Hundreds of
Eton students joined a protest over fears that its 160-year-old hunting society could be scrapped, The Telegraph can reveal.
Pupils and their parents at the
£42,500-a-year college are in open revolt over the future of the Eton College Hunt (ECH), one of the last remaining school beagling packs in Britain.
The kennel huntsman for the society, founded in 1858, was due to leave his post on Sunday and the college has so far failed to find a replacement, forcing the hounds to be relocated to a different hunt and the society’s operations upended.
This has prompted strongly-worded petitions from students to college senior leaders accusing them of a lack of consultation or transparency, while some parents have even intervened to offer to keep the pack together on their personal land estates.
While the Berkshire college says the ECH pack’s relocation is a temporary measure until a new huntsman is found, students and parents fear it is being quietly axed through the backdoor by
Eton’s “woke” leadership.
Beagling has historically been used at Britain’s top private schools and universities to introduce youngsters to small foot hunts before stepping up to foxhounds.
Now the months-long row has boiled over, with hundreds of students gathering in the prestigious college’s main courtyard for a rare “leggit” on Friday morning, the most powerful gesture by which Eton pupils traditionally express grievances to the headmaster.
In a “leggit”, hundreds of boys congregate at mid-morning on Eton's campus in their black tailcoats and white shirts to protest until the headmaster arrives to face them, then one shouts “leggit” and they all run away.
Students share footage of protest on TikTok
Videos show a large crowd of pupils making a series of loud chants, including “what do we think of Gregg? S--- What do we think of s---? Gregg,” a reference to David Gregg, the college’s deputy head for pastoral matters, who the college said was not involved in the row.
Some students at the all-boys school for 13- to 18-year-olds went public by sharing footage of the protest on the social media app TikTok, viewed more than 350,000 times.
Pupils warned senior leaders they would launch the protest to defend the tradition, having offered multiple solutions in recent months to protect the dogs’ welfare by keeping the pack united and close to the college campus ahead of the May 1 deadline.
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