The Big Shots
A collection of gems taken from . . .
"The Big Shots - Edwardian Shooting Parties" by Jonathon Garnier Ruffer published by Debrett’s PeerageHere is a collection of reminiscences of a brief age (some 40 years) which is now history.
The Edwardian era was a period rich in character and eccentricity, when the pace of living followed a more humane scale than today and leaders of thought and action had time for lengthy recreations.
A change happened in England about the 1860’s. Previously, gentlemen walked through woods and shot pheasants as they flew away. Now the estate workers did the walking - driving the pheasants towards the gentlemen, who stood at the far end. This became the way in which the great landowners entertained their friends and associates during the winter months.
It was greatly helped by the advent of the railway and technical improvements to the double-barrelled shotgun (which by now was breech-loading, without external hammers to cock, and automatically ejected the fired cartridges).
The first made the shooting estates accessible within hours rather than days - the other extended the scale of the carnage and touched it with artistry.
However, in addition to opportunity, a social impetus was needed, and this was provided principally by the Prince of Wales and his immediate circle.
As a consequence, statistics were all important in this highly competitive affair, and so was social style - you combined the opportunities of a Vimy Ridge machine-gunner with an infinitely better lunch.
Sandringham:
At the start of the week, the guests would come up from London by train, boarding at St Pancras Station, and travelling by the special royal train to the Sandringham Station (built by the Prince of Wales) at Wolferton, about two miles away. The occupants and their baggage were then transferred to the waiting horse-drawn carriages.
The rule that no lady must be seen dressed in the same clothes more than once meant that the amount of luggage taken for a week was phenomenal. As the guests entered the house, their hosts would be there to greet them, but only briefly. The guests would be shown to their rooms, the ladies in the older part of the house, the bachelors in the new wing. And there they would stay - there was no question of midnight liaisons at Sandringham. In their rooms there would be refreshments to revive them from the journey before changing for dinner at 8:30 - or 9 (by the Sandringham clocks).
The Prince kept all the clocks at Sandringham running half an hour fast - to get an extra half hour of daylight for shooting on the dark winter days.
Keeping the clocks at the correct time was not an option - Norfolk was a county slow to change, and that applied equally to the starting time for a gentleman’s sport.
Typical shooting records:
Tom de Grey (the 6th Lord Walsingham) set out to establish the record for grouse shot by 1 shooter, in one day, by having every bird on his Yorkshire estate driven over him. He recorded in framed manuscript, with suitable illuminations in his own hand, the 1,070 grouse shot to his own pair of guns in 14 hours 8 minutes!
Walsingham subsequently claimed that he suffered no ill effects (such as gun headache) afterwards!
Lord Ripon held the record for the most pheasants in the shortest time - 28 birds in 60 seconds! He was, of course, using a pair of double-barrelled guns, with a man to load them. Another time, he had 7 dead birds in the air simultaneously!
The ‘gun’ (shooter) and his loader must have worn gloves - the guns would certainly have become too hot to handle!
Ripon and Walsingham, shooting together one day, were suddenly approached by a covey of 8 partridges. Both men got a left and right with each gun - so killing the entire covey!
Apart from the undoubted shooting skill involved this demonstrates a wonderful harmony of judgement both showed in assessing which birds were theirs.
An unfortunate shot:
One particularly unfortunate shot fired by the Duke of Devonshire was at a wounded cock pheasant as it passed a gate. He fired at it and killed it, and also a retriever which was running after it. With the same shot, he hit the owner of the retriever in the leg, and the chef from Chatsworth, who was also an onlooker. The Duke was very concerned about this - but only because all the dinners might have been spoiled had the chef been badly wounded!
Where not to drop your bird:
It was not a good idea to cause a dead bird to fall in an undesired direction - the most undesirable direction of all was anywhere near King Edward VII.
Once, when His Majesty was out shooting in a bath chair, having suffered an injury to his foot while shooting at Windsor, Lord Ripon killed an exceptionally high pheasant which seemed about to fall on the royal head - this could have proved fatal. Mercifully, it fell a few inches wide but hit the arm of the bath chair, burst open and covered the King with blood and feathers. For a tense moment, it seemed that the King might burst open as well.
Dress:
Dress was another area where proprieties were very important. King Edward VII was brought up to believe that slipshod dressing was the mark of bad breeding. His subjects came to defer to his personal tastes - which is why we leave the bottom button of our waistcoats undone, and press our trousers down the middle rather than the side.
Lord Rossmore had a pair of jodhpurs made of black buckskin and was so pleased with them he wore them at Elveden, Suffolk. When King Edward VII spotted them, he came over and said: “I’m glad to see, Rossmore, that you are using up your old evening trousers to make shooting leggings.” Rossmore’s hat , too, came in for similar badinage. General Strachey, who was also shooting at Elveden said of it: “By jove! I am not a wealthy man, but I would willingly give 1,000 pounds to have the impertinent audacity to wear that hat.”
Witty words:
Lord Rosebery, who was staying with the Duke of Cleveland (and his mother, the Duchess of Cleveland) wrote in the guest book under the heading ‘Object of Visit’:
“To see their Graces - and to shoot their grouses.”
Lord Horton once wrote:
“On the 1st of September one Sunday morn
I shot a hen pheasant in standing corn
Without a licence. Contrive who can
Such a cluster of crimes against God and Man.”
The Edwardians loved success - had the villain missed the pheasant, the reaction could have been much worse.
Lord Dudley’s regret:
Lord Dudley once engaged his hairdresser to load for him. During the shoot, Eddy Dudley fired at a partridge that was too close and blew it to pieces!
As it fell at his feet, he kicked it into a ditch, hoping that the Duke of Portland, who was his neighbour, would not notice. At the end of the drive, the Duke, who had shot 6 birds, asked Eddy what his luck had been, and was told that he had killed 6 birds too.
Just then, he heard the hairdresser calling out “Milor, milor!” He was holding fragments of a bird by its remaining leg, and explained “See, milor! I have found another piece in the ditch. So I think milor now has one bird more than his Grace.” Eddy did not hear the last of this incident for a long time!
Loaders:
King Edward VII had a favourite loader for years, a dour Scot called Peter Robinson, and when he was loading, the King shot noticeably better.
When King George V shot at Sandringham, he employed one of the estate’s agricultural workers as his loader. This man happened to be almost identical in appearance to King George. At any rate, the loader grew his beard in the same style as His Majesty and, whenever they appeared together, they always wore exactly the same clothing. It greatly amused the King to see his guests unsure of whether they were talking to their monarch or an estate worker!
Lord Hartington:
The 8th Duke of Devonshire bore the courtesy title, Lord Hartington and was universally known as ‘Harty Tarty’.
His youth had been spent in the company of one of the most successful courtesans of her time, Miss Catherine Walters, known to the world as Skittles. This celebrated liaison provided the Prince of Wales with one of his most famous practical jokes.
During an official tour of Coventry, an equerry was told to ask the mayor to take the party to a bowling alley as Lord Hartington was especially keen on this game. During the visit, Hartington was clearly bored, so the mayor in all innocence exclaimed:
“His Royal Higness asked specially for the inclusion of the alley in the tour in tribute to your lordship’s love of skittles”.
Lord Hartington was a brilliant politician who could make three speeches with no notes, and indeed no preparations, when he found himself in a tight corner. With his political brilliance went a consciousness of rank. When someone asked him how best to reply to the American greeting “Pleased to meet you”, Harty Tarty replied “I should say, ‘And so you damned well ought to be.’”
The joys of being the King’s minder:
King Edward VII’s equerry, Fritz Ponsonby, was constantly approached by a stream of uninvited people wishing to rub shoulders with His Majesty. He recounted how a beautiful woman from the half-world of Vienna wanted to have the honour of sleeping with the King and said:
“I told her this was out of the question, so she said if it came to the worst she would sleep me - so that she would not waste the money spent on her ticket. However, I told her to look elsewhere for a bed.”
What the butler did:
Sir Ralph Payne-Galway had an unpalatable experience when he believed his butler was being dishonest.
Sir Ralph had organised a fortnight’s shooting party in the north of Scotland, and towards the end of the first week the sherry decanter was observed to be only half full, even though none of the guests had been drinking any. It was clear that the butler was the culprit, and to ensure that it happened no more the decanter was spiked with an unmentionable liquid.
To Sir Ralph’s horror, the level in the decanter continued to fall. Sir Ralph asked the butler directly whether he had been taking the sherry. “Yes, sir” was the unexpected reply, “and I have been putting two tablespoons in your soup every evening as your doctor ordered.”
The cost of being a big shot:
On 14 January 1865, the Prince and Princess of Wales paid their first visit to Merton (Lord Walsingham’s estate). The first day was spent hunting and they got nothing, but the next day was devoted to shooting. The resulting bag was 514 pheasants, 13 partridges, 35 hares and 32 rabbits. HRH was pleased, and it proved to be the first of many visits.
Unfortunately, the Walsingham family could not afford to provide the necessary hospitality - it is hard to think of a man with 3 estates and over 10,000 acres as the poor cousin, but Walsingham was. Walsingham, unlike some of his friends, did not have the weight of income needed.
In 1912 his indebtedness became apparent and the Yorkshire estates were sold. So was the London property (which included the site of the Ritz Hotel) and all that remained was Merton Hall itself which could not be sold as it was subject to an entail.
The last seven years of Walsingham’s life were spent abroad. He is also remembered as an eminent ornithologist, and a director of the British Museum - for which he shot the entire collection of humming birds, in the Natural History Museum.
The impact of war:
During the Great War, Regulation 2f of the Defence of the Realm Act forbade the feeding of game birds with grain - Britain was desperately short of food.
In April 1917, Lord Pirrie’s pheasants at Whitley Park were discovered to be feeding off grain. The head keeper, James McLean, was fined 10 pounds, as was the corn dealer who supplied the grain, and even the labourer who fed the birds was fined one pound. Lord Pirie (of course) said he had no idea such wickedness was going on - and was acquitted!
Foreign guests:
A foreigner who was grouse shooting in Scotland was asked by his host, at the end of the drive, how he had got on. He was told that the guest had been unable to hit any of the furry little birds, but of the ‘moutons sauvages’ (sheep) he had been able to shoot 3.
King Carlos of Spain, if he thought anyone was watching, would shoot from both shoulders alternately - then taking the gun in one hand like a pistol, he would shoot low pheasants.
Oh, to be a peasant then:
Lord Tennyson in the 1850’s invited a Russian nobleman to his home on the Isle of Wight, and used to send him off with a gun in the mornings to walk the hedgerows. One day the Russian came back looking very pleased with himself and reported in a thick Slav accent that he had shot 2 peasants.
Tennyson corrected him, saying “2 pheasants”.
“No” said the Count “two peasants. They were insolent - so I shot them.”
It was a situation echoed nearly 50 years later, when an Englishman shooting in Sweden refrained from shooting at a hare because a beater was in the way. His host afterwards chided him, saying “In Sweden we have many peasants - but not many hares!”
It was said of the shooting world at the time:
“Up gets a guinea, bang goes a penny halfpenny, and down comes half-a-crown”
This referred to the cost of raising a pheasant, the cost of a shotgun cartridge, and the price paid by the Leadenhall Market for the dead bird.
What happened to the difference? It went on entertaining the guests, and posterity has been left with nothing except for some extraordinary!