On the Scent
of History
Tracing Cross Country Running's
True Origins
Running Times
December 1998
Page 28
By Roger Robinson
I may be the only tourist in
history to travel 12,000 miles to see a wet field.
No, there's no buried gold at the end of this story,
just a humble, low-lying basin of unkempt grass and
spiky marsh reeds, about 100 yards by 50, with one
arthritic tree and a straight, shallow ditch crossing
the middle, eroded and overgrown with weeds, visible
only by its line of darker green and lingering
puddles.
An expensive round-the-world
flight, a day's drive and three days of persistent
map work and tough running, all to discover this
ditch. Yet here lie the origins of a major modern
sport.
I first traveled to Shrewsbury,
in the west Midlands of England, to research a book
about the Victorian satiric writer Samuel Butler, who
attended a private high school there. Butler is not
such a big name these days (not a television series
yet), but his great mock-utopia Erewhon
("Nowhere" backwards, more or less), his
wickedly irreverent notebooks and his
autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh made him
a cult figure early in this century. He began writing
during his five years as a sheep farmer in New
Zealand's South Island, and I became interested while
teaching literature there. Like Butler, I had moved
from England. And like me, I discovered, Butler was a
runner.
As a closet historian of
running, I sat up when I noticed a paragraph in The
Way of All Flesh where the hero, Ernest, then a
schoolboy, runs across several miles of country to
present a parting gift to a housemaid dismissed by
his stern father. The narrator says that at school,
Ernest joined in an" amusement" called
"the Hounds, " so "a run of six or
seven miles across country was no more than he was
used to. " That's all there was to the
reference. The other novels I was teaching that year
were by Jane Austen and Henry James, and nobody ever
goes cross country running in those. So I stored the
little episode away.
I knew that Butler based
Emest's school, Roughborough, on Shrewsbury, where he
was (he always claimed) an undistinguished and
unpopular student from 1848 to 1854. On a visit to
England I dug out from my father's collection of old
books a history of Shrewsbury School. It confirmed
that a sport called the Hounds, or more formally, The
Royal Shrewsbury School Hunt, was established by
Butler's time, recorded in something called the Hound
Books. Thus began my journey to the wet ditch.
THE INVENTION OF
cross country running as an organized modern sport
has always been attributed to Rugby School, mainly
because of the paper chase Hare and Hounds in Thomas
Hughes' best-selling novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays
(1857). That chapter inspired the first adult running
club, Thames Hare and Hounds, founded near London in
1868. Its founder, Walter Rye, paid tribute to Rugby
School as the cradle of the sport in his seminal
essay, "Paper-Chasing and Cross-Country
Running" for the Badminton Library in 1887.
Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modem
Olympics, kept the Rugby myth alive. He read Tom
Brown's Schooldays at age 12, and formulated his
Olympiades during a visit to England's schools in
1883. He praised Rugby's famous principal, Thomas
Amold, as the first to develop sports as part of
education.
The truth, I was to find, lay
100 miles northwest of Rugby, at Shrewsbury. I went
to Shrewsbury one September on official leave from my
university. I did not expect to find much. Butler
provided such a full narrative of his schooldays in
The Way of All Flesh that his biographers have never
tried to add to it. He was "listless and
unhappy, " the novel tells us, "no greater
lover of his school work than of the games. " He
wrote that in his 30s, and repeated its unflattering
version in autobiographical memoirs penned near the
end of his life. There has been no reason to doubt
it. It was more for sport than scholarship,
therefore, that I asked the librarian at Shrewsbury
to find those Hound Books for me. They are crackly
old exercise books, such as you'd find in any dusty
attic, their pages hand-written in scratchy black
ink. The writing changes year by year with each
generation of schoolboy secretaries. The oldest is
dated 1831, and accounts elsewhere indicate that the
sport was established at Shrewsbury by 1819-almost 20
years before Thomas Hughes played Hare and Hounds at
Rugby.
The reports of the runs, twice
a week from September to the Christmas holidays, are
detailed, spirited and sometimes very funny. In
imagination I joined those long-dead schoolboys in
their zestful enjoyment of hard running over varied
country. I also realized, as a scholar, that I held
in my hands absolutely authentic documentation of the
very early history of modern sport. In these stained
and yellow pages, dating back to before the time of
Queen Victoria, lie the origins of all the
international off-road sports we call cross country,
trail running, mountain running and harriers.
A game called "Hunt the
Fox" or "Hunt the Hare" had been
played in English schools at least since the reign of
Queen Elizabeth I. Shakespeare may have played it; he
has Hamlet call, "Hide, fox, and all after"
when he eludes the Elsinore security guards. At
Shrewsbury School, sometime about 1800, the game was
organized into an outdoor sport called the Hunt or
the Hounds. It was a way for the young gents to
practice their future pastime, fox hunting. Two
runners called "foxes" ("hares"
at Rugby and elsewhere) ran ahead laying a
"scent" of shredded paper. After an
interval of about five to 10 minutes known as
"law", the "pack" was
"coupled up" and "threw off' after the
scent. There were "checks" (obstacles or
false trails), a "view halloa" when the
foxes were sighted, and then the "run in, "
with the fastest hound getting the honor of "the
kill. " Someone was also awarded "the
brush. " I prefer not to know what that meant.
SOME OP THIS
is still part of our sport. Cross country runners are
called harriers, which means "hare-hunters.
" The international Hash House Harriers preserve
the old game, following a scent of flour now, not
paper. A group of runners on a trail, road or track
is called a pack. We all still run in the footsteps
of the Shrewsbury Hounds. In Shrewsbury, I decided to
do that literally;. The hunts each went in an agreed
direction, with the foxes providing variety and
challenge. Over the years these runs acquired names.
So I did my best that week to run these old courses:
The Bog, The Drayton, The Tucks and The Long (all 14
miles of it). Often I was turned back by urban sprawl
and screaming highways, but I managed to trace some
routes and locate landmarks cited in the Hound
Books-the Sevem River and little grass-clogged
Berwick Brook, Coton Hill and Sundome Farm(still
there, squeezed next to a giant retail park),
Battlefield (where King Henry IV retained his title
in 1403) and the tiny communities of Hencott and
Atcham.
In a car you would call
this-country rolling, but for a runner it is hilly
-and wet. I scratched my shins on stubble and plodded
across what the Hound Book often calls "heavy
ploughed land. " I ran with my historical
antecedents across folds and gullies, even the
natural bowls where cold water lurked. Being in my
50s, I could not match the schoolboys' eagerness for
"good leaps" and "stiff fences, "
wriggling instead inelegantly through the thick thorn
hedges which they crossed by a technique known as
belly-hedging. Nor could I "run in" on the
narrow lanes as freely as they did, being pressed
against the hedgerow every few seconds by some
frenzied automobile. But I tracked them as well as I
could. One day I ran to Hencott Pool, where they made
their kill on November 3, 1851; and where the
following year(September 25, 1852) they met the check
of a "snarling dog. " Both times, it is
documented, Sam Butler was among them. On November 3,
1852, after a heavy rain, he was one of the foxes who
mischievously laid the scent so that it crossed a
field covered in shallow water that concealed a
"treacherous drain" across the middle. The
Hound Book reported that "both hounds and
gentlemen, some head first, some tail, were one after
the other seen to disappear in the water; this
however only cooled our legs without cooling our
ardor, and we went along at a brisk pace up the
fields toward Hencott. "Finding that field and
its treacherous ditch became my last objective. It
was to prove a challenging one.
FORTUNATELY, I
made numerous other discoveries along the way that
both piqued my academic interest and kept me well
entertained. Like most runners, the Hounds were
independent, even rebellious, and enjoyed a vigorous
social life. Then as now the three great passions of
runners, apart from running, were food, beer and
trespassing. They liked to "refresh
themselves" during runs. I read of them pausing
to "imbibe punch at the farm of N. Lloyd Esq,
"that they "washed the hounds' mouths out
with some beer, " and "regaled our pack
with punch &c. " While running The Long,
they drank beer and sherry at the inn at Atcham. An
early form of interval training, perhaps. On special
occasions they took full meals ("were regaled
with a substantial repast").
Perhaps not surprisingly,
relations with local farmers and the school
authorities were less than harmonious. Some farmers
served them refreshments, but at others the Hound
Books record "altercations, "
"threats" and "burning execrations.
" The boys apparently bore no grudges. After one
infuriated old man threatened "a summunds"
against them, "saying good for the old fellow we
struck into the lane. "
The Shrewsbury School
principal, the eminent classicist Dr. Benjamin
Kennedy, tried to make rules about where the lads
could run. But, the Hound Book records, "as
stolen fruit is always the sweetest, we determined to
. . . revive the good old custom of running out of
bounds. " They vaulted hedges, enraged an
irascible miller, defied farmers, chased off their
dogs and ran, often wide-eyed, down the secluded road
that the Hound Book calls Fornicators Lane. Dr.
Kennedy tried making them wear mortarboards as they
ran, locked their dormitories and stood out in the
cold to take the names of those breaking bounds (they
whooped by on the other side of the hedge). Once,
they reported, "Ben nabbed the scent bag. "
With an eloquent gesture of reprisal they shredded
copies of his recently published Kennedy's Latin
Primer and dropped the tatters as paper trail.
"Frantic but fruitless" was how they
described his efforts to undo the damage.
In the midst of all this, at a
time when membership was high and rebelliousness
rampant, was Sam Butler, the lad who later belittled
himself as "a young muff, a mollycoddle . . . a
mere bag of bones with . . . no strength or stamina
whatever. " Often Butler was a fox, staying
ahead of the pack while carrying the heavy scent bag.
In 1854, his senior year, he was Huntsman, or club
captain, an elected position.
The weak, shrinking, dispirited
young Butler - by his own account and that of every
biographer was looking more and more like a skillful
burying of the truth. I began to understand also how
that clergyman's son straight out of Cambridge had
managed to become one of the most intrepid mountain
explorers in New Zealand's history. It's not often a
biographer can play hooky, as I was, and at the same
time hit the jackpot.
One of Butler's duties as
Huntsman was "fixing the ground" for two
competitive events organized by the Hounds after
their hunting season. One was the Annual
Steeplechase, a cross country race of notorious
severity. The first definite record of it is in 1834.
It is thus the oldest cross country race of the modem
era. The second, held each year in May, was the
Second Spring Meeting, a series of mock horse races
including the Derby Stakes, the Hurdle Race, the
Trial Stakes and a program of throwing and jumping
events. In other words, it was a track and field
meet, again the oldest still in existence, with 1840
the earliest definite date.
In a scrapbook kept by a
popular math teacher of Butler's time, and preserved
now in the school library, I found some of the
"race-cards" for these meets. Again, my
discovery had both historical interest and
entertainment value. Each runner was supposedly a
horse, entered by an" owner" who gave him
an appropriate horse-like name. After a while it
dawned on me that many of these names were
satiric-Adonis, The Wild 'Un, Mad-rig-all,
Plate-Licker and Everlasting Pea (probably a
disturber of the peace in the dormitories).
From this unexpected, almost
illicit source I obtained information about how
Butler was regarded by his peer group. I also gained
insight into schoolboy humor, often in a sexual vein.
Names like Miss Prettyman, The Perfumer, Smut
Fancier, Frog's Spawn, The Beaver Hunter and two
adjacent entries for Romeo and Juliet suggest that
teenage testosterone was as active during the reign
of Queen Victoria as in any other era.
IT HAD BEEN A
good week, although I'd failed to find the
"treacherous drain" into which Butler and
his fellow foxes lured the pack in November 1852. Two
or three years later I visited Shrewsbury again, this
time with my 85 year old parents along. For two days
I attempted again to pick up the scent. I went back
to Hencott, where the pack ran "at a brisk
pace" after their ducking. I searched through
faceless 1950s housing developments to find their
route into the open country. Most likely it was all
buried under the shopping malls and highway
interchanges that now encircle the old town. It
hardly mattered, I told myself. I was only looking
for a field after all. On our last morning, with a
flight to New Zealand the next day, I searched once
more for a footpath I'd found marked on an old map.
After more checks, I found a promising narrow lane
between Coton Hill and the railroad (a line built
later than 1852). It led only to an opulent white
house. The scent had died. Walking disconsolately
back to the car where my folks waited for their
eccentric son, I suddenly saw a tiny foot track I'd
missed on the way up, twisting steeply down through
long grass. I scrambled down. And there at the bottom
of the hill I found it.
No doubt - a low lying field
between two hills, clumped with marsh grass, with the
dark green ditch running straight across it. Soggy in
September, it would be flooded after the November
rains.
Perhaps the roguish foxes
secretly watched the pursuing hounds splashing across
it up to their ankles until the ground disappeared
and they tumbled headlong into the deeper water. I
didn't tumble in, but I jogged a short way in the
footsteps of those ghostly runners up the hill toward
Hencott. My parents waited, patiently eating bananas.
I suspect they have doubts about the seriousness of
their progeny's professorial research.
Indeed, real biographers would
laugh at all the trouble I'd taken to find such an
obscure and boggy bit of England. But it gave me a
sense of contact over 145 years, of the boy Sam
Butler as he really was , and of continuity and
history in the sport that has given me so much
pleasure. As the Hound Book put it that wet 1852 day,
I had cooled my legs but not my ardor. I drove away
from Shrewsbury at a brisk pace.