Partridges forrard at stubton
A great team, a full itinerary and well-named drives helped guarantee Robert Cuthbert
an enjoyable partridge day in Lincolnshire. Photographs by Andy Hook
The monikers given to drives could actually keep one awake at night: Jettison hope, Never Mind or Imminent Soiling. Oh, really? If you truly want to unsettle people, why not try calling them School Fees, Pension Performance or It’s Just A Small Camera Inserted. I hate to sound white-knickered over this but I’ve always felt the drivelabelling process has much in common with naming racehorses. For me, bombast and anything with the whisper of menace about it can go hang. Give me something nostalgic, historic or artistically inviting any day.
And so, on a cool, bright, autumn morning, a politely bubbly team of guns took their pegs for the first drive, Little Gates, on what was their first visit to the Stubton estate in Lincolnshire, just a hen’s run from Newark. The instructions were that they were “live on pegs”. As suggested, the girls in the line trudged silently to their pegs, tresses and tweed skirts billowing in the breeze, while the chaps – primarily Paul Graham, Richard Pavry and Tim Crum – chattered, giggled, stifled guffaws and generally faffed about until Jennifer Suman’s elegant 16-bore galvanised them into action as she dispatched the first intrepid little partridge that skimmed the hedgeline down towards the gun bus, where I was reclining. The inert bird near my boots, delicately jewelled with flecks of dew, a distinct chip in the upper mandible of its blood-red beak, immediately decreed Miss Suman a stylish, seasoned shot. No second barrel, no dog required.
After just short of 20 minutes of trickling and steady action in a small, rectangular, untypically hedge-corralled field, 150-odd shots had seen stunners killed, sitters missed and plenty of others in between; they’d made headway into the bag and into shaking off the cobwebs of the preceding night’s antics in nearby Stamford.
The thin morning mist slipped away as the team convened by the gun bus to both noisily congratulate and berate in agreeably diluted sunshine. The estate’s proprietor, head keeper and host, Malcolm Partridge, once dubbed in a sister title “the Father Christmas of all head keepers” (purely because he “always delivers”), seemed justly delighted with the first drive.
“Well shot, young lady,” Partridge said to Suman, with a faux-sombre, respectful nod as he subtly scrutinised the dogs busily quartering the stubble and yellowing, dying nettles. “Nice to see that someone was awake at the start.” Cue a blare of laughter, exaggerated shock, comforting hugs and fingers wagged as the team boarded the spacious gun bus, bound for The Warren.
Partridge was head keeper at Belvoir Castle from 2000 until 2011, when the opportunity to take on some ground of his own cropped up. “I started off with about 2,000 acres and I now rent some additional land, which has opened up more variation,” he said. “It’s just so satisfying to run things in my way, with my vision of how a shoot day should be. Our days are always fun, always. We let about 30 days and I like to ensure that a shoot day is a day – none of this finishing halfway through lark, it’s not me, that. Shooting’s expensive, there’s no point kidding people, but giving them fun and value, that’s what I love. And I’ve a hell of a team: Little Al, Big Al, Paul, Don and Dennis and my great beating line, they’re just superb; young Joe Wray, my great beat keeper, so hard-working and dedicated, too; then there’s Jonathan, Barney and the Captain – they’ve all been with me and picking-up for years; lovely Liz, my wife, has got some great help in Ann, Jackie and Angie, who produce all our amazing lunches and hospitality. Cliché, I know, but I couldn’t do it without them.”
The long, rangy willow trees the team faced on the second drive – easily standing a good 60-foot high – were planted by the late Dennis Burtt when this part of Stubton fell within the old Brandon estate, well noted for its über-traditional partridges. Paul Graham found great form on an unusually busy peg one, with birds posing skeet-style opportunities on a slightly awkward slide as they flipped over the thinnest parts of the branches. Suman, for this drive, shared her gun with her dear friend hattie Pask on peg two, with chirpy Chris Thorpe and Odon de Bellissen taking pegs three and four respectively. Pask was to claim her first driven bird just before lunch. Victoria Knowles-lacks wielded her brute of a Browning with an economical and effective style mid line, with little getting past her, Jules Bray and architect Tim Crum and off, away into the rolling, darkening, infinitely vast Lincolnshire skies behind them.
At pretty much 11 o’clock on the dot, before taking to the third drive, Temple Mast, the team paused for elevenses in the shape of a magnum of Pol Roger and deliciously peppery slabs of Melton Mowbray pork pie. In contrast to their infectiously boisterous behaviour, the team were appreciatively quiet, nodding and smiling, hushed as they munched and savoured the wine.
Temple Mast proved the perfect drive to cap a great morning’s sport: fast, frantic, with seemingly relentless waves of partridge sprayed the full width of the line, over and over again. Pavry and Crum hooted like
schoolboys as they reloaded hurriedly, eyes flitting over the hedgeline. As I watched, one of the guns on a quieter peg, David Holliday, sauntered back from his position a little way to join my notepad and me. Holliday is the brains behind the newly opened Hurley House Hotel, near Henley on Thames – a chic, boutique hotel with 10 rooms. Previously, he managed the superb, Michelin-starred Fulham pub the Harwood Arms and cooked at the renowned Pot Kiln in Berkshire. “Game will feature heavily in season,” he told me. “We’ll stick to what we know, what we do best. There are some great estates on our doorstep and some superb fishing, too.”
And as the final salvo slowed to a few faint, sporadic coughs, the increasing breeze rescinded the reports, the whistle, once again, signalling the end of the drive.
Pavry, resplendent in a Spanish Bel Teba shooting cardigan (as favoured by Spain’s King Alfonso XIII), beaming, eyes wide and coursing with adrenaline, couldn’t wait to reveal “a real first – I don’t think I’ve ever shot knee-deep in carrots before. How inspired, with partridge shot and landing already garnished? Certainly some of the finest partridge I’ve seen. Thank you, Malcolm. What wonderful, wonderful sport.”
Pavry, no small noise in the world of investments, really did have the measure of these birds, killing well out front with one half of a pair of 1927 Hollands. They took a bit of picking (the birds, not the carrots) but Malcolm Partridge’s pickers-up were a clinically effective bunch, with steady, biddable dogs led by the quietly smiling Captain John Hanmer with his respected black labradors.
After a satisfying meal, which closely resembled a Christmas lunch in terms of
‘A real first – I don’t think I’ve ever shot knee-deep in carrots before. How inspired’
length and sumptuousness, the team waddled out for the penultimate drive, Fox Cover, the perfect sharpener to the final drive, Cow Pond.
The finale, for me, is one of those drives where something beautiful happens. The knock of leather on willow, the effervescent swirl of tonic oscillating ice against glass, a child’s first word... they all fade into inconsequentiality when stacked against the sound of a penny dropping. This penny landing sounded not unlike an armoured lead penny, around a metre wide, deposited into a skip of neatly stacked bone china – from the 11th floor. It was superb to watch the team, as one, raise their guns, all on the front foot, to address the hail of partridges swirling out and up at them, a succession of breeze-muted shots sounding as tame as distant firecrackers. The barrage of birds hurtled through for
almost 25 minutes and, as the team gained confidence, their task became all the more difficult, with coveys and tricky singletons squirting up at the sharpest, most acute of angles, some easily close to 40 yards in height in what was now a late afternoon chill breeze, a south-south-wester straight off the North Sea. As Partridge came to join me, scores of apples yellowing at our feet in the rich, cocoa-like soil, we commented on the superb view of the line we had.
“That’s it,” Partridge whispered, as a spout of feathers preceded the shot, the bird landing at Suman’s feet. “That’s the style, early and well in front.”
I asked him to name the finest partridge shots he’d seen grace this part of England. He leaned forward, hard on his stick, and squinted up through the milky sunlight at the colossal skies, a jigsaw of greys, ranging far and wide over his acreage. “The late Alastair Mccorquodale, from Stoke Rochford, he was poetry to watch,” he mused wistfully. “Alastair knew how to really take them well in front, as did the late Sir Peter Walker-okeover; stunning. With so many birds in the air, it was their focus I found so enthralling. Jim Foster, the old head keeper from Welby Estates, and Lord Stafford, they hardly seemed to move either, so relaxed and unhurried.”
There was a wonderful flurry of pocket, cartridge bag and belt searching as a dozen or more mallard broke and swirled up from the unseen pond. Now loaded with suitable ammunition, the team resumed attempts, guns now perpendicular, with a slower, more concentrated approach. Graham, Crum and Jules Bray seemed to relish these hardflying wild duck, now approaching 40 to 50 metres easily, felling a third of the pack with comparative ease.
With the reception the mallard received, the surviving group were now pin pricks in the distance as Partridge thumbed the whistle around his neck. “Thank you, everyone,” he said crisply into his radio. “Safe home.” And lifting the whistle to his lips, a final, single shot met with a whoop, a cheer and a ripple of laughter along the line. He winked and said: “Now, that’s what I do it for.”