of sabs soon arrived and took up positions along the public track running by the meet into the woods they would draw. Within minutes of the hunt moving off and the sabs finding themselves cut off in a loop of the river, the hunt riders were off their horses in front of the police, trying unsuccessfully to drag people off the land. Unfortunately for the hunt, they forgot that hounds don't understand what their 'masters' are up to and with a couple of toots of the horn from the top of the hill above the river, we had the whole pack running with us into the distance. We hunted them on for quite a while before the huntsman decided they had lost the battle below, and came in search of their pack of hounds.
In close contact with the hunt and police on Ministry of Defence land at Yagden Hill, it was obvious that despite police promises that only experienced officers would police hunts in Surrey, we had been given the shitty end of the stick as usual. Not only did we have mainly rookie cops and specials (who aren't supposed to be used in public order policing situations) the majority seemed to come from the famously bent Farnham division. So no surprise when a sab was kicked in the stomach by a horse that was deliberately spurred by its female rider in order to get it to lash out, and all the police happened to have been looking the other way or at their feet!
Upon realising that we wouldn't be beaten by physical aggression, the hunt did what they normally do here and legged it. For some reason, the MOD grant the Surrey Union a licence allowing them to hunt over 'their' land. If you and I were to terrorise the wildlife on the commons in this area, we would be in trouble with the MOD police. When the hunt do it, they have the support of the MOD police. There are signs all over the commons barking out byelaws and rules about what you or I can do whilst just being on the land, and the hunt mash it up and try to kill things all over it and get away scot-free! It does make it pretty clear who pulls the strings in this country! Just check out byelaw 9 below (Click to enlarge the photo) if you can see it in the photo: "No person when on the Military Lands shall:- pursue, kill, shoot, snare or trap game or other birds or animals……" and so on.
The going is well tough if you are on foot trying to keep up with horses in this area so it was no surprise that we lost the hunt for a lot of the afternoon. Also, they didn't follow the route they usually do from here, and we had to do a bit of tracking, really only managing to follow horse and hound tracks for the most part. A reassuring feature was that the hound paw prints stayed very much to the tracks so it meant that the hunt were concentrating on moving fast to keep ahead of us rather than concentrate on drawing the coverts thoroughly. It was small comfort though. We did find them again in the woods off the Seale road and managed to have a little sport with them, following them along a ridiculously narrow 'green lane' in our rusty old transit. Definitely not an off-road vehicle!
Also heart-warming to see was the embarrassment of a red-coated rider nose-diving into the mud after coming off his horse and then flapping around trying to catch it in the field by the meet. All in all not a brilliant day, not being certain they didn't kill, but we did stand up to their contrived tactics and the attitude of the police with no arrests, and were back to sab another day...