Beharis will be pleased to hear that Captain Rutherfoord, of ours, won the first paper-chase in Pretoria. There were sixty starters over a stiff country, with the result that grief was plentiful.
But that view of the result, though entertained by nearly every spectator who was near enough to watch an exciting finish, did not commend itself to the official whose decision none could question. How it all came about may be told by an eye-witness, who was also a competitor until, finding himself hopelessly out of the race, he took to ‘skirting,’ and finally joined a crowd of onlookers at the winning-post.
The German Staff officer who said that English soldiers went into a fight as if it were sport and took their sport seriously as training for battle, must have been thinking of some scene like that in which British officers and Volunteers of all ranks figured on Pretoria Racecourse that last Saturday in June 1900. There we were in the midst of war with an active enemy not many miles off, yet nobody seemed to concern himself much about what the Boers might be doing at that moment. All were intent upon the important business in hand. A paper-chase had to be run, and every man meant to do his best, whether mounted on a Basuto pony that had never jumped any obstacle more formidable than a boggy spruit before, or on a raking Waler or clever English hunter. Lord Roberts had given permission for a paper-chase and theoretically the sport took that form. There were no prizes for winners, no clerk of the scales, no weighing-in, no penalties for infringement of Hunt Club rules. All who cared to start might enjoy that privilege. But practically the thing resolved itself into a steeple-chase under regulations that forbade riding from point to point at discretion; a course being marked by flags round which every starter was compelled to go or lose his chance of distinction. Paper-hunting would have been child’s play in a country like this unless it had led us over rough kopjes and away across the veldt, where there might have been a chance of Boer patrols chipping in. So to add some touch of excitement, and the spice of danger, without which no British sport is worthy of that name, artificial fences were made more difficult to negotiate than torrent-filled spruits or boggy water-courses. Two stone walls enclosing a mealie patch came handy, and suggested themselves as most appropriate for a start where spectators might see some fun at the outset if veldt ponies tried to tumble over, as they generally do, without jumping. A run without hound-music as an accompaniment did not commend itself to the immortal Jorrocks, whose eulogy of ‘’unting, the image of war without its guilt and only 25 per cent. of its danger,’ would have been considerably modified in application to such sport as ours of that day, if that genial M.F.H. could have seen the horses some men chose to risk their necks on. They were of all sizes, shapes, and breeds. As for the fences, an Irish hunter would have larked over every one in his stride; but it is quite another thing with horses that have never been trained to leap.