Grantley Fitzhardinge Berkeley was a British politician, sportsman and writer. He served as Whig MP for Gloucestershire West and later became known for books on hunting, sport and recollection.
Grantley Fitzhardinge Berkeley
Reminiscences of a Huntsman
Edward Arnold, 1897.
Among the most extraordinary scenes a hunting-field in so populous a vicinity afforded...was when a fine stag, covered with foam and stained with blood, entered London by the Regent's Park and ran the streets to No.1, I think, Montague Street, Russell Square. My brother...who whipped in with me had stopped the hounds outside the Regent's Park, all but two couple, who went at the flanks of the deer pell-mell into the town. I followed them, of course, to see the termination....The stag was obliged to stop, and turn to bay, backing his haunches against the street door of No.1, and looking wildly over into the area, into which I could see he had a mind to jump.
A crowd had gathered and the angry house-owner threatened to call a beadle if it was not taken away. The stag was finally secured: there is no indication of its fate but it may have been taken home, to be hunted again. A report in The Times (25-3-1842) described a hunt by the Royal staghounds that featured 'the celebrated deer Hampton, which has afforded some most extraordinary sport during the present and past seasons.' Starting from Ickenham, the stag had eventually 'crossed over Primrose-hill, into the Regent's-park, skirting Hampstead on the left, and was taken, after one of the most brilliant runs on record, in the area, where it had fled, of No.5, Chester-terrace, Regent's-park.'
In his introduction Herbert Maxwell explains that Berkeley, born in 1800, 'lived in an age when, in the hunting field, as in many other scenes of activity, the old order was changing, yielding place to new. His father [the fifth Earl of Berkeley] had hunted a tract of country extending from Kensington Gardens in the east to the suburbs of Bristol in the west'. Now the spreading metropolis was encroaching on the old hunting grounds, and incidents such as this - there were confrontations with farmers and nurserymen in other areas - finally convinced Berkeley that they were no longer suitable for stag hunting.