Introduction - Michael Clayton

Welcome to my website. As a journalist and author specialising in horsemanship, hunting and rural issues for much of my life, I feel these subjects are less than adequately covered nowadays in most of  the national and local press.

Previously I worked in hard news at home and abroad, including war coverage, and I hope this helped give some wider perspective on domestic issues such as the attempts to ban hunting in England Wales.

In the book section I list, with highly  appropriate modesty, my 20 or so titles published over the last 40 years. In the blog section I comment  on issues and news, past and present, of interest to everyone concerned with equstriansim and hunting, and British rural life.

I was lucky to make many friends and contacts in 23 years as Editor, or Editor-in -Chief, of Horse and Hound, and latterly of Country Life and The Field. I was fortunate indeed to assume the role of perhaps the last editor who served as his own hunting correspondent - as did Surtees and Nimrod, although I certainly  bow to their superiority in  sporting  literature.

However, thanks to modern communications, I was able to hunt on horseback with well over 220 Hunts in the British Isles, in the United States, Canada and once in New Zealand. Whatever the controversy about hunting with hounds, culminating in Labour's entirely ill-judged Hunting Act 2004, now admitted by Tony Blair to have been a "mistake", there is no question that it has been a cohesive factor binding together rural communuties for hundreds of years, and especially since the birth of organised foxhunting in Leicestershire in the mid-18th century. Judging by the survival of Britain's Hunts since the Hunting Act in England and Wales, and anti-hunting legislation in Scotland, the rural communities still remain loyal to their sport and the accompanying social inter-action it provides.

I hope this website will amuse,  interest and inform past, present and future horsemen and hunting people, and will bring some pleasure to many friends. I endeavour to maintain a regular commentary on all these matters, still of immense interest to millions of people world-wide, in my blog accessed on this web-site. Give it a try?

I  had  a wide experience of journalism in many forms, all achieved through luck. I  got my first job on the New Milton Advertiser and Lymington Times by riding my bike some 25 miles from Bournemouth to see if I could get some form of employment when my parents ordained I should leave Bournemouth Grammar School after my School Cert, instead of staying on for A levels and possible university education. In the   early postwar years we were very short of cash, and I had to face two years' National Service which would have put back my earning possibiities even further.  I was so fortunate to be "taken on" by the then Editor-proprietor of  the Advertiser and Times, Charles Curry - a superb, tough journalist with old fashioned values and skills. Amazingly, his son Charles Curry is still Editor of the Advertiser and Times, at the age of 90.  He was Deputy Editor in my day  (1950-54), and when he phones me with the words "Charles here!" I still get a shiver down the spine.

After National Service in Germany with the RAF, I worked successively for the Bournemouth Times, Portsmouth Evening News, then Fleet Street with the London Evening News (1957-61), the New Zealand Herald for a year, the London Evening Standard (1962-65) as reporter and Deputy News Editor, then News Editor of Southern TV,  before joining the BBC as staff reporter in London and abroad ( 1965-73). Then I made a huge career change to become Editor of Horse and Hound, and was never happier. I was a main board director of IPC Magazines for three years before "retirement" when I became Chairman of the British Horse Society.