This is an article taken from Earth Dog~Running Dog with the editor’s consent:
Frank Buck died on October 11th, 1998 at the age of 85. He had spent most of is life in the company of working dogs, hounds and terrier and this series was complied with the invaluable assistance of Dave Brearley and John Park in an attempt to recognize his contributions to the working terrier and to the traditions of his homeland. Dave interviewed Frank just a few months before he passed away and then kindly supplied me with the tape recording of their talk-it’s a tape, which I shall treasure as part of our terrier history and heritage. We must surely all do what we can to protect and safeguard the legacy of such pioneering dogmen as Frank Buck. Dave also provided me with a set of the historic photographs which accompany the series and once again, I thank him.
He has done his bit for our cause in many ways and he was one of the core walkers, setting out with the contingent from the Lakes and walking all the way to Hyde Park in London. Frank himself would have been proud of such a feat and indeed, he met the marchers en route and told them to ‘give’ em hell’ when they arrived at Westminster. They wore their yellow jerseys with pride and marched into Hyde Park, and into field sports history, with the cheers of 120,000 people ringing in their ears.
John Park was a friend of Frank Buck for almost forty years and probably knew the man and his terriers better than anyone. He provided many anecdotes and snippets of background information and will, no doubt, continue to do so in the years to come for he has an almost inexhaustible store of memories of incidents and highlights of a digging and hunting life in North Yorkshire and the Lakes.
John Park has bred his dogs pure to the lines of Buck and Breay and has probably the most pure lines to the old stock of any man in Britain. It was John who suggested the title for this revue of Frank’s life and he qualified it by saying that while Frank himself would never claim to be the best actual digging terrier man, his record of hunting, bolting, digging and breeding, raising and nurturing some of the best terriers ever to tread the soil of Britain, certainly qualifies him to be described as The Greatest Terrier Man Who Ever Lived.
When a man can reach the late years of life and be doing what he wants to be doing then that man is fortunate and if he has spent his whole life doing just what he wanted to do then he has been very fortunate, for most men go through life working to live, living to work, with very little time for the things they really want to do. I think the modern term is ‘quality time’. That’s the thing to aim for--a life of ‘quality time’. Frank Buck achieved just that.
Frank Buck’s first terrier came to him from his father, a gypsy who had kept his own type of terrier for many years – a line which Frank eventually carried on. John Park says that Mr. Breay told him that at that time no one had a strain of terriers apart from Frank and the six Fell packs who each had their own localized strain and of course, Frank carried forward his father’s strain. Incidentally, Frank’s father bred the famous dog Red Ike, a dog which would take a hold of anything and once fastened on to a deer, which it eventually brought down.
Frank was about twelve years of age when his father gave him his first dog, Punch, and Franks says that he made a good dog. An old game keeper called Dick Brown lived above Frank and came down to Frank one day when there had been a bit of snow. He wanted Frank to go with him and to take his terriers so Frank, Punch, Dastard and Myrtle went up with the old keeper, who gave Frank a double barreled .410 shotgun. They soon found a fox in a shock hole and, after tying two terriers to his stick, Frank entered Myrtle. “Get gun ready” said Dick, “you should kill him before he gets out of the check hole,” and with that, young Buck raised the .410 and killed the fox ‘clean as a whistle’.
“He was capped was old Dick” said Frank, and after that he accompanied the old keeper until the day he died. Frank ways that Dick Brown ‘used to be a big man’ with Breay and that was how Frank, a mere lad, got to know the great man. Punch was black and tan, out of black breeding, described by Frank as ‘ a hell of a good ‘un’ and he came down off the fell a proud young man. He has a shot the fox ‘and got gun for nowt’.
Frank said that Dick Brown know all there was to know about terriers – not as a judge but, more importantly, as a working animal and of the means and methods of working them. “He was a good fella. After he died I went on my own, on the same ground. The other keepers didn’t want to do it, it was too much hard work”. When Frank left there were not that many foxed about for there was very little woodland at the time.
Some time later, on a Sunday, Frank, by now aged about fourteen, went on a big fox drive. There had been a great deal of lamb worrying, big lambs at the back end of April and the farmers wanted it stopped. Frank took his .410 along and stood near a shooting box on Dodd Fell and an old chap, Kit Chapman said “you stay there, he’ll likely come’. Frank didn’t think that he would but he did as he was told and soon the hounds told and soon the hounds dragged up toward him and the fox came by. No one else had had a shot and the fox came right to Frank “and I cracked him. They were AMAZED man. Well that made me keener still. Went down then to Johnson rocks and bolted one out of their but another bloke got that”. Frank had been well and truly bitten by the bug! “I was always away on own after that. Many and many hundreds of hours have I been on them fells, on me own”.
He told of the time when Joe Bowman and Joe Wear came hunting to Hawes. “I was about thirteen” said Frank “and Joe Bowman was a very old man then, but he could still walk”. As he passed the school he said “Hello Frank” (he know Frank through his father) “I wouldn’t go to school if I were thee, what’s all thy mates?” “Oh, watching hounds” says Frank. “Come on all of you, all of you, get your bags on your backs” (we used to take our dinners to school at Hawes, explained Frank) “away wi you, come up to tops”.
It must have been like a scene from the Piped Piper of Hamlin with the old huntsman exerting a mysterious pull over his willing followers. “Yu had to walk all the way, there’s no bloody land rovers then” explained Frank to Dave and the tape recorder. “When I got to top, he gives me a fag. I missed school. Mr. Bowman wanted me to go with him”.
Was it possible that the veteran and respected huntsman saw the future, which lay ahead of the young Frank Buck? Did he have the insight to know that Frank’s life would be lived according to lessons never taught in the classroom? This must surely be very probable. The old hunts man may have recognized a kindred spirit and knew that it would find its fulfillment not in book learning, but in a life spent on his native fells, carrying on the great tradition of this wild and magnificent area.
Frank continued, “Mr. Bowman broke off wi hounds and away we went, there was just me and him going and by the end of the day I was knackered, absolutely buggered - and he was too because he was an oldish fella then. We ended up by Kirby Stephen High Station and he says to the stationmaster, “can I get the hounds in guards van to Hawes Junction?” “Oh yes Mr. Bowman”. Cos in those days they didn’t give a bugger” says Frank, “it cost nowt. Them days was different thing altogether. Coming back to Hawes at night, it was dark and me father was champing about bloody house and me getting lost, they didn’t know where I was. They were going to send a search party out. Well I was with Joe and old Dick Taylor and me father says “Come one, get yer bloody self home, what yer doing here? Your mother’s gone past herself”. Y\”You shut your bloody mouth” says Mr. Bowman, “we are going in here. I’m taking him for his dinner, he’s earned it today, this other lad an all”.
Frank continued, “We went in and we got our dinner, he was lodging in this pub, with the hounds, and we got a good dinner and then I went home and father never mentioned it again. Not a dicky bird”. No doubt Frank’s father, like Joe Bowman, recognized the wood from which Frank had been hewn. A chip off the old block who, it was increasingly obvious even at that early age, would follow in his father’s footsteps, the footsteps of so many hunting men who had trod the fells in times gone past. The footsteps of men who were a breed apart, a strand of the island race, which helped make this Britain the great nation it once was.
During this time Frank was using his father’s dogs and he dept the breeding and took his father’s advice when he told Frank how to breed them. The secrets passed from father to son. “They had a lot of bedlington in them in those days” said Frank, “all the fell terriers did. They couldn’t stand the cold. Not if it was blowing, frosty, snowy stuff. Could they buggery!! It used to blow their coats, they used to starve but he bred them down to a good coat in the end. He put Sealyham into them and bred off that until they got lovely coats, and then he mated a black and tan bitch to a blue dog. There was a lot of blue in them, really blue, belonging to Porter, Eskdale and Ennerdale. They were a gentleman’s pack then but he died and left them and eventually Edmund Porter’s grandfather started hunting them. Well they used his dog and got a ‘black un’. ‘One black bitch; just one black pup’. So he lined her again next time and she had two blacks, a dog and a bitch. There’s where it started. He in bred for a bit to keep them black and now you can put a black dog on almost anything and they will get black. So that’s how they got the black terriers. Then, years after, skipping a hell of a lot of work, I asked old Breay if I could use one of his”.
“Would he buggery? He wouldn’t play. Wouldn’t let anybody use his dog – a dog called Ozzie, black and tan, a bloody good un an all. A good un. Nobody had better. This was about 1929/30 and I knew him well but he wouldn’t let me use his dog. But then he got a hell of a good bitch stuck fast. What was her name? Damn, can’t remember the name, something like Greta. (At this point on the tape Frank was clearly annoyed at not being able to recall the exact detail.).
Mr. Breay says, “Could you come and get her out?”
“I looked a him and I says ‘could I come and get her out? You wouldn’t let me use your bloody dog for a favor!’ He says ‘No, but you can now’”.
It was such a bad place that Mr. Breay was prepared to throw a poisoned bait down to save the terrier for a prolonged ordeal of a slow death. He approached Frank more or less as a last resort. It was the only hope of rescue for the terrier.
“Can you get her out?”
“Aye! Maybe?”
Frank continued with the story. “I could dynamite when I was sixteen thy knows. I got schooled with the right man. I blasted when I was sixteen. I could make it an all. Anyway I went to have a look. Oh it was a hell of a spot; a rock face. About twenty feet of rock on top and there was a ledge on to it to have a look at it and it was all straight down after that, sloped away”. I said, “you can’t blow it from here” and he said” Why? I said, “You have to get behind it, I’ll kill terrier otherwise”.
“Oh no, no”.
I said, “I will, I know I will. If you go to where the concussion goes in you will kill the dog. I told him I would have to go from the top, but I had to put in a big ‘un. And I put one in and I said’get away back all of you ‘cos this buggers going to fly’. But I knew it wouldn’t hurt the dog because there was a clay back through so it would lift off. It was the only hope anyway.
I went back; and whoop, away she went. By hell, does thy know, there was a lump of bloody rock! This house is big, it came out of ground on other side, it’s still there today, settled into the hill! What a bloody size! “Twas like a bloody house! Must be a hundred ton. Easy! And when I went back in I could hear the dog, baying. I said, let my terrier go there, so they let him to and in he went and he went to fox and everything got quiet. I could just see in a bit so I got a bar and jammed it up a bit and crept in.
The bloody fox was sat up there; it was a big as this room. Sat up! So I poked it off and it came out and ran into some barbed wire, which had been gathered up for some reason, and bloked with gun bloody missed it! Bloody cur dog I kept there, luckily, muzzled on, poor bugger but I said ‘skid on’ and it ran, it downed it and kept it down till a man ran there and finished the fox.
Got that. Mr. Breay had two terriers with him besides and he said, “Which would you like to use?” I said “This un when it comes time” and I said, “I like that lal blue bitch of yours”.
He said, “Do you?”
I said, “Aye, I do, I like her”.
“I’ll give you her”.
I had her till she died when she were eighteen years old. She, were a bloody good ‘un’. Tiger, I bred off her and I bred a great dog of Breay’s by a dog from the Bedale kennels. Now I’ll tell you how I got hold of him”.
Frank was enjoying talking about the old day. In his won home, surrounded by familiar objects, a young terrier at his knee, he relived the past. “Bedale had run in one day and I stopped and watched for a bit, with the wagon. I had a good terrier, it was her anyway, Tiger, it was her. I walked across, I knew the master, Major Burden and he says “We can’t get it out of here Frank”. “Well” I says “I’ve wifes lal terrier wi me, if tha likes we shall try it cos, I says, that bugger’s useless that’s waffling there”. And he laughed, he was grand old man, and he says “What will wife say?” and I says “I don’t know if it will go or not (because there were a lot of people about) but we will try it”. So he got together bugger out, fox wouldn’t bolt, would it hell. So I popped her in, it was only like a tree hole, it bloody lifted did bloody old tree nearly – out it flew. Major Burden didn’t go, he stopped, he said ‘How much do you want for that? Will your wife sell it?” I said, “No, she’ll play hell if she knows its been in”.
So he came up at night and he was talking and Ivy said, “Major Burden, it isn’t my dog. He didn’t want to put it in to be showed up if it didn’t bolt it”. She was straight about it. So he said “I would like to use Craney (a dog called Craney) on her and have a pup”. Fair enough. Can do. And she had five pups. He got one – it make a good ‘un’. I kept two and old Breay got the other two. He lost them both in holes. Got ‘em – but dead”.
Now doesn’t that perhaps illustrate exactly where the working terrier world went stray?
Major Burden didn’t breed for appearance. He wanted to mate his dog, Craney to a bitch that had made light of a job which had been too much for others. No mention of anything else, coats, heads, etc. – no, work impressed and as a matter of fact Frank Buck never once mentions massive heads as being desirable. That’s another product of show ring fettish.
Frank went on “And then I bred him a lot – Skittle, Jet, Monty, he never hardly bred a terrier, he got them from me. But he was a good man, they were half his breed and he knew how they were bred. He used to look at pups and say “I like that, I like that. We
Will keep these, we’ll not sell them”. And then he would bring me three back, ready for work almost but he would keep one, he always kept the best. I just had to start to work them when he brought them back. He was a good keeper of a dog, they would come back lovely. So that was that.
Then he would come down hunting wi us, all the keepers would be after us because there were foxes starting to get about and we had many good do’s. He thought the world of my lass, thought there was no bugger like her. He was a very quiet man, his brother was a parson and his father, but he was a schoolteacher at Sedbergh College, but he retired. His wife was very ill, poor thing. She suffered, and she kept on about this woman and there was no woman. It was terrible. She was a nice woman and he though the world of her but he couldn’t stick it in the end. She was in a sort of a hospital home.
So Breay’s lines got to mix with the lines from my father’s dogs. Cyril’s lines came one from Scotland and one from Maryport, a bloke called Robinson. I knew his dogs and they were all right but he died and his dogs and I went to see them for stud purposes – bull in them – no good. Makes them too hard and too quiet. When they were working to badger they would just end up with a short life.” Frank mentions bull line the breeding as something which spoils them and surely this may be the vital distinction between what we have come to know as the Patterdale which in now a distinctly different type to the Fell/Lakeland, whatever.
Frank Buck gave Cyril Breay black bitches long before Skiffle. There were two which he describes as ‘good ‘un’, Murray and Dazzle. He describes Ozzie as a hell of a dog, blue, almost black. Bing was blood red. He worked for many hunts with his terriers and said that in those days everyone mucked in together and enjoyed: themselves. He said that this would not happen now; there was too much jealousy among terrier men. It may be that Frank had been misled about this and had allowed himself to become focused on the bad elements in the sport, rather than the genuine men who try, to the best of their ability, to work to a high standard without bringing shame to themselves and their sport. Whatever the reason Frank was of the opinion that few of today’s terrier men could be compared to the men of his era.
He told of a time when he watched hounds at Hawes and terriers were employed for about two hours trying to bolt a fox, which had run to ground. Eventually he said “I’m sick of this” and he walked across to the mark and started to criticize the terriers and the time they were taking. A man called Dick Fawcett, a millionaire, was present and he said to Frank “I’ll bet thee a fiver you can’t bolt it”. Rather in the manner of Muhamed Ali in later years, Frank not only accepted the bet, but said that he would bolt it in less than twenty minutes. “Well, said Frank, I had a dog called Tex and he was a masterpiece for bolting, so I told them all to stand back and I said to Walter Parkin ‘get that bloody dog out of there Walt, he’s chattered on long enough’. So they shouted on him and got him out. Now I said, stand back and you’ll see a bloody fox shooting out and by damn, he did, straight away. Boom”.
So they came back and I said “give us the fiver”.
“NAY, NAY, NAY, he says smiling – he was a bloody millionaire! NAY! NAAAY!” But I got him a bit after, not at that hunt but another hunt and we were all lads there and I reckoned it up that it would be about a fiver for a round and I said ‘Drinks all round’ and it came to just under a fiver, beer was much cheaper then, not much more than a shilling a pint. And I says to the landlord,’ now he’s paying ‘cos he bloody well owes me a fiver’ and he had to pay, he was that shamed. He did. He paid!”