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THIS MONTH THE FIELD celebrates its 150th birthday. A monthly that started out in 1853 as a weekly, it is not quite as venerable as The Observer (founded 1791) or The Economist (founded 1843) but it is older than any other currently monthly publication, and is the world's oldest rural affairs magazine. By comparison, Country Life, established as a glossier and more expensive weekly rival and today generally perceived as aiming to appeal to people interested in the countryside rather than living and working in it, dates only from 1897.
R.S. Surtees, the great sporting writer and novelist who was the leading light among The Fields founders, had envisaged 'a sporting, a farming, and a sort of high-- life-in-London paper with a summary of all that is going on'. Though containing a few line drawings, early issues were little different from any other weekly paper of the 1850s, with dense and gloomy columns of print and the usual coverage of general news, including Court News, Party Intelligence, Railways and Theatrical Intelligence, and at least twice as much space was devoted to sports as to other rural pursuits. At first glance the paper looked like a slightly seedier competitor of The Illustrated London News (founded eleven years earlier) and evidently the reading public tended to think that was what it was, for it did not sell enough copies to make a profit till the editorship was taken over byjohn Henry Walsh in December 1857.
It was Walsh who made The Field a national institution. A former ophthalmic surgeon and author of a 722-page Manual of Domestic Medicine and Surgery, he hunted with the Heythrop and Worcestershire, coursed greyhounds, trained hawks,...