Hard times
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ending of the First World War, Charles Smith-jones takes us back in time to a very different world
It is October 1918. Just across the English Channel the conflict that has become known as the Great War still rages. At long last, after four years that have shattered nations and destroyed a generation, the end may be in sight. A series of Allied successes have steadily pushed back the German forces and reports have appeared in the newspapers that the city of Cambrai has been captured. It is only a month before the Armistice will be signed and hostilities finally end.
Responsibilities
Here on the Norfolk estate where you have worked since being taken on as a trainee gamekeeper as a lad more than 40 years ago – and paid the heady sum of 18 shillings a week – the war has taken its toll, too. By 1910 you had risen to headkeeper with responsibility for producing 1,000-bird days for the ‘Guv’nor’, his family and his guests. Before hostilities began, you presided over some 40 souls, more than half of them beatkeepers and underkeepers. The rest were mainly warreners, trappers, kennel men and deer keepers for the Park. Under your direction this huge staff covered the many duties in a largely unmechanised age, including game rearing, predator control and combating the ever-present threat of poaching. Your word was law and you answered only to the Guv’nor, the 11th Duke, who has always treated you as a valued equal. As far as the local community was concerned, you outranked the local doctor and schoolmaster in the social hierarchy. Back then, to be a headkeeper was an undreamed-of attainment for any young lad taken on as a trainee keeper or the lowest of the low, a dog boy.
All change
In 1914, that all changed at a stroke. You and the Duke were unconcerned at first as, in line with the rest of the country, you were convinced the fighting would be over quickly and everything would soon return to normal. Within six months of the outbreak of hostilities, however, your staff was greatly reduced. First by the rush to enlist and later by forcible conscription, which took away many of your experienced underkeepers. Only a few escaped being called up after being reclassified as agricultural labourers and excused from war service.
Very soon, the casualties started to occur. It was clear that some would not be coming back while far too many of the others who did were physically and mentally scarred by their experiences. Your estate has got off relatively lightly, however, and the toll was higher elsewhere.
The Royal estate of Sandringham, not so far away from you, lost an entire company of more than 250 keepers, gardeners, household staff and others who had formed a volunteer force under the encouragement of King Edward VII himself. They all disappeared without trace in the notorious 1915 Gallipoli campaign, an event still unexplained three years on and which will still be debated for another century.
Despite hostilities, organised game shooting has continued, if on a smaller scale. Perhaps surprisingly, given that the firearms industry has switched its efforts towards producing wartime munitions, cartridges are still available although in limited supply and stocks are jealously preserved.
Several of your underkeepers have resurrected their grandfathers’ old blackpowder, muzzle-loading guns, which are used for day-to-day vermin control.