Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Enjoying shooting’s Golden Age
But when exactly was it? Did the Edwardians experience our sport’s finest hour or did it occur between the wars?
land and cash but manpower. By
1911, 25,000 gamekeepers were in employment. Their chief role was to target gamebird predators. Tenant farmers risked eviction if they threatened the welfare of game. Agriculture took such a back seat that the Land Enquiry Committee of 1913 concluded that an estimated 50% of farm land was in some way given over to game habitat. The gamebird was to the wealthy Edwardian what the sheep was to the entitled Tudor. Methods of rearing game, trialled in the time of Victoria, were perfected in her son’s reign. The labour-intensive, yet effective, Euston System of grey partridge management caused such a shootable surplus that between 4,000 to 7,000 partridges were shot on the Suffolk estate. For pheasants, wild broods abounded, their numbers added to by stock from game farms.
These new ventures appeared and prospered, rearing eggs under broodies and selling chicks and poults for release. Edwardian partridges and pheasants were cosseted creatures and the men who protected them did well, too. The head keeper out-ranked the village policeman in the rural pecking order.
So much for the landowners, birds and keepers. What of the ‘working Gun’ in Edwardian Britain? The elite’s newfound fanaticism for driven shooting and preservation led to some considerable changes in the law. When RS Surtees wrote
Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour in 1849, the acidic writer had his anti-hero walking-up partridges with impunity across boundaries. Fifteen years later, he penned Facey Romford’s Hounds. This time his chief protagonist masquerades as a gentleman MFH. Romford inveigles himself into a fraudulent tenancy of a stately home, in part so he can ‘legitimately’ obtain “a bit of shooting with my dogs”.
This alludes to the 1862 Poaching Prevention Act, which empowered policemen to stop and search people without a warrant. Gone was the relative free-for-all that was shooting.
By the commencement of the
20th century, leasing sporting rights was, for the average man, either cripplingly costly or near impossible
“We are now more discerning about our sport and blessed with choice”
to obtain. The large landowners jealously guarded their land and avariciously bought up more. Breech-loading shotgun technology advanced, aiding a move away from affordable ‘walked-up’ towards driven shooting – expensive, yet perfect for corpulent Kings, hangerson and corseted courtesans. Shooting was still available for the yeoman, largely away from the new shooting meccas of East Anglia and central southern England. In the Midlands,
West Country and lowland northern England, foxes were as religiously preserved as a partridge in Norfolk. Thus a tenant farmer and his friends might enjoy some rough shooting quite happily, provided they left the foxes alone for his Lordship’s hounds.
Shooting Times came into being in 1882. These early issues were clearly aimed at those seeking wild sport in wild places – but who didn’t own a castle. The status quo in game shooting more or less carried on unchanged until 28 June 1914, when Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. His marksmanship changed the world – and game shooting – forever.
World War I
Gamekeepers and estate workers flocked to the colours, while their employers donned uniform and were commissioned. Off they went to the mud and blood of Flanders or Dardanelles, many never to return. Some too frail to fight attempted to continue shooting at home but the Defence of the Realm Act made it illegal to feed grain to gamebirds, so shooting petered out. The gamebooks of the Canwick estate in Lincolnshire, researched by historian Mark Rothery, show that between 1914 to 1918, 76 days shooting took place, the bag amounting to 4,000. Before the war, the estate shot 40 days per season, accounting for 7,500 birds.
The Armistice heralded a fleeting resurgence in game shooting as
farming briefly boomed. However, the die was cast. While Tommies had died in their tens of thousands, the true lost generation of World War I was the officer corps. The life expectancy of a subaltern on the Western Front was a mere six weeks. These fallen warriors would have been the lords of the manor.
The 1920s was a bleak time in rural Britain. Few heirs to carry on estates, a crash in agricultural income, the introduction of death duties and sweeping tax hikes all spelled the end of the grand driven shoots. Nearly a quarter of the land of England and Wales was sold between 1914 and 1927. Estates that managed to keep their heads above water sold off outlying farms or rented out sporting rights. The Great Depression of the early
’30s saw these rents halve in price. Simultaneously, the numbers of grey partridges plummeted due to a series of wet summers, disease and lack of manpower to enact pest control.
Pheasants rule
Guns still demanded sport and thus the pheasant took over as the number one gamebird. Coming out of the depression, the mid 1930s proved to be shooting’s renaissance. The formation of the Game Research Station at Knebworth (the embryonic incarnation of the GWCT) added science to old-fashioned know-how. Gamekeepers now had automated incubators rather than broody hens for rearing. Specialist game feeds meant quicker to mature, healthier birds. Research helped to understand the reason for the grey partridge’s decline through strongylosis. Partridge counts revealed what ‘shootable surpluses’ really were. The Game Farmers’ Association (GFA) was founded, and by the late ’30s its 34 members produced 120,000 pheasant poults per annum. The pheasant took the pressure off the grey partridge. By the end of the decade, game shooting was a thriving and sustainable sport once more.
But, unlike its Edwardian forefather, it was no longer a closed shop to all but the most wealthy. What wonders might we have seen in this shooting world if Adolf Hitler had been killed in the British gas attack at Ypres in 1918? Sadly, he was merely wounded and in 1939 shooting’s second golden period ended in war once again.
So which was shooting’s golden era? The time of the Edwardian great estates or the brave new world of the 1930s? I believe neither. The excesses of Edwardian preservation and persecution are a legacy we are recovering from still, our sport’s opponents portraying the big bags of then as a norm of today. Game took such precedence over agriculture that our nation’s self sufficiency was found wanting in times of national crisis. That being said, the period gave us much of the superb woodland we enjoy today. Wildlife, insects and fauna thrived, not just game.
The 1930s were possibly closer to being golden but, sadly, shooting’s renaissance ended prematurely.
My conclusion is the ‘Golden
Era’ is upon us. Today, shooting is an egalitarian beast, a farm worker swaps yarns with a duke in the gun bus. We are now more discerning about our sport and blessed with choice. Today’s sportsmen despise those who prize quantity over quality. Shooting is driven by conservation and dovetails with agriculture, creating essential income for rural areas. All but the rabid zealot sees the vital importance shooting makes to the wellbeing of our countryside. The dash of the Edwardian and the science of the ’30s has been distilled into a golden today. What a time to be alive and a part of it all.