NEW: WILLY'S FULL CV AVAILABLE TO VIEW HERE

For some reason many of you seem to want to know about my background - a thing I try very hard to fade into, but I suppose that your curiosity must be satisfied - up to a point.

I was bred and buttered in Cornwall and brought up in my Grandmother's rambling Victorian house. I was born in 1940. My father was away at the War, most of which he spent as a prisoner of the Japanese. He never fully recovered from this experience and would never talk about it. Nothing Japanese was allowed in the house. I was five years old when Father and I met for the first time and I regret that our Relationship was never easy - a lot of him never came back from Singapore. I was spoiled rotten as a child, being the only male in a household of women. Granny maintained a tail of ageing female servants. Some of whom had been with the family since time out of memory. The household was ruled with an iron rod by Ruby, the cook / housekeeper, who came to the family as a 14 year old nursery maid (for father and uncle) and stayed until she died. I adored Ruby, which was a great bone of contention with my mother.


My grandfather died in 1936 from pneumonia caught out hunting, although my uncle (who spent his war wrestling with the Enigma Code) always maintained that he died of boredom. This was quite possible as the old man had spent his life as a peripatetic soldier of the Empire, getting himself posted to any little war that was going, commanding the Somali Camel Corps and mapping a great swathe of Central Africa. He retired as a Major in 1913; was recalled in 1914 and finished the War as a Major General, having fought on the Somme, been a military adviser to the late Czar, commanded a regiment of Cossacks for the White Army and the expeditionary force to Archangel. For many years his portrait hung in the Kremlin as an 'Enemy of the People'. He was sacked for not suffering War Office fools and box wallahs politely something that is tucked into my genes as well. He retired to Cornwall and as he was almost certainly what would now be called - 'an adrenaline junky' - he had been fighting for the Empire for most of his adult life; my uncle's diagnosis was probably correct. I wish that I had known him. My father almost became a 3rd Hussar. The regiment (along with my wife's father) was pretty well wiped out in N.Africa, whilst my father 'went in the bag' at Singapore and only the fact that he was badly shot up saved him from the Burma Railway. In the end, he was saved by Hiroshima. The Japs had promised to herd all the prisoners into old mine workings and then blow up the entrances. 'Ban the Bomb-ers' get short shrift from me.

After the war he qualified as a land agent and suffered the trauma of seeing our much-loved Cornish home appropriated by the Labour Government. Had my grandmother lived another 6 weeks, it would have been saved. My parents eventually settled in Gloucestershire where they lived until father died in 1977. I was away at school for a large part of the time - first at a ghastly concentration camp in Worcestershire, which I still shudder to think of, and then at Eton where I was moderately happy. Eton had (and still has) its own pack of beagles and it was here that I fell in love with hunting - the Grand Passion of my life. Hunting was in the genes anyway - Grandfather had been a Master of Hounds and Great Uncle Jack kept his own pack for 40 years . After a spell in the Army, of which I can only say that I spent most of my time and a lot of adrenalin, in Ulster, I was sent to work in London. Father was fixed on Chartered Accountancy, which might have been a good idea, had I not been (and still am) dyscalculic (mathematical dyslexia). It was horrid time. I had no ability in my work and no money to make London life bearable. Thus it was in 1964 I was sacked. I kicked my bowler hat down Cornhill and took on the Mastership of the Dartmoor Foxhounds.

At the ripe age of 23, I was the youngest and almost certainly the stupidest, Master of Foxhounds in the Realm. Dartmoor is not dissimilar to the Cheviots, but rougher, wetter and not as steep. I loved the wild hunting, but faced two major problems - money and people. The hunt gave me an allowance of £2,000. Out of this I was expected to pay all the running expenses of the hunt and keep myself. I allowed myself £5 per week pocket money and in those days the hides from the fallen stock (knackers) fetched a bit. I did all the knackering. In the winter, 50/60 sheep in a day were not uncommon. In my prime, I could skin and cut up a sheep in less than 2 minutes. Work started at 0600 and often went on until 0100, the following morning. I was fit and hard as an otter in those days. People were the other problem. Since time out of memory, one side of the Moor had fought the other side, for no known reason. I did my best to keep well in the middle, which is, of course, the best place to become collateral damage. After 3 years, I took the hump and moved my meagre possessions and myself to the Wilton, near Salisbury, where there was more money (I actually employed 2.5persons) and absolutely no feuding. They were charming people and I have always compared them to the 40-year-old virgin - thankful for small mercies. The Wilton was a country of rolling chalk downland and big woods. It was, and is, very feudal and most hospitable, but rather short of foxes. This meant that any fox you found, you had to make the most of. This was a most useful lesson in the art of Venerie. It was a happy time and I teetered on the brink of decamping with the wife of a major landowner. I teetered too long and she decamped with someone else's husband. Such is life. In the end lack of funds drove me out. I drove lorries and shipped as a deckhand on a Panamanian freighter, running in and out of the Middle East. I quit when I discovered that its cargoes were not always what they might have been - I did not fancy an Arab gaol.

It was in the aftermath of this that I met and married my wife to the great and understandable disapproval of her family. We worked through the problems and have now been married for 30 years. When we met she had 3 MsFH in the family and swore that she would never marry one. But at the time I was a lorry driver, so she counted this unto me for righteousness. After a short time, she sat me down and said that it was obvious to her that if I did not have a pack of hounds soon, I would become even loonier than I already was. So in 1973 I took the Taunton Vale in Somerset. This was a mistake. It was and is a country of small wet dairy farms. I was getting quite good at the job and this meant that the mounted field increased from 50 odd horses to 150, which was just too many for the country. But if success made a public relations rod for my back, it also got me head-hunted to the Sinnington in N.Yorkshire - a Premier League set up. It was a lovely happy country, largely thanks to the respect that everybody had for my senior joint master - Anne, Countess of Feversham - a great Lady in every possible respect. The Sinnington was also blessed with the biggest and strongest foxes I have ever encountered. Good foxes make good hunting and I reckon that I had the best hunting there that I have had anywhere. It was also the country that finally snapped my nerve. Everybody has just so many falls in them and my bottle finally overflowed. I resigned the mastership and was going to live in the Lake District and write. Then two of my oldest friends got hold of me and said - "No you can't. You will go to the West Percy and hunt them. There is no jumping there." That was over 20 years ago. I fell in love with the Cheviots and it was a return to the type of hunting that I started with. The fun was enormous. This was largely due to the late, great, Duke Hughie and the generous friendship of Sir Ralph Carr - Ellison and the late Lady Carr-Ellison, whom I used to reduce to fits of murderous Irish rage, bless her kind and lovely soul. It was also at the West Percy that I learned two valuable lessons - 1) that there was no way that I would ever persuade sheep to help keep me, instead of t'other way about, and 2) that I was able to make a modest living with my pen - largely thanks to that great man - Max Hastings. There was also the valuable advice I remembered from my youth - that you should give up hunting hounds, before it gave you up. I was getting older, fatter and slower.

I had worked with hounds for some 30 years. It was time for a younger man to take on. So that's where it's at. The wife and I live in reasonable harmony in our tiny house with its stunning views of the E.Cheviots. I still chisel a small living out of the literary quarry face. My only son is a successful headhunter in London. I read books and smoke my pipe and get great pleasure from following the famous Border Hounds on my quad. 'The lines have fallen unto me in pleasant places.' For this I thank God and many good friends.