Hunt Sabs Target Shipston Restaurant During Prue Leith Charity Dinner

West Midlands Hunt Saboteurs have begun staging what they call pop-up protests outside businesses in Shipston on Stour, starting on Thursday evening with The Bower House restaurant and B&B while it was hosting a charity supper with Dame Prue Leith.

Video seen by BTM shows the group’s leader, Cathy Scott, standing outside the restaurant with signs telling passers-by that the venue supports fox hunting. She was joined by her long-standing ally David Graham, who was convicted of perverting the course of justice in 2020 after giving police doctored video footage.

The evening the sabs chose to disrupt was not an ordinary night of service. The Bower House had advertised an evening with Dame Prue, with cocktails, a supper of her best-loved dishes, an interview, a Q&A and a signing of her latest book, and all proceeds were going to Chefs in Schools, the charity that brings cooking into school classrooms.

In their own account of the night, the sabs said they had spent the morning sabbing the Warwickshire Hunt before heading to Shipston. They complained that restaurant staff drew the curtains, and taped them shut, so that guests inside would not have to look at what was going on outside. Most people would see that as staff doing their best to protect a charity evening for guests who had paid to be there.

The sabs’ complaint is with the owner, Andrew Bower Knight, and the only thing he is accused of is letting a lawful activity take place on his land. He allows the Warwickshire Hunt and the North Cotswold Hunt to meet and trail hunt across the Compton Scorpion Estate, which is something landowners up and down the country do every season.

It is worth being clear about what that means for everyone else. If a landowner can have his restaurant picketed and his staff harassed for allowing something that is entirely legal, then any business owner whose family hosts a hunt, lends a field or rides out on a Saturday is fair game. The sabs have said as much themselves, describing Thursday as the first of many unannounced protests outside The Bower House and other businesses that allow hunting on their land.

The campaign is already reaching beyond Bower Knight. One local source told BTM that the sabs are increasingly targeting farm-based businesses, including a driving school run by a farmer’s wife.

The people of Shipston, however, do not appear to be taking it quietly. A post on The Shipston Notice Board Facebook group by a resident who drove past the protest drew 82 reactions and 90 comments within hours. She wrote that it was “really disappointing” to see protesters urging people to boycott small local businesses in already challenging times because of their own personally held views, and said she hoped people would support The Bower House. The most popular reply pointed out that local people work at the restaurant and rely on the jobs, and suggested the protesters might find proper jobs of their own.

This is not new behaviour for Scott. BTM has previously reported on her campaign against a pub in Ilmington, when she encouraged followers to leave bad reviews online and sent emails to the owner. The approach has stayed the same since then, which is to pick a local business, label it, and keep up the pressure until the owner decides that hosting a lawful activity is not worth the trouble.

The difference this time is that the people paying for it were diners who had bought tickets to raise money for children’s cookery lessons, and a town that has made clear it would rather back its local businesses than the people picketing them.