Hunting for solutions

The MFHA chairman on a lifetime with hounds, avoiding ‘own goals’ and the future

- Lucy Higginson

LIKE an athlete who can’t bear to return to the scene of their sporting triumphs to watch someone else take their place on the start line, Andrew Osborne doesn’t hunt these days. ‘I struggle to watch someone else hunt hounds,’ he admits. ‘I miss being able to hunt them every day—and I want to spend the rest of my life missing it.’

Despite the challenges huntsmen face trying to keep hounds ‘who haven’t read Hansard’ hunting legally, Mr Osborne still considers it the best job in hunting. He should know; there are few hunting jobs he hasn’t done, including being a master and field master, amateur huntsman, hound judge and—since May— chairman of the Masters of Foxhounds Association (MFHA).

The son of a joint-master and secretary of the Holderness in East Yorkshire, he was instantly fixated with the sport: ‘It was all I thought about—much to the detriment of my schoolwork. I just wanted to get home to my terrier and pony.’

His father ‘entirely discouraged the idea of working in hunting’ and sent him ‘to a school without a pack of beagles,’ he adds, scornfully. It didn’t work. Holidays in kennels in the company of ‘proper hunt servants’ such as Willie Deakin and his father, Dick, listening to tales of inter-war hunting set the hook.

Mr Osborne became a joint master, then huntsman of the Sinnington, followed by the Bedale, both in Yorkshire, and then the Cottesmore in Leicestershire, running his own property firm (and small cattle farm) around the more serious business of hunting.