Bridging the gap

If there was anything to coax you through the final hurdles of school drudgery, it is the prospect of a whole year hunting. Madeleine Silver finds out how to get your gap year fix on the hunting field

- Madeleine Silver

WHEN the northeasterly Yorkshire wind was blowing at the Middleton, an 18-year-old Luke Tomlinson briefly let himself imagine his fellow school leavers lying on a Thailand beach.

“But I was living the dream really,” says the England polo player, who arrived to help then master Frank Houghton Brown in the summer after finishing school nearly 25 years ago, staying for the season. “The weather up there was obviously pretty tough, but it was magical when you had a good day’s hunting.”

While spending a gap year volunteering with a hunt isn’t official training, “it is extremely good work experience for the future if someone either wants to go into hunt service or hunt their own pack of hounds”, says the Hunting Office’s Alice Bowden. “You are usually given accommodation, a good square meal every now and then and hunting — which a lot of people would think is brilliant. It’s an unofficial arrangement, but it is an invaluable one.”

For Frank, who had a rolling intake of gap-year students when he was at both the Middleton and the Tyndale, making sure they fitted into the same schedule as the hunt staff was critical.

“If they were given preferential treatment, then they wouldn’t have been accepted, so they got up at 6am, did the kennels, and then went and looked after their own horse. After that they went off doing whatever jobs were needed, whether it was building fences in the country or painting the kennels,” says Frank.

“They usually just did the hunting season with us, but we did have some who stayed longer; Otis Ferry came to me from Marlborough College and ended up staying for four years. Everyone who started hacked it, but I think the first couple of months for some of them was pretty tough. It’s hard work, but the harder you work, the more fun you get out of it.”