SLAUGHTER BY ROYAL APPOINTMENT
As Prince William campaigns to save endangered species, a rather embarrassing reminder that most of his relatives had a somewhat different approach by Richard Kay
WRITING to her father-inlaw George V from a safari in Africa, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon — the future Queen Mother — gave a gripping account of the excitement of the kill. ‘I took to shooting with a rifle, which I hope you won’t dislike me for,’ she wrote. ‘But really there was nothing else to do, and I enjoyed it so much, and became very bloodthirsty.
‘First of all I shot birds as big as capercailzie for the pot, and then I shot buck, and by great flukes managed to kill and not wound, and then I shot a rhinoceros, which nearly broke my heart.’
The carnage was far from over. In another missive to her life-long friend Francis D’Arcy Osborne, the Duke of Leeds, she noted: ‘Saw thousands of zebra — I shot two dead, with two shots for lion kills. Hated doing it.’
Almost 90 years ago, in 1924, the demure newly married duchess and her husband Bertie, who was to become King George VI little more than a decade later, embarked by ship on the start of a meticulously planned four-month trip to the East African plains — though ‘killing fields’ might have been a more appropriate description.
From late December to the following April they criss-crossed what is now modern Kenya and Uganda, accumulating a vast bag of big game. Among their kills were oryx, exquisitely graceful giant gazelles, antelopes, and a bull elephant, downed by Bertie who emptied his magazine into the charging beast.
They were, of course, following in a long royal tradition. When they weren’t occupied fighting wars, sovereigns, and their families, liked nothing better than hunting wild animals. History books are full of pictures of royals at play with their guns, such as the Duke of Windsor posing with a dead tiger.
In recent years, many of the spoils from these hunts have found their way into the ‘trophy room’ at Sandringham, the Queen’s Norfolk home, where the Royal Family will gather next week for Christmas.
Yesterday, pictures came to light which showed the macabre collection of stuffed animals and mounted heads — which were killed in the name of sport. All the big game on display was dispatched by royal marksmen over the years.
They include some of the animal kingdom’s most magnificent beasts, among them two rare rhinos, a leopard, an Indian tiger, the tusks of an elephant, and two stuffed lions. In all, there are 62 trophies on show in Sandringham’s intimate museum, which is open to the public when the royals are not in residence.
Some will see these exhibits as mementoes from a different age, but others will doubtless find it a gruesome spectacle — all the more unpalatable when one considers recent calls by Prince William for an end to the illegal killing of endangered wildlife.
Buckingham Palace insists the trophies should be seen in their historical context. They were part of a display which ‘recreates the look and feel of an Edwardian smoking room’. And for good measure they point out that all the animals were shot — some by Edward VII and George V, the Queen’s grandfather — before 1941.
All the same, William’s protestations of his desire to see an end to the illegal killing and trafficking of endangered species might be seen by some as a little ironic when one considers the epic scale of wildlife slaughtered by the Royal Family in the past 150 years.
Of the modern royals, the Duke of Edinburgh’s body count is highest. One estimate in 1996 reckoned that in the previous 30 years Philip had shot one tiger, two crocodiles, countless wild boar and stags, rabbits, ducks and at least 30,000 pheasants.
He has rarely listened to criticism of his passion for shooting, and has insisted there was no conflict of interest between his enjoyment of the sport and his position for 35 years as President of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, of which he remains President Emeritus. The charity itself has always maintained that what the Duke does in his private capacity ‘is beyond the sphere of our relationship with him’.
Certainly, shooting was one of Philip’s most accomplished pursuits. His ‘bag’ after more than half a century of killing things stretches over continents, species and into mind-boggling numbers.
The anti-bloodsports lobby harrumph that in Britain alone he has shot deer, rabbit, wild duck, snipe, woodcock, pigeon, partridge and pheasant. But his most controversial encounters have been overseas.
HE HAS never really escaped the furore that erupted over his shooting of a tiger in India during a break from a royal tour with the Queen in 1961 while he was a guest of the Maharajah of Jaipur.
The Queen rode nearby on the back of an elephant, with a bearer shading her from the sun with a parasol. It was the kind of lavish excursion members of the House of Windsor had been enjoying in the Raj for decades.
Two hundred beaters ‘worked’ a pair of tigers into a clearing near the Duke’s ‘ machan’, a raised wooden tower, whereupon he shot a ‘good- sized’ 8ft 9in beast with one shot to the head. The tiger’s body was hauled back to the Maharajah’s palace by truck and two hours later it was photographed surrounded by dignitaries, including a proud Philip and the Queen.
At sunrise the following day a hunt was organised for the Queen to shoot a female tiger. But according to the former game ranger who had led the royal party, she decided at the last minute that a monarch should not make the kill and handed her gun to one of her staff to deliver the fatal shot.
The Maharajah meanwhile had the Prince’s trophy tiger skinned and s t uff ed and s hi pped to Windsor Castle.
On that trip, Philip also killed a crocodile and six urials, a type of mountain sheep. His actions prompted widespread condemnation from both Indian and British politicians, even though big game shooting was not against the law at the time.
What has often been overlooked is that on the same trip, the then Foreign Secretary Alec DouglasHome, who was accompanying the royal couple, shot and killed a rare female white rhino.
The same year, the Duke also killed a 15ft-long crocodile with single shot, while dressed in a lounge suit, from the bow of a steamer on the Gambia River.
In the end, however, he bowed to pressure and gave up big-game hunting, but continued to defend his love of bloodsports, often claiming that he was culling, not killing.
He introduced Prince Charles to shooting when he was 12, and on one occasion father and son are said to have killed 50 wild boar in a single day while visiting the estates of Philip’s German relatives.
One bag in 1967, also in Germany, yielded 27 hares and four foxes, although this pales beside the 1,400 duck and 400 pheasant Philip and his guns chalked up in a day on the estate of a royal kinsman in Italy.
Yet even these efforts are dwarfed by the wholesale slaughter brought about by an earlier generation of royals, who showed no quarter in
their bid to blast game wherever and whenever they could. As Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII provoked consternation in 1868 when he chased a deer on horseback from Harrow in North-West London through Wormwood Scrubs to the goods yard at Paddington station, where he shot it in front of astonished railway guards and porters.
For Edward, the thrill of the chase was just as important as the bag. Hunting in Nepal in 1876, he shot a staggering 23 tigers in two weeks. The bigger the beast, the more it was prized — and sure enough an elephant was added to the bag. Edward’s eldest son Prince Albert, the Duke of Clarence, also shot tigers during a safari in 1889, while George V killed 21 tigers, eight rhinos and a bear during a ten-day hunting trip in India over Christmas 1911.
Royals would often use the excuse of an official tour to take in some hunting — in some cases the expeditions were far longer than the formal part of their visits.
For example, the father of the current Duke of Gloucester combined an appearance at the coronation of the Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930 with a shooting excursion. On that occasion, he shot and ate a lion, whose meat he later remarked tasted ‘a lot like veal’. Two years later, Gloucester was back for a twomonth shooting trip to Sudan, where he shot a grown lioness.
Gloucester’s brother, the future Edward VIII — who would abandon the throne to marry divorcee Wallis Simpson — was an avid hunter. In 1928, he downed a bull elephant whose tusks weighed fully 65lb. On a three-month safari, he also slaughtered crocodiles and koodoo, a large antelope.
Of course, there was nothing unusual about such trips at that time. The monied upper classes would often spend six to eight weeks shooting wildlife all over the Indian subcontinent and Africa during the British winter.
Today, with elephants, rhino and tigers in far greater peril, the younger generation of royals face a difficult balancing act as they try to combine their love of shooting with their own wildlife preservation campaigns.
William came unstuck in February when it emerged he had flown off on a trip to shoot deer and wild boar in Spain days before taking part in a highprofile campaign to highlight the illegal poaching of wildlife.
Earlier this year, a photograph also emerged of Harry — who supports his brother’s stance — after he had downed a one-ton water buffalo on his gap year trip to Africa ten years ago.
William has called for the destruction of all the ivory in t he Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace — an honourable, if somewhat ill-thought out idea. But in all honesty, it’s not one that sits very comfortably with that trophy room at Sandringham, where he will, of course, be a guest for lunch in just over a week’s time.