And tho’ we may hunt with another,
When the hand of old age we way feel,
We’ll mourn for a sportsman and brother,
And remember the days of John Peel.”
The late Sir Wilfrid Lawson also gives a good description of Peel. He says:
“I have seen John Peel in the flesh, and have hunted with him. He was a tall, bony Cumbrian, who, when I knew him, used to ride a pony he called ‘Dunny,’ from its light colour, and on this animal, from his intimate knowledge of the country, he used to get along the roads, and see a great deal of what his hounds did. Peel’s grey coat is no more a myth than himself, for I well remember the long, rough, grey garment, which almost came down to his knees. No doubt drink played a prominent part—if it were not, indeed, the ‘predominant partner’ in these northern hunts. I have heard John Peel say, when they had killed a fox: ‘Now! this is the first fox we’ve killed this season, and it munna be a dry ’un!’—words of that kind being a prelude to an adjournment to the nearest public-house, where the party would remain for an indefinite time, reaching, I have heard it said, even to two days.”
In the book “Sir Wilfrid Lawson (A Memoir),” by the Right Hon. George W. E. Russell, it says:
“The famous John Peel, who is ‘kenn’d’ over the English-speaking world, was a Master of Foxhounds on a very primitive and limited scale, and hunted his own hounds in Cumberland for upwards of forty-six years. He died in 1854. By this time Wilfrid Lawson was twenty-five years old, and desperately fond of hunting. So, on the death of John Peel, with whom he had hunted ever since he could sit in a saddle, he bought Peel’s hounds, amalgamated them with a small pack which he already possessed, and became Master of the Cumberland Foxhounds.”
The famous song, “John Peel,” was written by Woodcock Graves, an intimate friend of Peel. Graves emigrated to Tasmania in 1833, and spent the last years of his life there, far from the hunting country of his younger days.
John Peel was born at Grayrigg, and in later years lived at, and hunted from, his cottage at Ruthwaite.