The occupational hazards of a kite boy

Two weeks ago I was bemoaning the lack of wild grey partridges around here. Our local “family”, hefted to my neighbour’s 350 acres – we always see them on the same four fields – was, I reckoned, down to three, a pair of adults and a young bird. Disaster loomed.

But lo; on a walk with Waffle we flushed the largest covey I have ever seen, at least 15 for certain, tucked into a bit of rough ground on the corner of a stubble field. Where they had been all summer, avoiding Waffle’s nose on our daily walk, is something of a mystery.

The exploding covey reminded me of a very battered and foxed print by Archibald Thorburn, the Victorian master of bird painting. In the foreground is a worried looking family of partridges while in the distance, advancing across the stubble is a party of guns flying a hawk-shaped kite in front of them.

Instinctively the birds crouch. A “hawk” is bad news, so they sit tight. But by sitting tight the dogs and guns have time to get up to them. Not, some might think, quite sporting. On the other hand trying to get a Victorian mail-order bird kite to fly is a bit of an art in itself. I once met a man who flew a kite of the Thorburn variety as a boy on Salisbury Plain.

By the time I met him he was very old man and had donated the kite to a local museum. It was still in its wooden box with printed instructions from the now defunct Army and Navy Stores which had supplied the Empire with everything from tin hip baths to quinine and snake bite remedies. And kites apparently.

The kite, he agreed was not easy to fly. Too much wind and it crashed, too little and it refused to fly. Being “kite boy” was not without its evident dangers which he accepted as part of the job for six pence a day. He had inherited from the previous kite boy (fate unknown) a huge brown overcoat, the cast off from a local landowner, which was stuffed with straw sewn in tight twists into the back lining. This was to protect him from stray shot as the kite boy was required to walk in front of the guns.

Since partridges flush at head height or lower the kite boy was in severe danger of picking up a few pellets. On his head he wore a leather skull cap with a broad beaver tail-shaped neck protector of rough cow hide. He remembers being shot only twice to no ill effect.

Today, were anyone to contemplate shooting partridges, or grouse for that matter – Augustus Grimble wrote a learned treatise on shooting grouse in the same manner – the kite boy would have to be kitted out in full bomb disposal gear. Any volunteers? n