A pure delight: the Old English hound

Tough, tenacious and with an illustrious pedigree, this once out-of-favour hound is enjoying a revival as modern packs come to appreciate the qualities of Old English breeding

- Adrian Dangar

HOW TO DEFINE an Old English hound? I put the question to Martin Scott, who is acknowledged as the leading hound breeding authority of our time. The former Master and current breeder of the Vale of the White Horse (VWH) pack in Gloucestershire is something of a walking encyclopaedia when it comes to The Foxhound Kennel Stud Book, in which successive generations of foxhounds have been recorded ever since its inception in the mid-18th century. The casual observer might suggest Old English hounds are best identified by their uniform Belvoir tan but, as Scott points out, it’s really all about bloodlines. “A true Old English hound is one without a drop of outside blood,” he says. “That’s no American, fell, Welsh or heritage of any other kind in a foxhound pedigree going back to the late 19th century and beyond.”

It is true that a smooth black-and-tan coat is often the hallmark of an Old English hound; however, the Belvoir tan that predominates today is the consequence of a fashion that took hold in the late 1800s and gathered such momentum that by the start of the First World War entire packs of hounds were almost exclusively that colour.

The vogue also included such an excess of bone and substance that the avant-garde hound breeder Sir Peter Farquhar branded the era up until the War as ‘very sad in the history of the foxhound’, and criticised Masters who favoured fashion over work. The product of their policy was, he wrote many years later, hounds that were ‘nothing more or less than cripples’. In the fullness of time Sir Peter and other progressive hound breeders such as Bill Scott, George Evans and Ikey Bell were to use the Welsh outcross to improve the agility and conformation required by their own hounds to catch foxes in style.