Shooting Times & Country Magazine
The king of rabbiting
David SD Jones discovers how Welsh eccentric Richard Lloyd-price turned his 64,000-acre estate into a hub of fieldsports innovation
Often referred to as the Rabbit King, Richard Lloyd-price was not only considered to be the leading authority on rabbit shooting in Britain during the late-victorian and Edwardian periods, but was also nominated by Baily’s Magazine as one of the 60 best game Shots in the country in 1903.
Owner of the vast 64,000-acre Rhiwlas estate in Merionethshire in North Wales, he devoted much of his life to rabbit preservation, both for sporting purposes and as a means of making money through the sale of rabbits to game dealers, poulterers and butchers in northern manufacturing towns.
Something of an innovative character, he pioneered sporting lets for paying Guns on his property, established a game farm, founded the first ever sheepdog trials at Garth Goch, near Bala, in 1873 for the benefit of local farmers and shepherds — and, last but not least, set up a Welsh whisky distillery at Frongoch.
The grandson of Richard
Watkin Price, a prominent Welsh agriculturalist, Richard was born in 1843. Educated at Eton, he inherited Rhiwlas while still studying at Oxford upon the death of his grandfather in 1860 and took over the management of the property when he reached his majority in 1864.
A keen Shot, he soon turned the estate into a vast game preserve, increasing the gamekeeping staff from one to around a dozen, recruiting experienced English and Scottish keepers to look after his sporting interests in preference to locals.
High birds
Shortly after taking over Rhiwlas, Richard established a driven pheasant shoot on the property, capable of producing stratospheric birds in some areas. Indeed, surviving records from 1867 note that, on 26 November, he and 11 other Guns brought down a total of 402 pheasants, plus six partridges, 12 woodcock, 163 hares, 215 rabbits and two various on the Home Beat, with ‘hens only’ being shot in the first two hours. He also introduced organised grouse shooting on the Rhiwlas moors, managing the ground so well that an annual bag of up to 1,000 brace was attainable in a good season.
Not content with setting up successful pheasant and grouse shoots, Richard began to develop large-scale driven rabbit shooting at Rhiwlas, a sport that he felt could become a lucrative activity for landowners and farmers. He laid out a giant rabbit park on the property by
putting a wire fence around a small mountain and constructing artificial warrens inside the boundary.
In addition to rabbit stock on the ground, he put down consignments of live rabbits brought in from other estates to improve the existing blood and advocated regular introductions of rabbits from elsewhere to avoid degeneration and disease.
In the early 1880s, Richard opened a rabbit breeding station at Rhiwlas and pioneered the use of artificial incubators for rearing purposes. For shooting, he recommended wild rabbits only, but for food production purposes he suggested that the most suitable rabbit was a cross between a wild rabbit and a Belgian hare.
Evidently keen to promote rabbit shooting as a sport and to revitalise the medieval practice of commercial rabbit rearing as an additional income stream, Richard wrote a definitive book on the subject — Rabbits For Profit And Rabbits For Powder (1884) — and penned articles advocating the benefits of rabbit farming for The Field and other sporting periodicals.
He regularly wrote that whereas a cow consumed the same amount of grass daily as 150 rabbits, the profit made from a cow over 12 weeks amounted to £6, while the profit made from 150 rabbits over the same period totalled more than £11.
Richard gradually developed a system of driven rabbit shooting that would produce large daily bags for parties of between seven and 10 Guns. He implemented specialist holeblocking techniques, which included the use of paraffin, to keep rabbits out on the ground in readiness for a shoot day, and employed teams of beaters to drive rabbits towards the Guns.
Shoot accounts for 1883 reveal that he paid a gamekeeper a yearly salary of £52 to look after his warrens and spent £4-8/- on casual labour for hole blocking, beating and ferreting.
In 1885, having created his big-bag rabbit shoot, Richard was finally able to enjoy the fruits of his labours.
On 7 October, he and a team of eight other Guns shot a record bag of 5,086 rabbits at Rhiwlas. The Earl de Grey accounted for 920. Other outstanding bags taken on the estate during the 1880s include 4,000 rabbits shot by nine Guns on 16 October 1889, 3,660 rabbits taken by eight Guns on 16 October 1884 and 3,093 killed by eight Guns on 19 October 1887.
Increasing demand
Capitalising on the success of his rabbit farming operation, Richard established the Rhiwlas Game Farm in the mid-1880s in order to help satisfy the ever-increasing demand for pheasant eggs and live gamebirds, fuelled by the rapid growth in driven shooting at the time.
In addition to supplying eggs, live pheasants, partridges, hares and red grouse (netted from a special section of his moors) for shooting or breeding purposes, he sold “well-trained” pointers, setters and retrievers, and offered free overnight accommodation and Welsh whisky to gamekeepers collecting eggs.
Sensing another opportunity, Richard introduced sporting letting on his property from the 1890s, renting out Rhiwlas mansion with the grouse shootings and the pheasant shootings as separate lets, plus rough shooting over areas of land on the periphery of his estate.
Records from the Edwardian era note that the Liberal politician Sir Arthur Bignold leased the Rhiwlas pheasant shooting for several seasons and Ernest Hall Hedley of Pontardawe
“Richard felt driven rabbit shooting could become a lucrative activity for landowners”
rented the Berwyn Lowland mixed shootings. In 1909, William Lockett Agnew, a prominent London art dealer, paid £1,000 for a one-month grouse shooting tenancy, inclusive of fishing rights.
Richard was an early advocate of field trials to test the ability of working gundogs. A friend of Sewallis Shirley, founder of the Kennel Club, he held a three-day field trial event for pointers and setters in August 1873 in live grouse shooting conditions, with Mr Shirley as one of the judges. A dog lover, he is reputed to have kept a kennel of more than 100 sporting dogs, from pointers to bull terriers.
Eccentric Welsh squire, crack shot, fieldsports entrepreneur and Rabbit King, Richard died on 9 January 1923, aged 79, and was laid to rest in a vault at Llanfor Cemetery, built with money won by his racehorse, Bendigo. He bequeathed a life annuity of £50 per annum to headkeeper William Guest and yearly annuity of £25 to moor keeper Joe Tee.