This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Geoffrey Chaucer, in his prologue to The Canterbury Tales, writes of his protagonists, “They came from various places, and from various walks of life, but they all had the same destination.” This theme is contemporarily echoed by the grooms, gardeners, undertakers and farriers we are introduced to in Charlie Pye-Smith’s tragedy Real Lives, Real Voices.
The author hasn’t set out to create a tragedy of course, not in the literary sense, yet this work is tragic for all that. Pye-Smith seeks to give a voice to a section of rural society who are experiencing a catastrophic collapse of their way of life and loss of liberty and livelihood. The words they speak are unlike those you will find in most books of rural reportage.
This is a country mile from, say, George Ewart Evans’s uplifting Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay. Here you will find no nuggets of sage country lore or misty-eyed reminiscences of the good old days. Nor is there any hope for seasons to come. The author has listened, and then helped these people pen a communal death certificate for their country way of life.
The Labour Party in their 2024 manifesto pledged to ban trail hunting. Now in power, and in an uncharacteristic display from this reverse-ferret of a government, they appear wholly determined to actually see a policy through to its conclusion. The government’s reasoning for the proposed ban, the author reveals, is purportedly on animal welfare grounds.
Yet the evidence cited for this, that the trail hunts are involved in wrongdoing, either killing or disturbing wildlife, is either produced by the laughably biased League Against Cruel Sports, or from the imaginings of Labour backbenchers, brimming with urban class prejudice.
The sport of trail hunting is the offspring of the Hunting Act of 2004. It is essentially a make-believe romp, that seeks to recreate hunting of yore — the horses, hounds, hedge-hopping and stirrup cups. But now it is a fox-piss-soaked rag dragged by a runner, rather than the fox itself, that acts as the quarry. Curiously, we learn, since the hounds became urine trackers rather than fox killers, the mounted field who follow in their wake have undergone something of a social transformation.
Yes, Pye-Smith talks to a few old toffs, and they rue the loss of heritage and legacy when Labour consigns their old family pack to history’s dustbin. But we hear far more from the sort of folk Keir Starmer would hum and haw over, before eventually declaring them “ordinary working people”.
One such example is Dylan Evans, a funeral director who is a master of the Tivyside Hunt in Pembrokeshire. Dylan is clearly no galloping squire: he left school at 16, then trained as a carpenter before changing course to earn a living from the dead. He can’t afford to own his own horse, and borrows one from a neighbour. But it’s the hounds he loves, and the bond of community he feels that trail hunting engenders. “Eighty per cent of my social life revolves around the hunt,” he says.
Evans, despite his humble background, is as a master a big cheese amongst the hunting fraternity; so Pye-Smith also introduces us to a healthy number of the rank and file too. These are the true heart of the sport, eccentrics perhaps, the sort of folk who follow their chosen pack with the unalloyed loyalty one associates with the fanbase of county cricket teams.
Take Alan Stapleton, a milkman from Dulverton in the West Country. He follows the Devon and Somerset staghounds on his motorcycle. Paul Tully, a van driver from Liverpool, drives across the M62 to follow the Holderness Hunt in East Yorkshire. Frankie Holden is a substance misuse worker from Birmingham, who hunts with the Grafton — when she can afford to hire a horse that is.
Throughout this book, the recurring refrain heard from these disparate individuals is one of incredulity and disbelief that their sport, their social lives, and for some their jobs and tied cottages, are all soon to be legislated to oblivion. Pye-Smith has successfully added to the growing sense of gloom pervading Starmer’s Britain. That a government would choose to make laws against something simply because its proponents “look a bit posh” is not only a tragedy, but frankly bloody daft.
Do read this book, particularly if you want to feel miserable.
