This is an article taken from
Earth Dog~Running Dog with the editor’s consent:
Frank Buck lived through momentous years. As far as terrier work was concerned they were the years when great characters were to be found in many parts of Britain, none more so than North Yorkshire and Cumbria. For most of his life the ways of the country dweller had not changed a great deal and life was hard, particularly in the more remote corners of the land. Perhaps it was this which helped throw up these people who valued heir individuality and independence of thought and action.
One school of thought held that the black terriers originated with a pet dog kept by people who lived at the Post Office at Aposet, but Frank firmly denied this and said that the people in the Post Office were actually against any form of animal exploitation The theory can be well and truly discounted and to illustrate it Frank told of an incident with these people when they complained about the condition of hounds at the local meet.
Back to the tapes. Frank tells of the incident as follows:
“I once saved Walter Parkin very nearly being hung up by his toes because of the people in the post office. She fetched me out of the pub to look at the hounds. They were poor. My God they were poor. Bt Hell. She took me across to see the hounds and I said ‘they were fat this morning. They came back like that tonight’.
“Why, Frank?” she said.
“Because they run fifty or sixty miles” I said.
“Oh, I didn’t know that”.
“You see, he’ll leave the poor ones in now and take out the fit ones and vice versa”.
“Oh I see,” she said “and it washed and we got away wi’ it. He was a good huntsman, a bloody good huntsman, but a bad feeder. A bad hound man but there wasn’t a better huntsman tha Walt”.
Walter Parkin had all his terriers from the Buck/Breay stock and he called them all Rock, nothing else. Frank went on to tell of the few seasons when he hunted his own pack of hounds. “Before I went hunting in the morning, I used to make all the grub ready. It would be all ready and when I came back, all I had to do was put it out in their troughs and give it to them. Before I left them they would all be fed and made comfortable with new straw under them. Once that was done I’d be home to have a bath, because I needed one, and then I would have my dinner”. He would sleep then for an hour or two in the chair and then, before ten o’clock he would jump us, say “I’m off” and go to get the wagon and drive down to Wales. No alarm clock, no one would wake him, he would just wake of his own accord and off he would go. For a period of some years, while hunting his hounds three days a week, Frank drove a milk tanker from Yorkshire to North Wales, and back, starting about 10 p.m. He would then eat breakfast and see to his kennel of hounds before starting his day’s hunting. This meant that for three days and nights, each week, he never slept apart from the nap in the chair.
His dogs, hounds and terriers, were always in perfect condition and he was adept at conditioning his stock even on occasions, in emergency, carrying out caesarians on bitches in trouble while whelping.
Frank lived near to, and was great friends with, the vet Donald Sinclair who was two years older than Frank and was to be immortalized in later years as the character ‘Seigfried Farnon’ in the James Herriott vet stories written by Sinclair’s partner Alf Wight (Herriott). Frank took Donald Sinclair digging on many an occasion to any quarry for it was certainly socially acceptable in those far off days when terriers, hounds and hunters were something of local folk heroes. One of Frank’s terriers appeared in the film of later years and Sinclair treated many a dog for Frank, never charging anything.
In the presence of Sinclair and in front of many onlookers on a hunting day, Frank once dug on a fell side and accounted for various quarry. Donald Sinclair became the resident vet at Thirsk racecourse and held the position for many years. He became very wealthy and married the even wealthier daughter of a Sunderland ship owner. His partner, who was to write about him, was a life long supporter of Sunderland Football Club and had been born a street or so from Roker Park though his family moved to Scotland when he was young and he regarded himself as a Scot. Sunderland Football Club eventually made Alf Wight a life member.
Donald Sinclair was not happy with his portrayal in the vet books, particularly with the name ‘Seigfried’ for he was always a very patriotic Englishman. In real life he was described as tall, thin and boney and untidy and though Alf Wight described him as ‘stingy’ in his autobiography he could not have been more generous to his life long friend, Frank Buck. In later years he would also send anonymous donations to people who he thought deserved help and even gave the Queen a carriage horse. Though seriously wealthy, he enjoyed the ‘working man’s’ sport of pigeon racing and won many international races. Alf Wight had no interest in hunting, shooting or riding but he loved the Yorkshire Dales and its people. Sinclair’s wife of over fifty years died in early June 1995 at home in the arms of her husband and Donald Sinclair died tragically, three weeks later, from an overdose, unable to cope with his loss. He was 84 years old. He had remained in contact with Frank Buck all through these years.
Frank wandered away from his hunting reminiscences now and talked about another of his interests, horse racing. He told of a Grand National day when, with some friends, they had spent the day in the pub and had taken some good bets off the landlord. In those days the local pub was usually the place to get a bet on and Frank described his landlord as a brand old lad. “By the end of the day I was as drunk as hell. I couldn’t go home so I got in with the bitch hounds. My missus wouldn’t have said owt. My wife, she was the grandest woman ever lived. So I was missing when dark came, whole village was looking for me, an hour. Our Max came up to the hounds and there I was, in the middle of the bitch hounds, asleep in the straw. Warm as a bairn and laid out on top of em. It was always spotlessly clean mind. I think the winner of the National that year was Silver Coin, something like that. I once had the winner eight times in eight years, that’ll take some beating.”
Besides his won hounds, Frank also hunted the Wensleydale, Sinclair Harriers, Sinclair Foxhounds and he hunted the Lunesdale for a week when Walter Parkin had what he described as ‘a touch of pneumonia’. They had no whip then. When he had his own hounds he dept ten couple and, he said, “they took some keeping. Farmers used to bring some food, oats and wheat. They were a good little pack. I’ll tell you how to breed fell hounds to beat ‘em all”, he said. “White West Country harrier bitch and a good Fell hound dog on her and you will get the perfect bloody Fell hound, as it should be. For color, for size, for speed, for marking, for anything and I’ve done it. I used the College Valley, they mostly got them from the Dell packs in the lakes. They were good hounds. I once went with them and Sir Alfred Goodson was huntsman and master. He shook hands with me and he said ‘Terrier any good Frank?”
“Well” I said, “he’ll yap a bit”.
He said, “We’ve nothing that will yap a bit. I’ll give you a blow if we put one in, right?”
Well I stood watching em, it was a lovely sight, you could see it sloping away up for a mile and a half and they put a fox up and they gave it a grand run and they holed it. I stood and watched and didn’t know for sure if they were marking or not. They would run away abit, come back, and then he started blowing a tune ‘Come to the cookhouse door boys’. Well, I thought, what the hell is the man doing? And a man says to me ‘are you a terrier man?’ ‘Aye’, I says and he says ‘well that’s what he’s wanting. Come to the cookhouse door boys. It’s you he’s blowing for’. He didn’t blow ‘to ground’ no he didn’t blow ‘to ground’.
There is a reference to Sir Alfred Goodson in Border Tales. He wrote an item in reference to his ownership of Border terriers and one part states “A very hard terrier that goes in and kills his game underground is not required, but a terrier which lies to and bolts his game and has a good clear voice, so that if he is unable to get a bolt will let you know where he is. A mute killing terrier can be a nuisance as one just can’t always tell what is happening.”
Frank proudly stated that all his hounds always looked well, all his dogs. “They would be shining” he said, “I could take any hounds I was looking after in front of any man you could not fault them for condition. If they were out of condition, they were inside until they were right. The best thing for keeping condition on the, I found, was a little handful of fishmeal in the feed. I have changed their feed many a time but whatever I fed them I always gave just a sprinkling of fish meal”.
Though Frank was an expert in the use of explosive, he never actually worked at the quarry. He was simply driving out of it and when they were drilling and he had no loads to take, then he would help with the blasting. For this he would get do7uble his usual wages for no one else wanted the job. He would be ‘top coated up’ and drilling away, helped by an old man who know the job and he learned a bit more about the skills in his short time in the army. He picked up most of his knowledge over the years, until he said, “nobody knew more about blasting”.
When the, Second World War broke out Frank volunteered for the Army. He had only been in for a few weeks when he was sent for a medical to see if he was fit for overseas duty. The examining doctor asked him what he had in his head and Frank told him that he had a plate in his head which had been placed there after he had a fall while point to pointing.
“Can you see alright?” the doctor asked him.
“Aye,” said Frank.
“Where did you get this done?” asked the doctor and Frank told him it had been done in Manchester. He replied that they had made a good job of it.
The doctor said “What did you use to do?” and Frank told him that he had been driving a wagon.
“Well I’ll tell you what to do” said the doctor, “I’ll give you a ticket and you can go back and drive your bloody wagon ‘cos we mustn’t have you abroad like that”.
“That” said Frank, “was the end of me and the Army”.
John Park says that this was now the time when Frank Buck and Cyril Breay developed their terriers and cemented their lines. There was no other hunting taking place during the war years and the two friends were in great demand. Frank owned a motorbike and he would meet Breay and off they would go in Breay’s car. They worked all over the place, few people owned a car then and over those years they had all the work they could handle from grateful farmers anxious for fox control
Frank said that at one lambing season he once killed eighteen in a two hundred yard stretch. “That’s the truth,” said Frank “though there’s no one left alive to prove it. You can call me a liar but it’s the truth. All to ground. There were three vixens, I bolted them and shot them and then I got the cubs. I went to another hold, not twenty yards away from them and bolted another vixen and had another litter of cubs. And a bloke went around the side of a bit of hill and a dog fox came running toward me and I shot the bugger. Then I shot the next vixen out of a clutter and got the cubs again. Three litters all told, six full grown foxes and the cubs making it up to eighteen in all. Many would call me a liar, but I am not. It’s correct. I could hardly believe it myself!”
At this point on the tape Dave Brearley asked Frank what had been his longest run and he replied that this had been one of three and a half hours and they had killed it. “It never went to ground, never looked like going to ground. It was the best run I ever had”. Another run, with the Lunesdale was the longest he ever followed, from Dodd Fell over the Buckton, Starbotton Top, right over to Great Wernside and finished near Horton at night.
Then with his own hounds, he got caught on tip of Craymoss Fell. “The hounds were going like clappers of hell and came past me twice when it started to snow We had six inches in an hour. I came off the Fell at eleven at night with snow up to my knees and not a sound could be heard, not a bugle blown. I was by myself so I said, Frank, you will have to go mate or you will starve to death, so I came away. I got home. She had a lovely dinner for me. She said “where’s the hounds?” “Still on Cray somewhere, I don’t know where”.
So the next morning at seven o’clock I went up and there they were, all under this wall, in a snowdrift, as warm as if they were in bed! Now then. Not a ho8und hurt. They were all there, every one of ‘em. And the old hound I thought a lot of. By, I thought some of him. Cavalier. He was a masterpiece! He was bloody human nearly coos when he was dragging before he’d put a fox up, if he would stop and start to call, you could say in five minutes that fox was on his way. They were going. And by God, he was always right. He
Was a good hound.
Feed time in the morning. I fed them when they weren’t hunting, you know. I’d look at him and say ‘me mother has an apple pie for thee at home’, just like that to him and he’d cock his old lugs and off he went. She baked him one in a saucer, always. Up for the apple pie. I’d say come back Thomas is straight away. “He used to go on a push bike with them away on the road to exercise them. He’d come, he’d come back, he’d be with you. By, a masterpiece! He was a grand hound, good marker, grand hound, a kid could do anything with him’. Frank paused, full of nostalgia now. “He spent more time in the house than he spent in the kennel” – and old man looking back on a life spent doing what he loved most of all, a lifetime filled with terrier, hounds, hunting, in a world far different from today. A world with different, better values, inhabited by people who lived to higher standards of integrity and morality. “Go and see what thy mother has, and she knew that he was coming”.
John Parks says that in the mid to late fifties Frank was breeding terriers which are today in the bloodlines, somewhere, of practically all the black dogs in Britain today. John is 54 years of age now and he cycled up to get the first terrier he had from Frank at 16 years of age. He knew Frank for forty years and says that Frank could never resist a sale if the price was right and parted with many a great dog. One buyer returned claiming that Frank had stolen back a dog he had sold to him. John says that while Frank would sell anything, and everything had its price, he would never steal and this was eventually proved when a local farmer cleaned out a septic tank and found the body of the missing dog. He had fallen in and drowned. John smiled and said that if the price was good enough, Frank would sell – he couldn’t help himself. It reminds me of a friend of mine who, whenever someone made a good enough bid, would sell one of his pedigree Welsh Terriers or Fox Terriers. He would say “Dave, a pound note never caught distemper”. I suppose he was right and Frank probably thought the same way.
John told of an incident when Frank and Mr. Breay were coming down off the fell after a day out with the terriers. As they reached the road a gang of workmen were laying tarmac and chippings on the road and there, perched on the tar wagon, was a monkey. As they passed by the foreman of the gang began a conversation with the men for he had noticed the working terriers “Workers are they? Are they any good?”
“Oh aye, they are good”.
“Can they fight then?”
“Fight anything” said ‘Frank proudly, and by now Breay was becoming restive, perhaps he could see what was coming.
“Can they fight a monkey?”
“Fight any bloody thing” said Frank and Breay was tugging at him now, “Frank, you don’t know what you are letting yourself in for”. But Frank took no notice.
“I’ll bet you a fiver he’ll not fight my monkey”.
Done.
The monkey got the better of it and the dog was soon on the receiving end and could not seem to cope with the monkey’s attack but Frank did not seem to be worried. “Just wait till he gets a grip” he kept on saying and soon the dog did just that and the monkey was soon beaten, chattering away in defeat until they loosed the dog to save the poor beast’s life. Frank pocketed an old fashioned fiver, one of the huge white notes, when a fiver was a fiver. Three weeks wages in those days. “I knew terrier the would win” he said, “he just had to get his grip!!”
John Park says that is was Frank who created the black terrier and the first lot all had pricked ears and ever today they sometimes crop up. John believes the reason for this is that Frank used a Scottish terrier in the early days – not a bull- never a bull, for Frank was dead aga8nst any bull blood in his terriers. He didn’t want that at all. Many of the early dogs had a white foot and again, this sometimes occurs even now.
Frank was very secretive about the breeding of his dogs and John says that he would never tell how they were bred but later on, some facts would gradually emerge. In later years Frank never bred close – he bred to type. Breay bred close – always. But John says that Frank Buck had some of the best terriers that ever entered an earth. They were tough all right but Frank never wanted bull blood. He wanted sense as well as courage and John Park himself, will not breed a real hard dog to a real hard bitch. He says that the pups can come too hard and will usually fail after a while. (I should think that many a terrier man I familiar with the dog that fails after a storming first season). But Cyril
Breay’s maxim was ‘never breed to a terrier that can’t regularly kill his fox”. How many stick to that today. Jon said that the Breay/Buck terriers were adopted as the start of many a strain and Bill Brightmore’s lines all come from Frank when Bill bought a bitch which was in whelp.
Continuing his interview with Frank, Dave Brearley then asked Frank once more about his hounds and he mentioned that John Park had told him that Frank had fantastic control over them.
“Oh aye, I had it with terriers too” replied Frank. “I went into the Lakes one day with six terriers and at the show some one said ‘all on leads please’”
“Not these buggers” said Frank, “I’m not tethering these on leads, either you let them go as they are or I’m going back”.
“Oh well, go on then – they’ll not chase sheep?”
“No they’ll chase nowt” and they walked at my side. Well, they were dumbfounded. They never seen ‘owt like it in their lives! Wi’ terriers! I could keep them there. You stop there and they wouldn’t go anywhere. Till I tell them!
Frank was ever his own man and ever forthright and often upset people with his no nonsense attitude. At his funeral the tale was told of the first time he was introduced to Prince Charles who, seeing his terriers, asked him what type they were. “They should know” replied Frank, “I sold some to thy mother”. Well, he was a Yorkshireman after all!!
Frank continued with the tales of his terriers, “I’ve had two in my life, if they found a fox to ground and I wasn’t with tem, they wouldn’t go in until I got there. Tex was one, Davy was the other. They would stop till I got within gunshot of the hole and then, crickey, I mean in”.
Elaborating on his ability with hounds and terriers John Park said that at one time Frank had forty terriers and he could let them al out together and called them by name, one by one, and they would walk back in. When he had his hounds kenneled there was a passage with a wire at the end of it and he could send every hound, individually, by name, down the passage, over the wire, then jump back and return to Frank. John Park said that Frank seemed to have some power over all his dogs, they wanted to please him.
“It’s this makes a dog, just playing about with them” said Frank, making a fuss of q little bitch about his feet. “She’s a little bugger this, it’ll have to go to work. I’ll take it myself when hounds are here”. (Frank was eighty-four years of age at this time!) “Tell me” said Dave Brearley, “what age would you start a terrier?” Looking at the bitch Frank said “it’s rather young is this, but I always used to take them at twelve months old. If I could get them into spring cubs, like cats, I’d take them younger, you know, nine months or ten months. Give them something they can handle. They don’t want to be bitten when they are that age”.
Dave interrupted now and told Frank that John Park had told him that Fran was the best he had ever known to enter a young terrier.
“Aye, well, that’s how I used to enter them if I could, something they could handle”. He spoke again to the young bitch “You’d go to’em now wouldn’t you? Yes you would”.
“What’s the longest you ever had a dog to ground then Frank?”
“Three weeks”. No hesitation.
“Twice”.
“I told you about one, it was in dust heap in quarry up there. I knew which heap she was in but I didn’t know which hole – it was all holes. I went every day to listen and I took my other terriers but I couldn’t find her. That was funny wasn’t it? It had tumbled in behind her I expect. It runs does that grit out of stone. She was after a rabbit I would say. And three weeks had gone past and she came staggering up the back like a drunken man. She was thin, she must have had nothing but a sip of water. She did well to get down here, it’s a mile, but there were no cars on the roads in those days. Ivy looked after her here, gave her egg and milk and such like and she had her fit and going again in another three weeks, top of the bill again.”
“The other one, well it would have walked in because it was in a wet, rock spot but it took ages to get it out. Had to help it out, it was stuck fast I had to use a shot or two, blasting, and then, when I could get in to her I got her out I’ve been all over to get ‘em out, big rescues, I’ve been to Snowdonia. I once went and got two our there, for Major…Major…somebody they called him, can’t remember…big ugly man. I went up in the morning, three of us and ‘where are the terriers’. Half past two I think it was. Fired three shots in’. “What” said Dave, “with dynamite?” “Oh aye” and I got all perked up and he says ‘have you finished?’ and I says aye. Your dogs are there, in Land Rover and he says ‘good. How much do you want?’ “I says, give us a tenner for petrol – and you know how much he gave us? Fifty quid. He says, ‘put that in your pocket’. “So he was a hunting man in Wales was he?” said Dave. “Oh aye, Major – I’d tell you his name if I heard it – he had all fell hounds and he hunted around Snowdonia – it was his hunt.”
Frank was in full flow now. “I once met a man, he was master of the West of Ure then, they called him Michael Abrahams and I hadn’t been too well and he came down woodside on the horse and he said “hello Frank, how are you?” I said, “Oh all right Mr. Abahams. All right but poor”, just like that, you know, and he said ‘Oh’ and away he went, back up the woodside and he came back. He’d looked in wallet I think, and he fetched me a fifty quid note and he put it in my pocket and he said “Here, you mustn’t be poor any more tonight.”
What a striking example of the good will that hunting men felt towards Frank Buck and what an example to us of the spirit which prevailed at that time among hunting me in the non-pretentious North of England.
And still there is more to the fascinating story of Frank Buck’s life with terriers and hounds.