We wander out towards the edge of town, past the British Legion and Conservative Club to the Melton Carnegie Museum. This contains tidy, informative displays about various aspects of local life, not least Melton’s status as the ‘Rural Capital of Food’: heritage and food and ‘country living’ events draw over a million tourists to the area annually. But the most revealing display relates to the long history of fox hunting in the region. It turns out it’s no coincidence that those ‘Heart of Rural England’ signs that greet you at the county border bear images of foxes. The earliest known fox hunt using hounds may have taken place in Norfolk, and Wikipedia might tell you that the oldest formal hunt is probably the Bilsdale – which is in Yorkshire, naturally – but fox hunting in the form we know it today really developed in fashionable Leicestershire in the eighteenth century. Hugo Meynell, the father of the modern sport, lived locally. As master of the Quorn, he developed the idea of ‘hunting to a system’ and helped to breed a new species of hound, which could chase harder and smell more keenly, encouraging the use of thoroughbred stallions that could charge faster and jump the hedges of the newly enclosed fields more reliably. As a result of these revolutionary innovations, hunts began to gather later in the day – previously they had been obliged to go out early, when foxes would still be digesting their food, to have half a chance of actually catching one – and so started to develop much greater social allure.
Melton was the new leisure activity’s most fashionable centre. As John Otho Paget wrote in his Memories of the Shires at the beginning of the last century: ‘Melton is the fox-hunter’s Mecca, and he should make his pilgrimage there before he dies. Other parts of England have their bits of good country, but nowhere else is there a centre surrounded by glorious hunting ground.’ Writing at about the same time, T.F. Dale noted: ‘A man who has money and some well-mannered horses can, even if he is not an enthusiast about hunting, have a capital time at Melton. He ought never to be bored; he ought to eat well and sleep well and to be sufficiently amused … [Mr Cecil Forester helped make it] the chief hunting centre of England; and from that day to this there has been a steady flow of fashion and wealth to it.’ By the early 1800s, the town had stabling for five hundred horses and was the meeting point for several of the biggest hunts, including the Quorn, Belvoir and Cottesmore. Even the fox-hunter’s distinctive scarlet evening coat was popularised here. Like me, you don’t have to have a love of fox hunting and its lore to appreciate the implications of this snippet of history. Like the signs say, this – Leicestershire and the Midland Shires, not the Home Counties, not the North Country – really is the Heart of Rural England. Creeping industrialisation may have obscured its centrality in the twentieth century (‘It has been said that the day of Melton is passing, that the town has been invaded by manufactories,’ Dale warned in 1903) but in the post-industrial age the glory of the East Midland landscape is beginning to reassert itself. You don’t have to ride a horse or want to hunt foxes to appreciate it. Come and see for yourself.
While I’m looking at the museum displays, my mother does her usual thing of befriending loitering teens. She wanders over to the internet access points, where a couple of adolescents – one male, one female – are merrily Facebooking. The girl is happy to chat to her and boasts that she has 343 online Friends, but the furtive-looking boy stays schtum and hastily closes a window on his computer screen. While this scene unfolds, I approach the lady at reception – whom my mother has proudly told that her son is writing a book about the Midlands – to ask her about the origins of the phrase ‘painting the town red’. It’s regularly ascribed to an incident that took place in Melton on 6 April 1837, when the Marquess of Waterford and his hunting pals – no doubt high on pork pie, a favourite foodstuff with the horse-and-hound fraternity – went on a ‘spree’, daubing the buildings on the high street with red paint. The ‘Mad Marquess’ was a former Oxford undergrad; it sounds as though he may have been a Bullingdon man too. On this occasion he got comeuppance of a sort: he and his fellow rioters were all fined £100 at Derby Assizes.
Not that such demonstrations of animal spirits were unusual in Melton at the time, a fact that Paget puts down to the absence of women:
At the beginning of the [nineteenth] century Melton was rapidly becoming a fashionable hunting centre, and the men who assembled there were the cream of hard riders from other counties, but for several years previous to that date a few sportsmen had made the town their headquarters. In these early days, and for some years later, only bachelors visited Melton, and the married man left his wife at home. This will account for the mad pranks which history tells us were frequently played after dinner by the hunting men, such as painting signs, wrenching knockers and other wild freaks.
I ask the lady in the museum whether any of Waterford’s daubs are still visible and she says that red traces were allegedly found when the sign on the White Swan was taken down for cleaning in the 1980s. They’ve all gone now unfortunately. Still, the Marquess’s paint job appears to have survived for a century and a half before finally being scrubbed away – not bad for an ad hoc afternoon’s work.
The Carnegie Melton is an evocative little museum with the ability to do that splendid thing – transform the way you perceive your surroundings. After spending a happy half-hour or so under its roof, rather than pensioners sniffing out a bargain, you re-emerge to be met with the spectacle of Napoleonic War-era dukes, financiers and industrialists cantering through the Melton streets on their mounts, and the sound of Waterford and his pals carousing at a local pub and planning another spree. I do anyhow, but perhaps I’m just funny that way.
We head back into town via St Mary’s, an architectural gem whose splendid tower, described by one early hunt commentator as ‘a grateful sight to a returning sportsman on a beaten horse’, probably served as a finishing post in the early steeplechases that ‘thrusters’ attracted by the local hunting rode in here. (The name ‘steeplechase’ is derived from the fact that a church steeple or tower usually served as the finishing line.) One of the great heroes of English classical music, Sir Malcolm Sargent, began his career at St Mary’s as choirmaster and organist in the period around World War I. His celebrated productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas regularly attracted the Prince of Wales as a spectator during the latter’s hunting trips to the county. In keeping with its location in the ‘Rural Capital of Food’, the church now hosts the annual British Pie Festival – it’s not just pork pies that are accepted for consideration either, but any pie answering to the broader definition of ‘a filling totally encased in pastry’ – as well as a Christmas Tree Festival, when the nave suddenly becomes a dense forest of trees, creatively decorated to reflect themes from recycling (made of carrier bags) to cleaning supplies (hung with hygiene hair nets rather than tinsel and baubles).
We finally surrender to the inevitable and pay a visit to Dickinson & Morris’s Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe on Nottingham Street. After all the fanfare and build-up, I’m slightly disappointed by what we find. Not because I’m one of the ‘many’ who, according to my truculent friend the Rough Guide, ‘find the pie’s appeal unaccountable’. Quite the opposite. But I had begun to imagine the pork-pie equivalent of London toy emporium Hamleys – five floors rammed with every possible variety of pie: flying ones, Playmobil and Scalextric ones, online multiplayer video-gaming ones – when in fact YOPPS only offers a modest selection, sanely counterbalanced by a range of sausages, breads and Hunt Cake (a rich cake spiced with Jamaican rum, also favoured by hunters). Perhaps my hopes were unreasonable: even Meltonians can’t be expected to live by pork pie alone. And enthusiasts will find some compensation in the fact that you can book a Pork Pie Demonstration or arrange to attend a Make & Bake Experience, and there’s a sign on the wall revealing the secrets behind a great pork pie: the meat should be fresh and not cured, and chopped rather than minced or pureed; preservatives are strictly verboten, only natural bone stock jelly will do and seasoning with salt and white pepper is highly recommended; and the baking should be carried out without the use of a supporting hoop or tin so as to produce the classic rounded, gently bow-sided Melton Mowbray pie shape. So now you know.
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