Buy this book on-line McKERGOW, PETER: : ASTRIDE TWO CENTURIES: The Life of Bob McKergowLONDON.QUILLER PRESS LTD.,1999. ISBN 1899163522.
UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn.FINE/FINE.No owner
inscrptn,and no price-clip to dw/dj. Bright,crisp,clean,glossy laminated, subject colour painting portrait to upper wrap,small colour caricature portrait to rear wrap' with negligible shelf-wear and creasing to edges and corners - no nicks or tears present.Minisculely bumped to head of spine/backstrip with reciprocal creasing.Top+fore-edges bright and clean, contents bright,tight and pristine. Unblemished,publisher's original,plain red cloth boards with bright,crisp,stamped gilt letters to spine/backstrip and immaculate plain pink endpapers.UK,8vo HB+ dw/dj,1st edn,vi-viipp+1-180pp [paginated] includes bibliography,acknowledgements,3 parts comprising 11 chapters,profuse b/w contemporary biographical photographs throughout the text and the book,an index; plus [unpaginated] half-title+title pages, contents list/table,and 2pp family tree chart.
Bob McKergow,son of a Glasgow wine merchant who came south to set up a branch
of the family business in Brighton in 1859
and built himself a grand mansion in Burgess Hill,lived through the last forty
years of the 19thC and the first forty years of the 20thC.Business was not for Bob who,by the time he was 18,was hunting regularly,had his own pack of beagles,for
a short time followed Lord Harrington's foxhounds at Nottingham,spent most of the time hunting as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1880's as well as playing
polo and learning to drive horses tandem and four-in-hand.He settled for the life of a Sussex farmer as Squire of Twineham Grange,turning out for the village cricket team,singing comic songs at its dinners, taking part in local theatricals,taking a hand as churchwarden in running the parish church,as chairman of the parish council running the village,speechifying at the local Conservative Association,and wooing, and then marrying,the pretty young Jeanie Baker of Polegate in 1894.
From 1903 to 1908 he was Master of the Southdown Hounds,for two years from 1913 Joint Master of the Crawley and Horsham Hunt resuming in 1919 as sole Master to great acclaim taking Guy Cubitt as Joint Master before he retired in 1933.In 1901 he had helped raise the Sussex Imperial Yeomanry,and with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914,he commanded a yeomanry regiment and from 1917 the 4th reserve Battalion of the Royal West Kents.In that year his son Dudley,who trained as an air pilot in the Royal Flying Corps,was killed in a dog-fight over France.Colonel McKergow was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Sussex in 1921,and High Sheriff for 1933/34.He died in 1947 aged 81.
In 'Astride Two Centuries' his son Peter paints a picture of a hunting man enjoying
his chosen country style of life as a Sussex farmer,adjusting to the social attitudes of late Victorian and Edwardian England as they changed to those of the very different postwar Britain under Labour.
From the recently discovered correspondence which his father had with Jeanie Baker in the two years leading up to their London wedding,the reader is let
into the privacy of their light-hearted but obviously devoted relationship,with the chance to follow,as if it was happening today,the far-from-smooth steps to matrimony.Just as alive are the accounts of Bob McKergow's activities as MFH and chairman of the British Field Sports Society,with his life-long love of horses,not only in the hunting field,but on the polo ground and driving dog carts and fours in hand around the Sussex lanes.
'Astride Two Centuries',fully illustrated with contemporary prints and photographs, gives a remarkable insight into patrician country life,down on the farm and up in the saddle,in an England that now seems so remote.
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