Shooting Times & Country Magazine
The best of decades
Given the chance to go back in time, ponders Blue Zulu, which era would prove to be the happiest for those of us of sporting tastes?
In my boyhood we played a game that allowed full expression of the imagination: when, ideally, would you like to have been born? And we decided that the 1880s, the decade of Shooting Times’ founding, was about perfect.
The game was usually played in an Edwardian octagonal tree-house perched in a cedar tree where we often spent the summer nights before rising at dawn and marauding with airgun, catty and butterfly net. It was a hunting base, in other words, and so the criteria for the perfect birthyear were based mostly on sporting opportunity with one other, very selfish, consideration: we didn’t want to have been nobbled in one of the world wars.
Never repeated
World Wars I and II weren’t vague notions in the history books then. Fathers had served in the second, grandfathers in the first. Our comics were stuffed with characters taking on Jerry, our maths master had been imprisoned by the Japanese. Veterans from both wars attended the local Remembrance Sunday service.
So we did our calculations, balancing the availability of sport with avoidance of early death in the trenches or in a Lancaster bomber; and the 1880s seemed the right time to enter this world.
Back then, we weren’t taught about the darker side of the British Empire, the last remnants fading fast. Instead, we studied the great swathe of pink in old atlases and dreamt what it would have been like when a Briton could travel throughout the world, his safety guaranteed by Her Britannic Majesty, the army and the world’s greatest navy.
To East Africa, perhaps. Nairobi wasn’t founded until 1899, and even then it was only a railway depot.
In the 1880s plains game smothered the savannahs and no one envisaged that the great herds of elephant would disappear through habitat destruction and ivory poaching.
Or to Egypt, for the great duck shoots on the 55,000-acre Lake Karoun, where the companies of wigeon, pintail, teal, mallard and shoveler darkened. Then off by steamer to India, where the snipe were so plentiful, according to ‘Longspear’, writing to Shooting Times in 1887, that your cook could concoct a curry “entirely composed of the ’trails of snipe” and eaten in a “handsome, spacious, well-lighted tent, double roofed and double walled”, the ground covered with “rich Jubbaulore carpets” and the table “glittering with glass and plate atop glossy damask”. It sounds somewhat fanciful, until you know that one Gun, a Mr WK Dodds shot 3,472 snipe within 100 miles of Calcutta in the 1896-97 season.
I loved the idea of snipe shooting as a boy and adore the sport now, but today we are thrilled with 15 couple shot between eight of us. What would it have been like, then, to have accompanied Captain George Rice on 16 February 1893, when he shot
207 pintail snipe in Ceylon to his own gun or with Messrs Bell-irving, Gedge and Turner in September 1894 when they bagged 299 Swinhoe’s snipe near Hong Kong? And one does wonder how long they scoured the marsh for the 300th.
Such feats appealed to us when we were young (and to be honest, they still impress) partly due to the obvious marksmanship but also because of their exotic nature, carried out in countries that are now a four-film journey on a long-haul flight. But there’s another factor: they were often performed by ‘ordinary’ chaps working in some capacity for the British Empire. Equally impressive bags of gamebirds were made in the UK, but the Guns were usually titled or from a county family.
The record bag for partridges, for example, when 4,109 wild English greys were bagged between 18 and 21 October 1887 at The Grange, Hampshire, was made by HRH The Duke of Cambridge, the Duke of Roxburghe, the Earl of Ilchester, Colonel Digby, Captain EHT Mildmay, the Hon F Baring and Mr AH Wood.
Thirty years later, the aristocrats were also typically in force at Broomhead Moor on 27 August
1913, when 2,843 grouse were killed by the Earl of Darnley, the Earl of Westmorland, the Earl of Powis, Lord Savile, Lord Lewisham, Sir Ralph Payne-gallwey, Bart, Captain The Hon J Dawnay and — last in the order of precedence — Mr W Barry.
Empire Guns
But shooting has never just been about the grand occasions with grandees and those born in the 1880s from less exalted backgrounds must have found plenty of sport even if they did not answer the Empire’s call having first packed their Greener or Westley Richards boxlock (invented in 1875).
It may be hard to imagine now but you could still shoot parts of the Crown foreshore in the 1970s free of any restrictions. No wildfowling club membership or parole period was then needed; if you were a member of WAGBI and the foreshore wasn’t leased, you could just walk on the marsh and shoot provided you could reach it without trespassing.
Before World War II, farmers and housing developers hadn’t undertaken wholesale drainage and there was plenty of
“You could shoot parts of the Crown foreshore in the 1970s free of restrictions”
freshwater marshland and water meadow in which wildfowl could breed and winter (and I have in mind one wonderful area close to my childhood home that’s now an industrial estate).
People of all backgrounds pulled on their waders, picked up their 3in magnum 12s and found their sport in the mud and mere. It’s little surprise that BB (born in 1905) and Sir Peter Scott (born in 1909) wrote some of the finest fowling books ever published. The fowl were there and they had the freedom to hunt them.
Rabbits were another source of sport and food for the ordinary shooting man, especially before 1954, when myxomatosis was introduced. With the rabbit population estimated to be between 60 million and 100 million in the 1930s, the farmer’s gun — and those of whom he gave permission — must indeed have gone bang, bang, bang pretty constantly.
Even the splendid English partridge featured frequently in the bags of those born in the 1880s who had the farmer’s permission or took out a modest shooting lease and bought the annual game licence.
Bread-and-butter bird
Before mechanised farming, and herbicides and pesticides — and when keepers dealt ruthlessly with enemies of game — AJ Stuart-wortley could write in 1893: “Whether we wander over the downs of the south coast, climb the slopes of northern oat-fields, or thread our way through the rich pasture lands of the Thames valley, we cannot easily forget the presence of this familiar bird.”
The Englishman was the breadand-butter bird for the sportsman before World War II, whereas today our lovely greys thrive only where people are passionate about them and are prepared to fund that passion.
Everything considered, then, the embryonic sportsman would have been blessed if he’d been born in 1882, the year of Shooting Times’ founding. But given that none of us was, let’s be thankful for the sport we enjoy now: our woods probably hold more deer now than at any time since the Norman Conquest; the marvellously adaptable woodpigeon continues to thrive; geese numbers continue to climb and a network of fowling clubs provide sport; clay shoots are nationwide, giving us all the chance to enjoy clay busting and hone our shooting skills; and pheasants, once preserved by and for the few, are ubiquitous.
So we are lucky and should consider ourselves so. But I’d still like to have eaten snipe ’trail curry with Long-spear in 1887 on a table “glittering with glass and plate”.