A DISPLAY on Victorian hunting, horse breeding and racing, assembled by volunteers from the archive and library, has opened at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle.

The hunting section marks the 150th anniversary of the deaths of Robert Smith Surtees, the hunting novelist, and his illustrator, John Leech.

Surtees was a lawyer and Durham squire whose rough, tough comic novels set in the world of crooked horse dealers, rascally servants, and city girls on the search for moneyed country bumpkins were enormously popular with the Victorian public.

They include such memorable titles as Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities and Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour. Their success was at least as much owing to the wonderful illustrations – many of them in colour – by John Leech. He was a frequent contributor of comic scenes of everyday life and political cartoons to Punch, but also illustrated Dickens and many other writers of the day.

The rest of the exhibition is devoted to the museum’s founder John Bowes and his passion for the turf. His Streatlam Stud produced many famous horses, including four Derby winners. One of them, West Australian, only raced three times in a one year and won each time. He thus became the first horse ever to win the Triple Crown (Guineas, Derby and St Leger).

It was not all plain sailing – his name was linked with a famous betting scandal.

The exhibit which is in the John and Joséphine Bowes galleries will run for a year.