‘Biggamehunters’at Stirling

Police naturally took an interest when two English-speaking boys, packing air guns and accompanied by an Alsatian pup, stepped off a train at Stirling and began looking around for their bearings.

Under a heading `Big Game Hunters’, the Observer of July 1939, told how the boys, “from comfortably-off families”, earlier visited a museum and were fascinated by a golden eagle exhibit displayed there. Information attached to the stuffed bird suggested it had been shot near Muir of Ord, Scotland.

Packing food into a haversack and grabbing their air guns and the Alsatian, the 14-year-olds set out for Scotland imagining the country was one vast game reserve teeming with golden eagles, deer and other wildlife.

However, when they got north of the border, they realised such a notion was fanciful and stopped off at Stirliing `to find out where all the big game had gone’.

When police asked the boys where they intended to stay, they replied that they supposed there would be caves nearby.

Authorities in Reading were contacted and they revealed that the boys were missing from their homes there.

`Delighted parents wired money north for the boys’ return tickets and two disappointed but better informed juveniles sped south.