POINT OF NO RETURN? Amateur steeplechasing losing its focus

Even the twin ‘apostles’ of Point-to-Pointing, Iain Mackenzie and Martin Harris who crafted the late lamented bible of ‘Hunter Chasers & Point–to-Pointers’ (1968-2012), are fearful the version of steeplechasing they chronicled so spontaneously and expertly is doomed.

The annuals, choc-a-bloc with meticulous results and arch commentaries on eccentric participants (two and four-legged) and idiosyncratic racecourses, were required reading for many who had no concept of striking ‘hunting pink’ but dutifully togged up in bland Pointing mufti – Barbours, corduroys and green wellies - to wend along rutted lanes to remote venues in all weathers. The trek ensures involvement. 

Having devoted careers to Pointing - overpaid consultants and marketeers need not apply - only Mackenzie and Harris could be entrusted with the requiem. Point-to-Pointing survived the banning of hunting with dogs in 2004 but it’s a different animal today when its raison d’etre is as a Breeze-Up for jumpers under Rules. ‘Open races’ were once the acme - for superannuated steeplechasers or mounts whom their owners would no more go racing with on professional terms than shoot foxes. Now Maidens and Bumpers (for goodness sake!) crowd the shop window.

Ireland is different. They don’t have our anti-hunting prejudices/sympathies. What they do have are honeypots for their point-to-pointers, for eye-watering amounts: unsuspecting purchasers may be the ones in tears. Some change hands as soon as they jump the first at such as Toomebridge, Bartlemy, Loughrea. Yet the Irish have struck a balance between a rural community at play, run by volunteers, and a product designed to induce the ambitious to dig deep. 

Point-to-Point devotees inhabit a small planet. Nerdish? possibly, yet their baroque sentiments chipped in to the oh-so-subjective Annuals, spoke of fanatical commitment. There are saner ways of establishing your ‘countryside credentials’ than turning a brave face to the Arctic blasts across Salisbury Plain at Larkhill, shared with MOD firing ranges. The ‘Cheltenham’ of Pointing was almost the ‘Aintree’: the suggestion was the Grand National should go to Larkhill when Mrs Topham threatened to flog off Liverpool. 

The toilets would have needed a face lift: according to Hunter Chasers they’d been used for tank target practice.

Friendly fire? I’ll return to. Back in 1984 Mackenzie and Terry Selby (“I was just his lackey,” said Iain) fulminated: “Some genuine hunters do occasionally pop up but they are not bred to cover three and a half miles at racing pace and the spectacle of such ill-prepared animals staggering through the finish is most distressing.” 

They didn’t mince their words. But unintended consequences…as the sport ‘upped its game’ so followed financial contamination.  The Point’s function was to fund the Hunt, even as costs spiralled: Martin estimates it costs £20,000 to stage a meeting.

The Annual was never apologetic. “A book of this nature that made no conclusions would be valueless, one that was invariably correct – miraculous”. Still, the cutting comments were never gratuitous: the praise, heartfelt. “The fun element of Pointing rates far higher with the owner than any chance of winning a paltry prize (pennies) – long may this sporting attitude prevail and may those who wish to abolish Hunting and thereby effectively deal a mortal blow to Pointing, perish!” 

The Abolition Bill passed through Parliament, 362 to 154 for the ban.

So the ‘Corinthian’ days are over. Mackenzie says: “There isn't a future for Pointing. In my last season of doing the Annual, 2010-11, there were 3626 hunter certificates (visas to compete): this year, around 1450. Every year since foot and mouth the number has gone down. In 2025, at important fixtures, fourteen horses turned out at Garthorpe; thirteen at Larkhill; eight at Tabley; four at Corbridge (fields of 2, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0).”

Martin Harris produces the loose-leaf Pointing Form Book – an extraordinary feat when you consider the demise of the official Form Book, Superform, the Timeform Annuals and Perspective. Existential threats are more than financial. Cricket demarcated ‘Gentlemen and Players’ – amateurs v professionals - in its salad days before selling its soul to the twin ogres of television and advertising. Broadcasting and printed word require colour, not the stark black and white of bookmaker diktat, grasping racing in their insatiable maw. The brushwork of the late Jonathan Neesom who briefly hosted Pointing on television, Mackenzie and Harris, came in 3D.

Iain contemplates a perilous future. “What will probably kill the sport faster than anything is the number of horses attached to big stables, livery and prepping yards. Do people really want to put on a sport in which they are not really involved?  

“Farmer Fred used to keep a hunter or two for himself and family to bump along; perhaps a mare to breed from. Nowadays the kids have wider horizons. Agents take over farming: driverless tractors don’t hunt. Let’s not get started on inheritance tax.”

Tumbleweed blows down the tracks of a grass-roots sport. And yet at the 130 fixtures scheduled at seventy-seven courses for 2024-5 you might still bump into champion trainers introducing their next generation. 

Time and again that word ‘passion’ dominates conversation – matched by the old huntsman I knew who couldn’t pull on his hunting boots due to arthritic toes, had them cut off - and rode on.

I mention the form of a horse who last ran in some far flung track and quick as a flash Harris is on to it: “Yes, surprising how brilliantly that race has worked out given it was eight seconds slow.”  Encyclopaedic or what? That horse was Highclere’s Carlenrig.

As with Mackenzie, his mentor, Harris emphasizes the camaraderie. “There’ll always be thirty – forty conversations at a meeting, the atmosphere is quite different from that under Rules. But as volunteer numbers have declined - they prepare the tracks and put the land back after racing - more meetings are scheduled for clement weather. The game’s roots are in winter,” he states trenchantly. 

The first Point used to be in February: come May there would still be plenty of horses on the go. Now the November starts mean, come spring and quick ground, fields are depleted. Ian, typically sardonic, encapsulates what Pointing once was, musing, “The jockeys all seemed to wear colour combinations of Eton and Harrow blue. A lot of hoops; And the racecard was only half a crown! 

“Some people think that hunting is irrelevant to Pointing. I strongly disagree,” he said – sentiments backed by Martin. “Thinking paid people could replace volunteers was pie in the sky. They tried it at Tweseldown (1868-2012) and the great old course soon shut.” 

Deep in Hampshire woods, sylvan Tweseldown was described in one Annual as “requiring a dose of Agent Orange to improve viewing”. Which takes us to the Annual’s meat – horses, courses and riders – their paragraph of fame. Martin: “My favourite write-up? A horse called Yr Eryr, Welsh for ‘The Eagle’ but more Eddie than the feathered version – ‘may fly further next season’.”

New House: After the race he smashed into a sports car, jumped a stone wall and fell into a pond. Can go a bit, but does not impress.
Scally Beau: Putting a bolting mare to Scallywag was the sort of experiment Frankenstein would have treasured.
Thomas Crown: May have trouble staying, although it could be just the veteran rider running out of puff.

Rising Rebel: The owner may be looking for the equine equivalent of a car boot sale. And one that will remain anonymous: “Carried 17 stone to the first fence and dumped it.”

Everybody in this niche world begged inclusion - the ‘Private Eye syndrome’. The subjects of derision would sacrifice school photos to find room on loo walls for framed versions of the insults. 

Not that the scribes were niggardly with credit. “Spartan Missile - reportedly going to Nick Henderson’s and surely no trainer can have started with a finer horse”. 

Spartan Missile, amateur ridden, second to Aldaniti in the 1981 Grand National, was perhaps the highest-rated pointer, surpassing even Flying Ace who 1983-92, won fifty-nine times, aged five to fifteen. “It should have been sixty,” said his constant partner Doreen Calder. “But they put the weight cloth on wrong and it came off.” 

How would the Annual have rated Energumene (Fr)? One run, victory in the Larkhill maiden - as a four-year-old! (unheard of precocity) in January 2018. His ticket was booked on the ‘underground railroad’ to Willie Mullins. The Queen Mother Two-Mile Champion Chase winner of 2022 and 2023 returned £1m prize money; Larkhill contributed a couple of hundred pounds.

And then the courses: 

Bogside, Ayr former home of the Scottish National “rapidly falling into decay. Viewing good when overcast but sun reflecting on sea (Irish) can cause problems”.

Carholme, Lincoln, another ex-racecourse, “Toilets unchanged since Fred Archer’s day. Stands include an incredibly seedy bar!”.

Talybont Powys, “Commentator adequate unless there are more than five in a race”.

Siegfried Sassoon’s opus ‘Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man’ (1928)  is a lament for bygone days - “I wanted the past to survive and to begin again.” Its ambivalence, shot through with sanitized nostalgia for a lost age of privilege - Sassoon never needed to work – ensured its esteem.  

During the First War Sassoon observed that foxes, undisturbed in Britain during the carnage in France, multiplied til they were too plentiful for good sport. ‘Memoirs’ was inspired by the shooting of a fox which had strayed into his trench. Sassoon was invalided out after being shot by (allegedly) friendly fire. 

Successive incarnations of Hunter Chasers traded in ‘friendly fire’. The last edition went out shining with passion in its sheath of acerbic humour.

Oscar Wilde’s character Lord Illingworth sneered, immortally, that the English country gentleman chasing the fox is “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”.  (Fox isn’t inedible, so I’m told, but if a ‘Reynard roast’ doesn’t microwave try gas mark 5). 

Hunting has democratised since Wilde’s day though members of the Banwen Miners Hunt, West Glamorgan weren’t necessarily paid up NUM members. It shared coal mining’s fate. 

The 2004 ban has promoted a lingering death, assisted dying. Back in 1933 Rudyard Kipling defended hunting in his prescient way: ‘The Fox Meditates’: 

When men grew shy of hunting stag,
For fear the Law might try 'em,
The Car put up an average bag
Of twenty dead per diem.
Then every road was made a rink
For Coroners to sit on;
And so began, in skid and stink,
The real blood-sport of Britain!

And if the fox population grubbing in the dustbins of London W1 keeps increasing, we may yet witness Belgravia Harriers or  Chelsea Foxhounds: ironic, since a withering critique of Hunt ‘meets’ nowadays is “tarmac harriers” - confined to roads, the countryside oh so often a no-go area. Pointing – going, going, g…