Introduction
In 1926 the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) was offered a private legacy of £10,000 on the condition that it should oppose all sports involving the pursuit or death of any stag, deer, fox, hare, rabbit, bird, fish, or any other animal, and shall use every means to abolish such sports. Stephen Coleridge, a long-standing member of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Council known for his total opposition to vivisection and all forms of hunting, a founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and president of the recently formed League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports regretted that his fellow members of the Council had seen fit to reject such a generous bequest. His resolution was narrowly defeated by thirty-six votes to thirty-one. Lord Banbury, the Conservative Member of Parliament for the City of London, summed up the majority view on the RSPCA Council in the following way:
Lord Lambourne is Chairman of the Council. Lord Lambourne hunts and shoots, and therefore it would be impossible to accept the bequest unless we got rid of him. I hunt and shoot, General Colvin hunts and shoots. . .. The King is patron of this Society, and his Majesty shoots. The Prince of Wales is the President, and he hunts – in fact he says it is the finest sport in the world. Are we to get rid of the King, the Prince of Wales, Lord Lambourne, General Colvin, Colonel Wyllie, and last but least, myself? I decided it was impossible to accept this legacy.Footnote 1
Before the 1920s opposition to most types of hunting faced enormous cultural, social and political barriers. The main late nineteenth-century pressure group opposed to hunting was the Humanitarian League, set up in 1891 by Henry Salt.Footnote 2 The League recognised that fox hunting was regarded as almost a national institution and stood no chance of abolition, but rather concentrated its fire against so-called cruel or spurious sports, such as hunting tame stags and bagged rabbits and hares, and wider animal welfare issues such as vivisection and vegetarianism, which attracted stronger public support. Aristocratic and royal interests dominated the leadership of the RSPCA and made opposition to hunting wild animals, especially shooting and stag hunting, which were upper class sports reserved exclusively for royalty and landowners, a political impossibility. While elements of the emerging Labour movement supported humanitarian causes, interest was focused on opposing the hated game laws and the misuse of agricultural land for non-productive purposes such as sport. Working class recreations, such as rabbit and hare coursing, and the right to poach game, were jealously defended. The question of animal cruelty did not feature to any significant extent in any working class political campaigns.
However, by the 1970s the RSPCA became the more direct focus of different groups seeking to infiltrate the society, both pro and anti hunting, and the prospect of abolition of all ‘blood sports’ became a political possibility. The RSPCA became ‘a prime target for the new radicals aiming to transform its plodding respectability’.Footnote 3 The hunting traditions of the royal family attracted particular condemnation at a time when mainstream politicians, led by Lord Houghton of Sowerby and Eric Heffer MP were making a concerted effort to put ‘animals into politics’.Footnote 4 This period also witnessed the emergence of more radical elements determined to take direct action, like the Hunt Saboteurs Association, set up in 1962, whose ideology was based on an agenda designed to transform ‘animal welfare’ into ‘animal rights’.Footnote 5 As a result of these and other pressures, the RSPCA had declared by 1976 that its official policy incorporated opposition to fox hunting and the shooting of birds for sport.Footnote 6 This was the first time that the RSPCA had publicly opposed fox hunting and this represented a major change of direction and a long-term victory for anti-blood sports campaigners. The Hunt Saboteurs Association hailed the move as a ‘major step forward’ and a ‘blow to the men in pink’.Footnote 7 After 150 years the opponents of bloods sports had finally succeeded in persuading the RSPCA to extend their remit to cover wild as well as domesticated animals, and in particular to seek the prohibition of fox hunting, so long regarded by its supporters as a national sport that had appeal across all social classes.
This article will explore some of the long term historical reasons for these shifts in public opinion concerning hunting as indicated by the conflicts within the RSPCA during the twentieth century. It will consider why the opponents of blood sports eventually persuaded the RSPCA to change its policy into one of opposition to most forms of hunting and the main pressures and influences that brought about this shift in public opinion, as reflected in the changing policies of animal welfare organisations like the RSPCA. Political scientists and sociologists have put forward a number of possible general explanations for explaining such changes. For example, Ronald Inglehart has argued that changes in post-material political culture have shifted public concerns away from an emphasis on material well-being and physical security towards quality of life issues. Economic progress and stability after 1945 in western democracies brought about a decline in the legitimacy of hierarchical authority, patriotism, and religion which led to a declining confidence in institutions and a shift in the balance of political skills between elites and masses.Footnote 8 A similar sociological explanation has been provided by Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning in their analysis of sport and leisure in the ‘civilising process’.Footnote 9 The political scientist Robert Garner has sought to explain the rise of the animal protection movement since the 1970s by reference to such theories, as well as possible links between the rise of feminism and the protection of animals, and the emergence of an animal rights ethic based on advances in science and philosophy.Footnote 10 However, historians have given little attention to this question in the twentieth century. The history of the RSPCA in the nineteenth century has been explored in some depth by Harriet Ritvo, Brian Harrison and Stefan Barghereer.Footnote 11 But in the later period there has been an absence of detailed historical analysis of the changing public attitudes towards the treatment of animals and animal rights. For example, Alun Howkins and Linda Merricks have only recently explored changes in public opinion to live animal exports in the period 1980 to 1995 based on evidence from Mass Observation.Footnote 12 Emma Griffin has published a general outline history showing how hunting with dogs has survived into the twenty-first century despite social conflict and ecological pressures.Footnote 13
This article will therefore seek to fill this gap by outlining the relationship between the RSPCA and hunting in the twentieth century and speculating on the reasons behind the change in RSPCA policy. It will draw wider conclusions about changes in public attitudes towards hunting from the specific experience of the way the RSPCA responded to pressure from those opposed to hunting. It will explore three periods in order to begin to identify some of the key factors that might be behind changes in RSPCA policy: up to 1914; the interwar period; and 1945 to 1975. Attention will be given to the changing social basis of RSPCA membership, especially the decline of aristocratic and royal influence. But of particular importance is the way the rhetoric about animal cruelty changed over time in response to the emergence of broader social and philosophical developments such as environmentalism, ecology and advances in the scientific understanding of species. Changing attitudes to farmers, who have been traditional supporters of fox hunting with hounds, also played a part, as did the long term geographical and social shifts in the relationship between town and city. These longer term changes influenced the way animal cruelty was perceived. Before 1945 the debate about blood sports tended to be focused on the effects of hunting on the moral character of the hunter rather than on the distress or pain inflicted on the hunted animal. Such considerations certainly did not apply to the hunting of certain wild animals regarded as fair game by the supporters of blood sports. By the 1970s however the debate about animal cruelty encompassed wider environmental and ecological concerns that were sufficient to influence the policy of traditional animal welfare organisations like the RSPCA to come out in opposition to most forms of hunting.
The RSPCA and hunting before 1914
Throughout its history advocates of hunting have been prominent members of the RSPCA, and many of these have been drawn from royalty and the aristocracy. In the early nineteenth-century support for legislation to protect domesticated animals from cruelty, especially in rapidly expanding metropolitan areas, did not extend to wild animals and the right to hunt them. Working class sports such as bull and bear baiting and cock fighting had however been legally prohibited in 1835, mainly on the grounds of their demoralising affects on the lower orders. Two of the founding members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Richard Martin, MP (called ‘Humanity Dick’ by his friend George IV) and Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton were both hunters and shooters.Footnote 14 Fowell Buxton was a Quaker and leading member of the anti-slavery movement, who after abolition dedicated himself to prison reform and was the first chairman of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824. Both Buxton and Martin were mocked by opponents of ‘cant’ at the time and ridiculed as puritanical meddlers intent on preventing the popular pastimes of the common people.Footnote 15 A great deal of the early fervour of the RSPCA came from a moral view that the threat to domesticated animals came from the uneducated and inadequately disciplined lower classes, and it was their duty ‘once the source had been identified, to counter it’.Footnote 16 Such considerations did not apply to hunting wild animals.
By the time the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had achieved respectability and royal approval in the rapidly changing moral and religious climate of the 1840s, its relationship with the aristocracy and Queen Victoria in particular, had become more firmly established. By 1887 the RSPCA could ‘boast no less than twenty royal and four ducal patrons, and thirty four titled vice-presidents. The church connection was maintained by an archbishop, five bishops and Cardinal Manning as vice-presidents’.Footnote 17 During the course of the nineteenth century the Royal Family was increasingly identified with various new forms of hunting, especially shooting and stalking, while carrying on the long standing tradition of the highly privileged, exclusive and aristocratic hunting of deer, either wild or tame, usually in royal parks designated for the purpose.Footnote 18 The royal link with the RSPCA therefore made opposition to blood sports problematic, if not impossible for the society to consider. Queen Victoria regarded the hunting of carted deer as cruel, and never hunted with the Royal Buckhounds, established by Henry II. But she purchased Balmoral as a Highland Sporting Estate in 1847 and Sandrigham in 1862 as a home for the Prince of Wales, where he could pursue his passion for shooting. Her children went on to give patronage and prestige to different forms of hunting, including not only the pursuit of the stag, but stalking, which was made popular by the spread of the railways, and grouse and pheasant shooting, which became acceptable and popular amongst landowners during the nineteenth century. At the same time, royalty and the aristocracy participated on an increasing scale in safaris and big game shoots, as the Victorian Empire expanded to claim dominion over native peoples as well as wild animals.Footnote 19 By the turn of the twentieth century the royal family was firmly identified with most forms of hunting, including fox hunting which benefited from the patronage of King Edward VII.Footnote 20 Fox hunting survived because it had both aristocratic and popular support, and by the late nineteenth century had become an attractive means for social advancement amongst the non-landed in urban society and the growing number of farmers who had become owner-occupiers.Footnote 21 Above all fox hunting did not involve shooting, an exclusive prerogative of royalty and landowners.
By the twentieth century hunting was seen by its supporters as reinforcing the link between monarchy and people. According to his Equerry in Waiting, hunting gave Edward VII not only the opportunity to pursue the life of a country gentleman, ‘perhaps visit Scotland and use the rifle as well as the gun,. . .keep racehorses or steeplechasers,. . .. or shoot ‘big game in other continents’, but more importantly it allowed him ‘to move freely among his fellow men in a way which, apart from the excuse that sport afforded, would have been difficult for a reigning monarch’.Footnote 22 For George V, described as ‘the first Country Gentleman in Europe’, love of ‘sport, racing, breeding of blood stock, yachting, shooting, dogs, and farming’ were important elements of what it meant to be British, irrespective of class:
These things are part of the blood and bone of our race. They are bred in us as a heritage from the old days when men were fishers and fowlers, hunters and herdsmen, when life was won hardly from the earth and sea by the skill and cunning of those primitive arts which are the essentials of a man. It has been the boast since the English race began that these were the foundations of our bodily health, our native common sense, our ability to lead others.Footnote 23
By the beginning of the twentieth century therefore, hunting had come to exercise a powerful influence in the creation of certain strongly held social and ideological beliefs. For example, it was argued that hunting unified the various classes of landowner, tenant farmer and agricultural labourer who lived in the countryside, cemented the relationship between monarch and people, reinforced masculinity and morality, and provided excellent training for warfare and imperialism.Footnote 24 In these circumstances opposition to hunting was impossible. The dominant animal welfare issues at this time were vivisection and vegetarianism.Footnote 25 The Humanitarian League, established in 1891 to campaign amongst other things for the abolition of blood sports, recognised the strength of popular support for hunting across society and the extent to which fox hunting in particular was seen almost as a national institution. Other rural sports, such as carted-stag hunting or rabbit coursing, were regarded as less defensible because they involved cruelty towards animals seen as tame or reared for the specific purpose of killing.Footnote 26 The RSPCA's membership during this time reflected both its aristocratic and royal sponsors as well the growth and influence of humanitarian and scientific thought, especially Darwinism and the emerging view that animals were sentient beings. On the question of vivisection the society sought to maintain a middle position on matters of general principle without upsetting the bedrock of its membership and its income from legacies. With regard to hunting, the society brought prosecutions at regular intervals against the masters of hunts for cruelty, using the mid-century legislation to prohibit bull and bear baiting in the hope that a precedent might be set for extending the law to protect domesticated animals to those living in the wild. For example in 1877 a prosecution was brought against the staff of the Royal Hunt at Beaconsfield for cruelty against a stag killed by six dogs in a confined space. The case was dismissed by the magistrates on the ground that a stag was a wild animal.Footnote 27 In 1892 a similar case was brought by the RSPCA against six miners summoned for cruelty to a number of rabbits, but the case was also dismissed on the grounds that rabbits were not domesticated animals.Footnote 28
An early campaign of the Humanitarian League was to seek the prohibition of hunting, coursing and the shooting of animals kept in confinement, and they introduced a parliamentary bill in 1894 and proceeded to apply pressure on the RSPCA to support their campaign. The Reverend J. Stratton, Honorary Secretary of the Sports Department of the Humanitarian League, publicly attacked the RSPCA for its attitude towards the Queen's Buckhounds, used to hunt tame carted stags in royal parks. He attracted considerable vituperation, and sometimes physical attack, by following hunts on foot to record their cruelty. ‘What has become of the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (sic)’ he lamented:
That it seems never to have made a persistent stand against this barbarity in high places? And what are the clergy about that they do not denounce it? We have painfully worked our way out of such brutalities as prize-fighting, cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bull-baiting and badger-drawing. Why does tame-stag-torment flourish in full vigour?Footnote 29
The argument put forward by the League was to condemn certain so-called cruel sports that involved hunting and killing tame animals reared for the purpose. The most active members of the League were part of a growing group of radical intellectuals like Henry Salt, the founder of the Humanitarian League, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Peterborough Sir George Greenwood, a Shakespearian literary scholar who sided with T. H. Huxley in support of anti-clericalism, Ernest Bell the publisher, the socialist Edward Carpenter and the mystic Edward Maitland. Humanitarianism was defined to mean respect and kindness towards all sentient life.Footnote 30 Literary figures like Rider Haggard and George Bernard Shaw were also active in condemning blood sports on the grounds of their cruelty to all living things.Footnote 31 The Humanitarian League coined the term ‘spurious sports’ to describe hunting tame animals, a pursuit regarded as deriving unmanly pleasure ‘obtained at the cost of suffering animals’. The objective of the Sports Department of the League, which sponsored various attempts to introduce a ‘Spurious Sports Bill’, was to educate public opinion and promote other sports such as cricket, rowing, football, cycling and drag-hunting.Footnote 32 Specifically, spurious sports covered hunting the carted-stag, shooting pigeons from traps and coursing the bagged rabbit.Footnote 33 The League regularly attacked and lobbied the RSPCA during the early Edwardian period, but recognised it stood little chance of enacting legislation. The RSPCA defended Queen Victoria against such criticisms maintaining that she was opposed to the Royal Buckhounds and would have disbanded the pack if it had been in her power to do so.Footnote 34 A leading member of the RSPCA Council, Sir Frederick Banbury MP, came in for particular condemnation in August 1906 when he talked out a spurious sports bill.Footnote 35
The RSPCA was seriously split on the issue and matters reached a head at its annual conference in 1906. Stephen Coleridge, a member of both the RSPCA and the Humanitarian League, persuaded the annual meeting to support the Spurious Sports Bill by a narrow vote despite attempts by the leadership to refer the whole matter to a sub committee to resolve ‘the diversity of opinion amongst the membership’. The leadership wished to support a short bill extending the Wild Animals in Captivity Protection Act of 1900 as an alternative to abolishing so-called spurious sports. Attempts to allow the Reverend Stratton to speak failed during an acrimonious debate.Footnote 36 He went public in December 1906 with a pamphlet attacking the reactionaries on the RSPCA council for supporting legislation ‘that would not entail any loss of subscriptions from barbarous sportsmen!’Footnote 37 The following year the RSPCA reported back to the conference that it had considerable difficulty in supporting the Spurious Sports Bill and in deciding on ‘a course of action that would recommend itself to subscribers as a whole’.Footnote 38
After 1906 the Humanitarian League changed its tactics, replacing the Sports Committee by the Animal's Defence Committee with wider terms of reference. These condemned all blood sports, advocated the humanising of the diet system, including the introduction of improved methods in the transit and slaughter of cattle, and called for improved public awareness about the fur and feather trade.Footnote 39 The League recognised the difficulty of opposing hunting as a single-issue campaign divorced from wider concerns about animal cruelty, which attracted more popular support. Such tactical awareness remained a feature of animal welfare concerns during the course of the twentieth century. Following discussions between leading members of the Humanitarian League and the RSPCA, the term spurious sport was dropped in favour of ‘cruelty to animals’. The RSPCA agreed to support this new approach in 1908.Footnote 40 A Cruelty to Animals Bill was introduced in 1908 and 1909 seeking to extend the protection afforded to domestic animals to include deer ‘that are kept in captivity for the purpose of being carted to the hunt’.Footnote 41 Needless to say the League was angered when leading members of the RSPCA voted against the bill in the House of Lords.Footnote 42 This split within the membership of the RSPCA remained an on-going cause of conflict between a defensive leadership and a wider group of subscribers.
Therefore in practical political terms it proved impossible for the anti-blood sports campaigners in this period to make any progress. Aristocratic and royal influences, such as Sir Frederick Banbury MP and Colonel Mark Lockwood MP (later Lord Lambourne), continued to dominate the ruling council of the RSPCA. They regularly voted against or talked out any legislation that threatened the legality of hunting wild animals. Limited progress was achieved in consolidating legislation, such as the 1911 Protection of Animals Act, introduced by Sir George Greenwood MP with the support of Sir Frederick Banbury, which attracted all-party support mainly because it specifically omitted any reference to a ban on blood sports.Footnote 43 The RSPCA strongly welcomed the act as a major achievement, but its provisions were limited to making it an offence to cruelly beat, kick, ill-treat, over-ride, over-drive, over-load, torture, infuriate or terrify any domestic or captive wild animal of any kind or species whatsoever.Footnote 44 Any attempt to include wild animals under the same legal protection continued to run up against aristocratic self-interest in the legislative process, but also faced a lack of wider public support.
Opposition to hunting wild animals based on arguments about cruelty remained a minority interest of concern to a particular social stratum within the metropolitan elite, ‘part of the outlook of New Lifers, social reformers and faddists who made up the ranks of the radical intelligentsia, . . . steeped in Tolstoy and communistic vegetarianism’.Footnote 45 Within the radical and Labour movements of the time, such arguments did not strongly feature. They became diluted and took second place to political attacks on property and the landed aristocracy. The author of the Humanitarian League's pamphlet against the game laws, Jim Connell, who was secretary of the Clapham Branch of the Independent Labour Party, also wrote an impassioned defence of poaching and in praise of working class sporting traditions, in particular rabbit and hare coursing.Footnote 46 The socialist Edward Carpenter railed against the demoralising effect of sport on agriculture and argued that if agriculture was to be revived this would mean the abandonment of a ‘good deal that goes by the name of sport’.Footnote 47 Despite his vegetarianism and support for what Henry Salt termed ‘animal rights’, Carpenter knew that country people were divided on the issue of hunting and accepted the shooting of animals for food or if they threatened farming. His opposition to vivisection was much stronger, reflecting wider public opinion.Footnote 48 The negative impact of hunting on land use and agriculture was also a line of argument taken up by the Labour Party before, during and after the First World War in the way that it formulated policies for the countryside. The question of the productive use of the land outweighed the rights of aristocratic sporting traditions or animal cruelty. There was no support within agricultural trade unionism for a ban on hunting, especially rabbits and hares, which would have been regarded by rural labourers as a traditional country recreation.Footnote 49 In 1918 the Humanitarian League commented that ‘the extravagance of spending vast sums of money on hunting and shooting’ figured much more largely in the public eye than the cruelty of blood sports.Footnote 50 This view reflected deeper concerns after the war about the loss of productive capacity created by the increasing devotion of land, especially deer forests, to sport.Footnote 51
Furthermore by the beginning of the twentieth century hunting began to defend itself against its growing number of urban critics on the ground that it was a rural and not a class sport, ‘legitimated by rural communities and traditions’, especially as the larger tenant farmers were increasingly given equal rights with landowners to join hunt committees.Footnote 52 At the same time fox hunting experienced an influx of ‘the new rich’ with connections to the City and big business, a new ‘plutocracy’ with urban values slowly displacing the rural ‘squirearchy’ that had dominated fox hunting up to the end of the nineteenth century. The traditionalists complained bitterly against the lowering of standards brought by these new comers but had to accept the injection of money in what was an increasingly expensive recreation at a time of falling rent rolls and agricultural depression.Footnote 53 Support for hunting therefore remained strong as its social base diversified. In this environment the aristocratic leadership of the RSPCA could safely ignore the clamour for extending anti-cruelty legislation to cover wild animals. The influence of the royal and aristocratic connection had begun to decline during this period, but the reduction in the number of royal patrons was matched by a corresponding increase in middle class and scientific interest in its purposes, so that the abolition of blood sports based on arguments about cruelty, did not attract sufficient political or social support to threaten the leadership of the RSPCA.Footnote 54 In any case the continuing and dominating influence of the landed aristocracy in both houses of parliament before 1914, and the narrow franchise, would have made any attempt to ban traditional upper class sports a political impossibility.
The RSPCA and deer hunting: 1920s and 1930s
During the war the opponents of blood sports, and in particular fox hunting, complained about its extravagant cost as an economic drain on the war effort. The number of packs declined and subscriptions fell, but the sport survived and remained popular.Footnote 55 Hunt servants were initially exempted from war service on the grounds that the army was dependent on the breeding of hunters for cavalry charges.Footnote 56 The RSPCA focused their concern on the plight of the many tens of thousands of horses killed and injured on the western front and of the condition of pit ponies. The strength of British hunting traditions was exported to the fields of France. Officers, in particular those in cavalry regiments, took packs of hounds to hunt foxes in the French countryside, much to the annoyance of local farmers. The War Office banned such sporting traditions in early 1915 in order to both placate their French allies and prevent unnecessary injuries to officers not familiar with the contours of the local countryside.Footnote 57
During the war, Stephen Coleridge characterised the RSPCA leadership as ‘stone images’, although such attacks at this time tended to miss their mark, eclipsed by the more general cruelty of the escalating attrition of officers, men and horses.Footnote 58 Coleridge, a descendant of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had literary and artistic interests and was a longstanding thorn in the side of the RSPCA council, a total opponent of vivisection and a fierce critic of blood sports.Footnote 59 The ‘stone images’ he referred to were the landed and ennobled lords of the RSPCA council that were active hunters and shooters, and with strong connections to the court and the royal family, especially the future Edward VIII, who was a keen shooter and hunter and who after the war became patron and later president of the RSPCA. He was the first royal to dedicate himself to fox hunting since George IV.Footnote 60 Prominent amongst the leadership of the RSPCA during the 1920s were Lord Banbury, Lord Lambourne, Lord Danesfort and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Keith Willie, supported by a range of other well-connected defenders of hunting traditions such as Lady Spenser Churchill and Brigadier General R. B. Colvin MP. Lord Banbury was described at his death in 1936 as ‘an uncompromising champion of the old order’, educated at Winchester, a leading member of the stock exchange, and a strong opponent of female suffrage.Footnote 61 He was regarded by contemporaries ‘as the sort of person that our public school system turns out in troops’, and had a reputation for talking out what he regarded as unnecessary bills. This included many anti-hunting bills and he also succeeded in preventing trams from crossing London's bridges. He was briefly chairman of the RSPCA in 1927 and 1928 and attended the first meeting of the British Field Sports Society in 1930, set up under the presidency of the Duke of Beaufort to defend hunting against legislative attack.Footnote 62 Lord Lambourne, formerly Colonel Mark Lockwood, Conservative Member of Parliament for Epping from 1892 to 1917, was chairman of the RSPCA from 1919 to 1924 and an enthusiastic hunter and shooter, president of the Essex Hunt Club, although an opponent of the shooting of live pigeons in traps. He inherited 5000 acres from his father's estates in 1876 and was regarded as a typical country squire Member of Parliament.Footnote 63 Lord Danesfort, previously Conservative Member of Parliament for York, was an uncompromising diehard Tory and Ulsterman, a vice chairman of the RSPCA, an ardent opponent of vivisection, and campaigned during and after the war to end cruelty to circus animals. But above all he was a keen hunter and shooter.Footnote 64 Lieutenant Colonel Wyllie was appointed chairman of the RSPCA in 1926, served in the Boer War and was a director of the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company. He left £100,000 to the RSPCA on his death in 1928.Footnote 65
Attacks on the RSPCA leadership over its position on blood sports continued after 1918 from both within the organisation and externally from a new range of single-issue pressure groups. These attacks mounted in intensity during the 1920s and led to the eventual displacement of the aristocratic influence, culminating in the forced resignation of Lord Banbury in 1928 following bitter public controversy over the tactics employed by the leadership to defend hunting interests. A new less aristocratic and more progressive leadership took control in the late 1920s in the form of Sir Robert Gower MP. This laid the foundation for the RSPCA to take more seriously the growing clamour against stag hunting in the 1930s. This was a much more realistic target for the abolitionists than fox hunting, which continued to demonstrate its ability to survive during the interwar period.
In terms of external pressure groups, the Humanitarian League collapsed in 1919 as a result of the domestic pressures of the war and the ageing of its membership.Footnote 66 Following its demise, the cause of opposition to hunting as a single-issue campaign was taken up by the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports, formed in 1925 by two disillusioned members of the RSPCA, Henry Amos, Secretary of the Vegetarian Society and Ernest Bell, Editor of the Animals’ Friend. Sir George Greenwood was its first president and Henry Salt its vice president.Footnote 67 It was a controversy over rabbit coursing in 1923 that precipitated the formation of the new society. Henry Amos campaigned against Sunday rabbit coursing in Morden, Surrey, and in 1925 he persuaded the local district council to ban the sport.Footnote 68 This brought him into contact with Ernest Bell, and together they formed a new society. The difficult relationship between the RSPCA leadership and those subscribers who also belonged to the new league, like Sir George Greenwood, Stephen Coleridge, Amos and Bell, continued into the interwar period and if anything became more strained and bitter. The new League was successful in raising the profile of animal cruelty, unencumbered by other humanitarian and equally controversial and divisive concerns, such as opposition to capital punishment and vivisection and support for vegetarianism, the combination of which had reduced the effectiveness of the Humanitarian League as a lobby group. It exerted considerable internal and external pressure, and created serious disruption and public controversy at RSPCA meetings during the 1920s and 30s. It was, for example, largely responsible for persuading the Labour Party in 1927 to adopt a position of opposition to hunting based on cruelty, through the auspices of Margaret Bonfield MP. By the end of the 1920s they and their allies in the RSPCA Council had succeeded in driving some of the ‘stone images’ from office and generally reducing the dominant influence of the landed aristocratic connection, but this was not enough to reverse policy in favour of the abolition of blood sports.
However, the tactics of the leading members of the new League created in their turn internal tensions over the relationship with the RSPCA and led to the setting up of a new organisation less publicly critical of the royal society. In 1927 Sir George Greenwood resigned as president of the League over public criticisms made of the RSPCA by Henry Amos, and he was succeeded by the uncompromising Stephen Coleridge.Footnote 69 Sir George died a year later after what Henry Salt described as ‘a stormy meeting of the RSPCA that heralded his final and fatal illness’.Footnote 70 In 1932 the break away National Society for the Abolition of Cruel Sports, was set up by Ernest Bell and Henry Salt, following a bitter internal dispute within the League over the relationship with the RSPCA and its historic ambivalence over blood sports, and in particular stag hunting. The aim of the new National Society was to educate public opinion and ‘to expose and attack the custom of chasing and killing wild creatures for sport’ while abstaining from interfering in the affairs of the RSPCA.Footnote 71 During the 1930s the new lobby group concentrated its attack on aristocratic sporting traditions, in particular the Eton College Hare Hunt, and it attracted the support of leading members of the Labour Party such as Margaret Bondfield, G. D. H. Cole and Lord Passfield.
In terms of internal pressure, members of the League who were also subscribers to the RSPCA mounted an on-going challenge against the ‘stone images’ of the RSPCA council. Opposition involved trying to prevent the leadership from introducing voting by proxy to enable ‘the 8000 or 9000 members of the society to control the society’, a tactic which the leadership considered would defend hunting from its growing band of critics. Matters reached a climax in 1928 when Lord Banbury was shouted down at an extraordinary meeting called by the leadership to change the constitution. After he was challenged over his chairmanship of the meeting, and for his personal attack on Stephen Coleridge over his position on blood sports, he abandoned the meeting with six other members of the Council, having failed to get his rule changes through. The whole matter was rehearsed publicly in the letters pages of The Times over a number of weeks and caused maximum embarrassment to the society.Footnote 72 The controversy undermined the position of Lord Banbury who resigned after only a few months in office.Footnote 73 In November 1928 the society elected Sir Robert Gower MP as its new chairman, who thereafter occupied the position for over twenty years. His election heralded in a new era under a more progressive but cautious leadership.Footnote 74 Sir Robert Gower was Conservative MP for Central Hackney and then Gillingham and a leading figure in the local government of Royal Tunbridge Wells. He was educated privately and a practising lawyer, but his middle class and provincial background was in stark contrast to the ennobled aristocrats with connections to the court that he displaced, some of whom, such as Lord Danesfort, continued to serve on the ruling council. He exercised considerable influence in parliament and was chair of the Parliamentary Animal Welfare Committee for a very long time.Footnote 75 The period after his election heralded incorporation by act of parliament and witnessed a number of rule changes designed to control dissension within the ranks and prevent disorder. Such measures did not fully quell discontent or prevent a number of high profile expulsions of members of the League Against Cruel Sports and the Performing and Captive Animal's Defence League.Footnote 76 His election did however create space for the opponents of stag hunting to mount a more concerted campaign against this most exclusive of aristocratic sporting traditions.
In December 1928, the opponents of bloods sports on the RSPCA Council pressed for a more ‘actively progressive policy’, including the suppression of all stag hunting.Footnote 77 After much controversy and debate, a poll of all 7,672 subscribing members was taken in early 1929, resulting in a majority of nearly 2,000 in favour of abolition, with 3,125 against and 1,142 for. This precipitated a resignation from the Council, protests from rural branches with a strong hunting tradition, and a successful delaying move by Lord Danesfort to refer the whole matter to a select committee of both houses of parliament.Footnote 78 A bill was introduced in 1930 on behalf of the society to ban wild deer hunting with hounds but, like most private members bills, it made little progress. A situation of stalemate prevailed thereafter creating an environment for further controversy and disorder at the annual meeting held in 1931 when a newly formed ‘Members Association’, representing the opponents of blood sports and vivisection, disrupted the meeting forcing it to be abandoned before the completion of the agenda, amidst accusations of assault after two members of the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports were forcibly ejected.Footnote 79 Such controversy provided a backdrop to the dispute within the League Against Cruel Sports about the tactics employed to disrupt the RSPCA, leading to the formation of the break away National Society for the Abolition of Cruel Sports in 1932.Footnote 80 Extraordinary security precautions were introduced at the annual meeting of the RSPCA in 1933, in order to prevent further disruption.Footnote 81 Throughout the 1930s the RSPCA continued to introduce bills to prohibit the hunting of wild deer with hounds but with little success. While the RSPCA was publicly opposed to stag hunting, and remained seriously divided on the question, the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports turned their attention to seeking to persuade the National Trust, which was one of a number of new institutional landowners increasingly replacing traditional aristocratic landlords through the purchase of estates, to prohibit all killing for sport on lands under its control.Footnote 82 This strategic approach was taken up more widely in the 1950s and 1960s when the League Against Cruel Sports purchased plots of land to interfere with hunts and provide sanctuary.
After 1918 the declining influence of the ennobled leadership of the RSPCA mirrored the misfortunes and dramatic decline of the landed aristocracy as a whole. While in central and Eastern Europe new postwar governments were dispossessing the landed aristocracy to create a new class of peasant small holders, rural landowners in Britain were on a significant scale selling their estates to their tenants in order to emigrate, to diversify into other spheres such as the city, or to sink into genteel poverty. The mass land sales in the immediate post-war period accelerated the decline of the landlord and tenant system. The spread of owner occupation, especially owner-farmers but also the owner-occupier in urban and suburban areas, supported by the growth of mortgages, and the emergence of new institutional landowners like the National Trust, undermined the ability of the landed aristocracy to pursue traditional rural sports. ‘The greatest blow to hunting in England was the breakup of the great landed estates’, declared Brigadier General Bruce, historian of the Essex Foxhounds in 1929.Footnote 83 The further decline of agriculture following the repeal of the Corn Production Act after the war added to the problems and depression of the countryside and undermined the economic position of a whole class of landed gentry that to all intents and purposes disappeared during the inter-war period.Footnote 84 While landowners, as a governing elite, had seen it as in their interests before 1914 to resist politically the attacks of Lloyd George and the attempts to reform the House of Lords, their power in reality had declined even if their social position still belied the fact. The reasons for this are complex. They relate to a wide range of factors including the death of a large proportion of the aristocracy during the First World War, the increase in death duties, and the sales of land between 1910 and 1922.Footnote 85 Although aristocratic and patrician values continued to survive in the 1920s and 30s in one form or another, especially hunting and shooting traditions, the political power of the landed interest almost disappeared as they withdrew or were excluded from national politics. Peerages, for example, became increasingly associated with wealth rather than with land.Footnote 86
In these circumstances, the defence of the purely aristocratic and highly privileged sport of stag hunting became more difficult to defend during the interwar period, while fox hunting remained resilient because it attracted a range of new and different supporters. These were drawn from the growing class of farmers who had become owner occupiers, from plutocratic urban interests intent on pursuing a country sporting tradition that conferred social respectability, from a growing group of middle class hunt supporters that followed the hunt by car for recreational and social purposes, and by a growing group of individuals who enjoyed the opportunity for riding that hunting provided but were not necessarily attracted by the kill.Footnote 87 Hunting and shooting conferred social prestige in the interwar period, as new money increasingly purchased landed estates from economically distressed aristocratic and gentrified families bankrupted by death duties and falling rent income. The new landlords pursued an aristocratic bourgeois life style, which included weekend country house parties, where shooting and hunting were very much part of the social attraction. After 1918, a landed estate no longer conferred political power, but it did guarantee social prestige for those that could afford the trappings. In this environment upper class hunting traditions were still regarded and defended as part of rural society, and while farmers and the new rich in particular were accepted into hunt committees, it was not difficult for the RSPCA leadership to continue to resist the clamour for the abolition of blood sports in general, especially while the Royal Family remained so publicly identified with most forms of hunting.
The RSPCA and fox hunting: 1945 to 1976
During the Second World War, as in the First, hunting was regarded by its critics as a diversion from the war effort and was restricted by the war time county agricultural committees.Footnote 88 The domestic impact of the war undermined many sporting traditions. Horsing racing in particular, and its association with gambling, was morally condemned as a drain on national resources and agricultural production, and was banned for a period during the war.Footnote 89 The immediate post-war years created a more conducive atmosphere for a political attack on the sporting traditions of the upper classes. The almost total disappearance of domestic servants and the appropriation of country houses for the war effort combined with post-war austerity and the election of a Labour Government to further undermine the economic and social basis of aristocratic life styles and values.Footnote 90 However the effectiveness of this attack did not necessarily extend to working class or other upper class sporting traditions, especially those linked with gambling such as horse and dog racing which, along with other mass spectator sports, experienced a post-war revival after the deprivations of the war years.Footnote 91 Fox hunting also revived after 1945, especially amongst farmers following the continuation of generous government agricultural subsidies. James Fitzwilliam, Secretary of the British Field Sports Society, confidently told The Times in 1946 that fox hunting had ‘firmly re-established itself as the yeoman sport of our countryside, with the general and enthusiastic support of the farming community’.Footnote 92 By 1953 there were 190 packs of hounds compared with 170 in 1939.Footnote 93
After 1945 the RSPCA position on blood sports was further tested by expectations that the Labour Government might allow legislation to abolish blood sports. By 1947 the countryside interests began to take notice not only of the threats to hunting posed by rationing on petrol and foodstuffs for hounds, bad weather and the needs of post-war agricultural production, but also the early circulation of a draft bill to abolish all forms of hunting.Footnote 94 At that stage the bill did not represent a serious challenge as in the absence of the reintroduction of Private Members’ Bills, there was little likelihood of the bill getting any parliamentary time. But by the autumn of 1948 the prospect of a concerted political campaign against hunting had become more immediate and real. The Government had announced that Private Members’ Bills would be reintroduced and that a ballot would take place in early 1949 to decide which ones would be debated. The British Field Sports Society launched a campaign in October 1948 to defend ‘the old-established country pursuits of hunting, fishing and shooting and other field sports that are an essential part of the rural life of the country’.Footnote 95 A Countryman's and Sportsman's Pledge was issued that stated that field sports provided health-giving recreation for all who live on, and make their livelihood from, the land and also for a great and increasing number of townspeople’.Footnote 96The Times reported that forty out of fifty-nine branches of the National Farmers Union had joined the campaign and that the Duke of Beaufort, president of the British Field Sports Society had maintained that ‘that almost every one who hunted today was in some way connected with farming, and that many hunting packs were now run entirely by farmers’.Footnote 97
On the 28th January 1949 the ballot for private members bills was held. Two bills opposing hunting were successful. Seymour Cocks, Labour Member of Parliament for Broxtowe, secured third place with a bill to make the hunting of deer, otters and badgers illegal, as well as hare and rabbit coursing. Frank Fairhurst, Labour Member of Parliament for Oldham, secured eighth place with a bill to make foxhunting illegal.Footnote 98 The original intention had been to introduce a single bill, but the strength of opposition to the abolition of fox hunting had brought about a change of tactics. The bill was split into two because it was felt that some opposition Members of Parliament would support the abolition of hunting with the exception of fox hunting. However there was also a suspicion that even if the second bill had been withdrawn attempts might be made to amend the first at second reading to include fox hunting.Footnote 99 These tactics reflected the divisions within the RSPCA, which had made it clear to the bill's sponsor, Anthony Greenwood MP, that while it was opposed to deer hunting with hounds, carted stag hunting and coursing, it was not supporting any measures to abolish all forms of hunting, and in particular fox hunting:
The problem is not an easy one. As a responsible body we could not promote legislation against wild deer hunting for instance without first ensuring that adequate provision is made for those animals, otherwise they would be left to the mercy of every farmer with a gun. We believe that the true solution is the setting up of national parks and reservations. Our Society has taken no line against fox hunting because, here again, the question arises how foxes are to be kept down in numbers. We realise that some hunting interests have been accused of preserving foxes, and we would be very much opposed to such a practice, but we have to recognise that in certain areas foxes do a great deal of damage; shooting them is not easy and trapping and poisoning are objectionable.Footnote 100
The first bill was debated on 25th February 1949. It was rejected by 214 votes to 101 and a large number of Government ministers voted against the bill. It was formally opposed by Tom Williams the Minister of Agriculture, who gave the following three reasons for refusing the bill a second reading, relying on the arguments of the RSPCA with respect to cruelty, but above all seeking to safeguard the relationship between the Government and the farmers:
First, that it is based on the false premise that its provisions would lessen cruelty; second that the suppression of these sports without effective and efficient alternatives would lead to much less satisfactory activities, and third, and this is of some importance, it would alienate the support of the rural population to our food production programme, which is vital in the national interest.Footnote 101
The RSPCA sent a delegation to the Scott Henderson Inquiry on cruelty to Wild Animals which was set up by the Government as a concession, following the defeat of the two bills. The report was published in June 1951.Footnote 102 It proved to be a severe disappointment to the opponents of blood sports. It did not accept the general principle that cruelty to animals for amusement was unjustified. It incensed the anti-hunting lobby by arguing that all field sports, including those which do not make any useful contribution to the control of the animals concerned ‘may also be considered useful in that they provide healthy recreation for a number of people’.Footnote 103 It proposed that all wild animals should be brought under the protection of the law, but added injury to insult by adding that this should not apply to field sports: ‘coursing, pursuit, capture, destruction or attempted destruction of any deer, fox, hare or otter for the purposes of sport, shall be lawful while conducted under the approved rules of the sport’.Footnote 104 It concluded for example that ‘carted deer’ hunting should be allowed to continue because it did not involve a sufficient degree of cruelty to justify legislation to prohibit it. The cause of the anti-hunters was thus set back a generation. The RSPCA welcomed the report's condemnation of the gin trap, which had been a long standing grievance and was finally made illegal in 1958, but it regretted that the committee did not make stronger recommendations in regard to the hunting of otters, wild deer with hounds, stags, badgers and hares and the coursing of hares and rabbits.Footnote 105 The position of the RSPCA had moved a long way since the 1920s, when no real justification for supporting hunting was put forward. By the 1950s the argument centred on the means of control of the population of deer and foxes if hunting were banned, with concern about:
Indiscriminate destruction by inhumane methods. . .The RSPCA cannot support any bill to prohibit fox hunting because they have yet to find a satisfactory way of dealing with foxes, which must be kept down because of the damage they do in destroying poultry and lambs. The society could not advocate the use of poison because of the danger to other animals and birds.Footnote 106
The 1950s and 1960s were relatively quiet in terms of legislative or campaigning activity. Internecine warfare broke out on occasions within the RSPCA over the issue of stag hunting and hare coursing. In 1969 the organisation balloted its 30,000 members and a majority of 10,000 was obtained against hunting, shooting and fishing for sport.Footnote 107 But this clear evidence of shifting public opinion did not lead to any major parliamentary campaign. The leadership of the RSPCA were under no obligation to conduct such a campaign. Blood sports continued to be seen as a matter of individual conscience to be pursued through Private Members’ Bills, and the RSPCA leadership was under little real pressure to take a more radical anti-hunting position. Indeed at this time senior members of the British Field Sports Society were actively involved in seeking to elect pro-hunters onto the ruling council of the RSPCA.Footnote 108
However, the 1970s were a crucial period for the RSPCA. Adam Lent, who has researched British social movements after 1945, has argued that during the 1970s the key activity around animal rights operated at two ends of the strategic spectrum, neither of which attracted much support from the young radicals campaigning for other causes, such as gay liberation, women's liberation, and opposition to racism and the Vietnam War.
Some animal rights activists took an extremely radical route, while others concentrated on raising the profile of the moderate lobbying which had characterised the movement for many decades. The Band of Mercy was established in 1972 by a group of activists from the Hunt Saboteurs Association. . ..most animal welfare and rights activity at this time operated well within the law led, as it was, by a plethora of highly specialised and professional groups who predominantly relied on their membership bases as a source of funding. The high point of many of these groups arrived in 1976 when an Animal Welfare Year was launched by no less than 67 groups to raise the profile of their cause. Following the success of Animal Welfare Year, many of the associated groups went on to form the General Election Co-ordinating Committee for Animal Protection which aimed to ‘put animals into politics’ by lobbying party conferences and candidates in the run up to the election of 1979.Footnote 109
Furthermore by the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a significant revival in what Richard Ryder, a leading figure in the radical Reform Group within the RSPCA during the early 1970s, termed ‘the animal protection movement’. Both pro and anti hunting organisations sought to nominate and elect new members onto the ruling council of the RSPCA, with the League Against Cruel Sports and the British Field Sports Society putting up slates of competing candidates.Footnote 110 The RSPCA was quick to try to distance itself from such activities, but was powerless to do anything to stop the practice. An examination of the candidates for election to the Council for 1965 and 1967, for example, shows a predominantly middle class membership, with little connection to the landed aristocracy or royalty, but reflecting a mixed social base, including the odd earl and a viscountess, some with military or colonial backgrounds but the majority from professional groups, such as veterinary surgeons.Footnote 111 There was little respect from each opposing camp. Patrick Moore, the subsequently well known astronomer, joined the RSPCA in the 1950s, but resigned in disgust following the expulsion of Howard Johnson MP. He characterised the pro hunters as an odious ‘gang that clung on to out-of-date military rank’ that were not finally removed from the society until the 1980s.Footnote 112 The activities of the Reform Group within the RSPCA have been well documented. They include for example the opposition to the infiltration by members of the British Field Sports Society; the major disruption of the annual general meeting in 1969; the campaign to prevent the expulsion of Vera Shepherd and other activists; the setting up of an inquiry into the affairs and constitutional arrangements of the Society by Charles Sparrow QC in 1974; the success of the Reform Group in electing a majority of sympathisers onto the Council in 1975; the final change of policy in 1975 to outright opposition to all forms of hunting; and the election of Richard Ryder to RSPCA chairman in 1977, a symbolic event that represented a major shift of policy that proved impossible to reverse thereafter, despite the defeat of the radicals on the ruling council in the 1980s.Footnote 113
Richard Ryder had coined the word ‘speciesism’ in 1970 to counter the widely held belief that the human species is inherently superior to other species, thereby justifying oppressive behaviour and cruelty to animals. With the support of the novelist Bridget Brophy he collaborated and supported the Australian philosopher Peter Singer in developing a philosophy of animal liberation. His election as chairman of the RSPCA in the 1970s marked a significant change in the historic social make-up of the RSPCA leadership and membership. It also represented a significant change in the content and tone of the debate regarding animal cruelty. The annual report of the RSPCA for 1975 in its consideration of wild animals noted the growing unease amongst the public about the way ‘our natural heritage is used and abused. Many of these changes can cause suffering to wild creatures’. It also went on to note that the growth of knowledge about animal behaviour allowed conclusions to be drawn about ‘abnormal frustration and stress’ suffered by ‘non domesticated animals kept in close confinement’. In relation to wild animals it argued that ‘as man upsets the delicately balanced ecosystem, conditions are created which allow or even encourage rapid multiplication of some species until the food they consume and spoil and the damage they do to modern agriculture becomes economically unacceptable’. In this respect they funded Exeter University to undertake an independent study of the fox and its status.Footnote 114 By the 1970s, therefore, concerns about the environment and ecology were competing with and possibly displacing traditional arguments about animal cruelty.
Thus the changing social composition of RSPCA membership was perhaps one of a combination of factors that came together during this period to influence the policies of the RSPCA, reflecting much wider political and intellectual changes that were beginning to transform the traditional and well rehearsed debate about blood sports from one of ‘animal welfare’ to one of ‘animal rights’, although with differing degrees of success. On this wider intellectual and political front, the period witnessed a number of developments that were responsible for influencing public opinion, although it is difficult to measure their impact or to identify a single dominating factor. Politically, the formation of the Hunt Saboteurs Association in 1962 and the emergence of direct action by groups of young people in disrupting hunt meets drew public attention to the question of animal cruelty in new ways, but such activities probably did more to entrench traditional views about animal welfare in bodies like the RSPCA than to support an agenda of ‘animal rights’.Footnote 115 Labour Party policy moved in this period to one of more determined opposition to all blood sports but not without generating internal controversy. During the 1970s Eric Heffer MP and Lord Houghton of Sowerby were prominent Labour Party members in the League Against Cruel Sports seeking to ban hare coursing and otter hunting. Houghton chaired an all party General Election Coordinating Committee in 1978 with the aim of ‘putting animals into politics’.Footnote 116 In the build up to the 1979 general election, the Labour Party's Home Policy Committee, chaired by Tony Benn, sought to include a commitment to ban hare coursing and fox hunting in the manifesto.Footnote 117 But the National Executive Committee persuaded Tony Benn to reconsider the policy after Prime Minister James Callaghan was warned that Labour could loose thousands of votes in rural and mining areas if the Party committed itself to prohibiting fox hunting.Footnote 118 In July 1978 the Party published Living without Cruelty: Labour's Charter for Animal Protection, which recommended that fox hunting, hare coursing, beagling and stag and deer hunting should be banned. But the report did not contain any promise that a ban on blood sports would be included in the legislative programme of the next Labour Government.Footnote 119 The manifesto did contain a commitment to legislation to end cruelty to animals including the banning of hare coursing, stag and deer hunting. In 1983 Michael Foot committed a future Labour Government to abolish fox hunting, but this provoked a fierce response from a group of miners in Leicester who threatened to withhold their political levy.Footnote 120
The ‘animal rights’ agenda was also given intellectual backing at this time by the publication of a series of key influential texts that had a significant impact on public opinion with regard to hunting and its relationship with the countryside and the wider environment. The most important of these texts included Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, published in 1975, a philosophical attempt to equate animal and human sentiency, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, an attack on the use of pesticides in farming and their effects on ecology. These texts underpinned, sometimes in contradictory ways, the spectacular growth of wildlife conservation movements during the 1960s and 1970s, which embodied a mixture of environmental and anthropomorphic considerations. Conflicting policy objectives can be seen in the development of legislation to protect endangered species such as otters and whales, campaigns against the fur trade, and the emergence of international treaties to protect wildlife.Footnote 121 The sport of otter hunting was banned in 1978, following their legal protection as an endangered species. Wildlife conservationists like Sir Peter Scott had by the 1960s rejected the pro-hunting traditions of their earlier years.Footnote 122
On the broader economic and social front the countryside was undergoing significant change that was redefining traditional rural identities and recreations. The trends first identified in the interwar period intensified after 1945. These included the spread of physical planning, changing land-use patterns, the expansion of urban areas despite the constraints of the green belt, the counter-urbanisation or suburbanisation of the countryside as the middle classes in particular relocated to greener and healthier rural areas, the growth of institutional landlords, the continuing sales of country houses brought about by death duties, the use of such houses for alternative purposes, and the creation of national parks.Footnote 123 Such developments created many physical constraints on the practice of hunting. These physical and economic trends were accompanied by or created changes in the way the countryside was perceived by the majority of the population, and this affected in turn the way traditional rural pastimes, including hunting, were regarded. By the 1990s the countryside, as Jeremy Burchardt has demonstrated, had come ‘to represent the dreams, aspirations, hopes and utopian yearnings of a large part of the population, including millions of people living in cities’, a renewed version of the rural idyll.Footnote 124 Of major significance in these developments were changing public attitudes towards farmers and the wider farming community. The link between farming and hunting was weakened for example as a result of more critical public attitudes to farmers particularly over issues such as live animal exports. The campaign over this resonated and influenced the policy of the RSPCA in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote 125 Social geographers have debated the influence of the middle classes in rural England, including whether there was a ‘demographic take over’ by middle class groups and urban ideology from the 1970s that might have influenced public opinion about hunting and other rural traditions and practices.Footnote 126 However, Paul Milbourne has shown that hunting has remained socially embedded within certain rural communities, with higher proportions of incomer groups and the new service classes expressing support rather than opposition to hunting and conforming to existing dominant local cultures of hunting, especially in areas where farming is strong. Yet he goes on to argue that:
In contrast, a more complex relationship between nature and society exists in middle class commuter spaces (e.g. rural Leicerstershire) where farming is less dominant in economic and cultural terms, and much less significance is attached to hunting ruralities.Footnote 127
Despite these demographic and social pressures, and an influx of middle class and essentially urban values into the countryside, fox hunting in particular continued to thrive and attract new supporters in the second half of the twentieth century. ‘By the 1970s hunting was probably a more genuinely popular sport than ever before, as cars brought the hounds within reach of an ever-increasing following of hunt supporters.’Footnote 128 But in spite of its popularity it is not clear how far fox hunting with hounds continued to be regarded as an essential feature of rural life and culture, closely identified with farming interests. In the 1960s The Times could argue that ‘first hand knowledge of what goes on in the countryside is essential before judgement can be formed on the fate of the hunted by hound, trap, hook, bullet, gas – or natural enemy’.Footnote 129 However, by the 1970s public attitudes to the countryside, and in particular the role of farmers in modern food production, and the destruction of an idealised countryside by modern farming methods, undermined public confidence in the social prestige of farming. Farmers were no longer seen as custodians of the countryside as they had been after 1945. The defence of hunting, which had been so closely identified with the farming community up to the 1970s, was weakened and other philosophical and political perspectives gained more influence, especially the growth of ecology and environmentalism. These perspectives were reflected in the struggle within the RSPCA to oppose fox hunting and the shooting of birds for sport, a battle finally won in 1976, and not subsequently reversed despite the concerted efforts of hunt supporters.
Conclusion
The history of the RSPCA during the twentieth century in relation to opposition to hunting provides some specific answers to why opponents of blood sports eventually persuaded the RSPCA to change its policy into one of opposition to most forms of hunting by the 1970s. The changing policies of animal welfare organisations like the RSPCA indicate the main pressures and influences that brought about this shift in public opinion. One of the most significant factors was the changing social basis of RSPCA membership both at the level of its leadership and its rank and file. By the 1970s the organisation was quite clearly no longer dominated by royal and aristocratic connections, and this influence had started to decline as early as the 1920s. Royal patronage was still available throughout the period, but it was less easy after the 1960s for the RSPCA leadership to defend the hunting activities of individual members of the royal family, as shown in some of the difficult press coverage. This may be the result of less deference towards royal authority and prestige, but further research is required in the royal archives to address this question and such access is currently denied to scholars. Queen Victoria was ambivalent about the hunting of carted stags, although she supported hunting and shooting by her family. There may well be a gender difference between royal figures over time that would be worth exploring in more detail, not only with respect to royalty but also in relation to the wider population. Changing attitudes to hunting could perhaps be attributed to the varying degrees to which modern societies have been ‘feminised’.Footnote 130 Other intellectual influences are also apparent but are equally difficult to measure and assess, such as the on going and varying impact of ideas about animal liberation and ‘speceism’, ecology and environmentalism, and the influence of more problematical concepts like anthropomorphism.
The significant social and political changes in the membership of the RSPCA over the course of the twentieth century clearly reflected wider developments in public opinion and shifts in political power. Three factors have been highlighted. Firstly, despite the continuing popularity and survival of fox hunting as a rural sport, as a result of the resilience and diversity of its social base, it became apparent over time that it was no longer regarded by society as a whole as an essential feature of country life. Up to the 1950s and 1960s a key argument rehearsed in many debates about blood sports, both in the RSPCA and more widely, was that hunting was a natural part of a rural identity, a countryside tradition with which urban interests had no right to interfere. The Labour Government used this argument as a reason for opposing abolition in 1949. But after the 1970s it was no longer possible to put forward this case with such confidence. The increasing domination of urban middle class values in the countryside, brought about by migration from urban to rural areas after the 1950s, is one reason for this. Secondly, the link between farming and hunting has been significantly weakened as a result of changing public attitudes towards farmers. This is a trend that has accelerated since the 1970s. Up to the present day, farmers have been a key component in the support for fox hunting. But they are no longer seen as custodians of the countryside as they were in the immediate post Second World War period and this has probably undermined the case for hunting. Thirdly the rhetoric about animal cruelty has changed in some significant ways The RSPCA in the nineteenth century was above all concerned about the demoralising effects of hunting on the moral character of the ‘lower orders’, although this did not apply to royal or aristocratic pastimes. By the late twentieth century such concerns had been superseded by new ways of looking at the protection of species, informed by scientific and philosophical developments. The minority views of members of the Humanitarian League, about the sentiency of all animals, had become by the end of the twentieth century a view held by a majority of the population.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor June Hannam, University of the West of England and Dr Emma Griffin, University of East Anglia, for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
