Hard times
Back to basics
Everyone has been forced to rediscover their trapping and snaring skills now that the men who were responsible for it have left to fight at the Front. The shortage of men has also resulted in an entirely new phenomenon as women are beginning to take on what were traditionally male roles right across society.
On your estate they are now appearing as vermin trappers and beating on shoot days. In the case of one of your neighbours, one has even taken over as a full-time beatkeeper. The traditionalists have their own thoughts regarding this, but as far as you are concerned you’d be lost without their contributions. Elsewhere you have heard rumours of German prisoners of war being employed as beaters for shoot days but the Duke won’t even countenance the idea, not so much that it is against the law but because he has lost two sons, one on the Somme and one at Amiens, and he wants no enemy on his land.
Smaller bags
The Duke still travels to Scotland each year to shoot grouse, taking you to load for him as always, but with so many staff now absent from the moors predation is high, the heather goes unburned and the bags are much reduced. Some moors will never In better times, a shooting party in Norfolk in 1910 outside the headkeeper’s lodge
truly recover properly as management is especially labour-intensive and those who once tended them will not be returning. Nevertheless, grouse shooting still takes place, so much so that a Bill was passed in the House of Lords to bring forward the open season to permit members of the House to shoot during recess. It was rejected in the Commons to cries of, “We want to shoot Germans, not grouse!”
Back on your estate the thousand-bird sporting days are long gone and you fear that they are unlikely to return. The Duke is insistent on running regular days, but they are smaller and less frequent and the Guns are noticeably all of the older generation as the youngsters are mostly away at the Front, lost forever or in some cases terrified by the sound of gunfire. There is no way that you could sustain the old big-number days
in any case. Large-scale game farming has been suspended; the Defence of the Realm Act introduced in 1914 ensured that many game farms stopped operating completely or converted to more general agricultural purposes. Most of your game is either wild or reared locally, and numbers of reared birds are further restricted by the reduced number of estate staff available to tend them.
Food production
Even your game coverts have shrunk. Where once game shooting ruled the estate and your wishes overrode those of the farmers, now the land has increasingly been given over to food production and you no longer occupy the position at the top of the local hierarchy that you did just a few years ago. Even the herd of fallow deer in the Park has found a new purpose – no longer ornamental, they are treated as just another food source and encouraged to breed for numbers rather than quality. Shot birds have taken on a much greater significance and are donated to the local military hospital. Your underkeepers spend far too much of their valuable time, in your opinion, shooting and trapping rabbits to go to the local market. Not surprisingly, poaching has gone through the roof in the face of meat shortages and for the first time you can remember you simply do not have the resources to fight it. It seems an endless battle to maintain game numbers on the estate.
Forever changed
Game shooting is by no means finished, but the war will have changed it forever. Many keepers discharged from the Forces will return to their old jobs, but crippling taxation and death duties imposed by a post-war government anxious to recoup the costs of the conflict will mean that shoots across the land will have to make serious economies. The old order has changed, smaller syndicates will now take on a new prominence. Things will never be the same.
Charles Smith-jones Says: “Where once game shooting ruled the estate, now the land has increasingly been given over to food production”