Foxhunting in Toronto: The First Fifty Years

In the 19th century the Toronto Hunt consisted of a pack of hounds and a group of riders who enjoyed the challenge of keeping up with them. By 1842, and probably a year or two earlier, the club was organized enough to assign the title of Master of Foxhounds to an individual responsible for the sport.

Whatever records of its activities the group may have kept were lost in 1910 in a fire that destroyed its first clubhouse. We know the names of a few of its early members and its first Master’s thanks to the 1844 minute book of the Toronto Turf Club. Until 1860 the MFHs were all military officers, so in those first decades, hounds were probably kenneled in or near Fort York (marked K on the map). After that, the hounds were kept near the Woodbine race track on Queen Street East and various other locations in the city (the few we know of are marked K on the map). From about 1879 the locations where the huntsman and hounds would meet to start a hunt were sometimes announced in the newspaper; from those notices, Zita Barbara May, hired in the 1950s by Clifford Sifton (MFH of the Toronto and North York Hunt), gleaned a list of 19th century meets of the Toronto Hunt. The places marked M on the map are taken from her unpublished list, which is preserved in the Archives of Ontario. Until 1895 the Toronto Hunt owned no property.

Organized foxhunting in Toronto was briefly derailed by an event of great importance for the economic growth of Ontario, namely, the building of the Grand Trunk Railway in the 1850s, including the great Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge. Historian David Burley, in The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, describes the rapid rise to wealth of William Hendrie, who worked in the railroad’s Hamilton headquarters. He brought from Scotland a sharp understanding of business, a passion for horses, and several younger brothers One of these was John, who rode one of William’s horses to victory in a famous race in 1864, according to a 1909 book titled Lovers of the Horse: Brief Sketches of Men and Women of the Dominion of Canada Devoted to the Noblest of Animals. Hamilton was also the home of a volunteer militia regiment, the 13th Hamilton Battalion under Captain Henry Erskine Irving. Between 1860 and 1864 Capt. Irving and John Hendrie are reported to have been MFHs of a “draft” of the Toronto Hunt’s hounds, which is to say, some portion of the pack was given, or lent, for those gentlemen to hunt in the countryside around Hamilton. No MFH in Toronto is recorded for those years, perhaps because of a reduction in the Fort York military, but Lovers of the Horse mentions (p. 41) an 1862 meet of “a private pack belonging to an Englishman named Steers” at the Davenport road, where Bathurst Street ended. Because it is said that some hounds had been kept by individuals in Toronto and that the Hamilton draft was returned, we are entitled to celebrate the unbroken bloodline of foxhounds from the early 1840s down to the pack of today’s Toronto and North York Hunt (the same claim can be made by the Eglinton-Caledon Hunt).

Andrew Smith, MFH of the Toronto Hunt from 1883 to 1893, painted by Paul Giovanni Wickson in 1891. Photograph courtesy of the Ontario Veterinary College.

The end of the American Civil War in 1865 would indirectly give a shot in the arm to the Toronto Hunt. In 1866 a thousand experienced and well-armed ex-soldiers, loyal to their Irish roots, crossed the Niagara River to Fort Erie, hoping to win a bargaining chip to use against British rule in Ireland. The failed Fenian Raid (which earned Capt. Irving a medal) had the large consequence of nudging the Province of Canada up to Dominion status, but more relevant to our story is that it caused Queen Victoria to send across reinforcements. In the autumn of 1866 the 13th Hussars, under Lieutenant Colonel Soame Gambier Jenyns, arrived in Toronto, with 285 horses. Jenyns was the senior surviving officer of the tragic action in the Crimean War portrayed in Tennyson’s 1854 poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (“theirs not to reason why theirs but to do and die”). With military threat against Canada gone, the regiment, or at least the officers, occupied their time by racing horses, establishing a cavalry school for local volunteers, and foxhunting (Lovers of the Horse p. 42). Jenyns served as MFH of the Toronto Hunt until the hussars were called home in 1869.

Although Lovers of the Horse claims that the Toronto Hunt was not organized until 1865, all other sources accept a starting date circa 1843. Several say that in 1864 William Copland was MFH of the Toronto Hunt. Whether this was the William Copland who came from England, began brewing beer on Yonge Street in the 1830s, and founded the East Toronto Brewery at King and Parliament in 1847, or this was his son, William Jr., who took over the enterprise in 1860, in either case, a new chapter in the hunt’s history had certainly begun, founded on the enthusiasm and finances of Canadian businessmen. After the departure of Lt. Col. Jenyns, George Gooderham and his cousin James G. Worts, whose thriving distillery business had expanded into railroads and banking, took over the leadership of the hunt until Worts’s death in 1882. Andrew Smith, the founder of the Ontario Veterinary College, then served as MFH for the next ten years. In those decades the Toronto Hunt held a place of honour in the social history of Toronto. That its elite carried on a sport that was held in great esteem in Great Britain was a source of civic pride.

One of the young men riding behind Dr. Smith was D’Alton Lally McCarthy, who lived from 1870 until 1963. Near the end of his life, McCarthy composed an autobiography, which remains unpublished but is available in the archive of the Law Society of Upper Canada. One of his memories as a teenager gives us a glimpse into what Toronto was like before the invention of the automobile. He wrote, “...my father [D’Alton McCarthy, an eminent politician] was an inveterate rider. He had a beautiful thoroughbred Irish mare which he purchased in Dublin, and he rode every morning at quarter to seven, and I always went with him, being mounted on one of the chestnut carriage horses ‘Warcry’, who gave me a pretty rough passage. But, believe it or not, in that hour and a quarter we rode to High Park, round the Park and back, by eight o’clock. In those days there was no pavement on College Street west of Spadina, in fact the only pavement in those days was the old cedar block.” No doubt their morning hack began in the laneway behind their home at 174 Beverley Street (marked B on the map), which would have had a carriage-house and stable, although men of lesser means kept their horses in one of the city’s many livery stables. As a young law student in the early 1890s McCarthy kept his fi rst hunter, “a black mare called ‘Madge’...on the north side of Richmond Street a few feet east of Bay Street.” The fact that father and son could so easily ride out to High Park (H on the map) and back shows how simple it was for a resident of Toronto to hack to a meet of the hunt.

She and 43 other members of the Toronto Hunt, plus the huntsman and kennel man, posed for a composite photograph in 1877. This is a close-up, photographed by Emile Rufiange, from a large collage hanging in the clubhouse of the Toronto Hunt in Scarborough, reproduced with their kind permission.

In the course of the 19th century Toronto’s original city limits, from the lake to Queen Street, and from Bathurst to Parliament, expanded to Dufferin, St. Clair, and the Don River, but within those boundaries were villages separated by woodlots and farmland, with plenty of game. Nevertheless, in the last decade or two of the 19th century the Toronto Hunt, according to Lovers of the Horse, was following a drag (a scent laid down artificially) rather than a wild fox, as also were most of the hunts in the United States. The reason for this was explained by Theodore Roosevelt (long before he became U.S. President). Foxhunting was no longer limited to gentlemen of leisure, he said, but was enjoyed by “men in business, who work hard and are obliged to make their sports accommodate themselves to their more serious occupations. Once or twice a week they can get off for an afternoon’s ride across the country, and they then wish to be absolutely certain of having their run, and of having it at the appointed time, and the only way to ensure this is to have a draghunt. It is not the lack of foxes that have made the sport on this side of the water take the form of drag-hunting so much as the fact that the majority of those who keep it up are hard-working businessmen who wish to make the most out of every moment of the little time they can spare from their regular occupations.” (The Century Magazine 1886, 32 (3): 335-342)

As the 19th century drew to a close, meets of the Toronto Hunt “were always well attended, there being seldom less than forty or fifty present, all well mounted, including, as a rule, five or six ladies." (Lovers of the Horse pp. 42-43) A photographic collage of Toronto Hunt members in 1877, posed in front of Slattery's Hotel where Bloor Street crosses Dundas, includes five lady riders. Those women were, of course, on sidesaddles, and those saddles were all equipped with a third or "leaping" horn, a mid-century invention that enabled a rider to gallop and clear high fences with remarkable security. The popularity of this sport for the fair sex rose dramatically after Elizabeth, the beautiful Empress of Austria, enjoyed hunting in England and Ireland between 1874 and 1882, where she demonstrated the stunning appearance of a skilled rider in an elegant costume, soaring over obstacles. A group of gentlemen gathered in his father's house on Beverley Street and decided to buy property well east of the city on which would be built a kennel, a house for the huntsman, and a stable where members might keep their horses. The expense of this ambitious change would be met by involving "a number of prominent citizens of Toronto who although not particularly interested in hunting, were interested in the establishment of a country club" with a golf course and dining hall. With D. McCarthy (senior) as its first president, the Country and Hunt Club of Toronto was incorporated in 1893, and two years later, with funds loaned by Gooderham, a hundred acres of land overlooking Lake Ontario was purchased. The era when foxhounds lived in the city of Toronto was over.

D. L. McCarthy recalled, "In 1893 Dr. Andrew Smith decided to retire as Master of the Toronto Hunt. There was great consternation among the hunting men in an effort to find a successor....' At that time hounds were kept just north of Bloor on Clinton Street, where their odour and noise were “strongly objected to by the nearby residents."