1 October 2015
The Glorious First
by J R Thomas
Every year the newspapers run amusing and sometimes serious articles on the Glorious 12th, the 12th August, when every gentleman and increasingly, many gentlewomen, head to the northern hills in the hope of multiple encounters with a rare bird, the red grouse. As we discussed a few weeks ago – indeed, as close to the Glorious 12th as we could get – the red grouse is not as rare as it used to be, thanks to the wonders of modern keepering and medicated grit. But the grouse is still an expensive bird to pursue, so even among tweedy types with shotguns it remains a minority interest.
But for many country types, including many who live in cities and towns, there is a more glorious day, the Glorious first of October. Today, in fact, assuming you are reading the Shaw Sheet on publication day. For this is the first day of the pheasant shooting season, which runs to the 1st February, excluding Sundays and Christmas Day. The pheasant might be described as the poor man’s grouse, but most shooters would wince at that suggestion. At around £35 per bird if you wish to join a shooting party, as against £60 or so for grouse, they are cheaper, but not cheap. And it is no good popping along with seven mates and hoping to shoot ten or so; the estate owner or farmer who has taken the trouble to sort out some shooting will want you to take a hundred as a minimum, preferably two or three hundred. Not though, as some City and overseas types are reputed to arrange, five hundred, or even eight hundred. That is just vulgar and not sporting at all.
Pheasants are certainly much more widely available than grouse, as they like to live in hedges or on the edges of lowland woodland, preferably deciduous and with some wet ground around. Boggy places are perfect for them but they will also take their country dry, low or high (not moorland though), arable or grassland, provided that there is some shelter to keep off the winter chill and to hide in during the autumnal invasion of folks with guns and dogs. As most of rural Britain meets this general description, they thrive all over the UK. Indeed, there cannot be a county in which it is not possible to meet, or even shoot, a pheasant. Greater Manchester or West Midlands, maybe, but we are talking proper old fashioned pre Walkerisation counties here.
The pheasant is reputed to have arrived with the Romans, and certainly it can still be found in the rolling hills of Umbria. They are very adaptable birds and have settled in many countries but it is in the British Isles and the north east of the USA – New England – that they are especially to be found in large quantities. This is not just because, along with many rich foreigners, they find the conditions friendly and benign. In fact, a pheasant, if asked to complete a survey by someone with a clipboard, would probably report that it found local conditions anything but friendly and benign, what with the constant pursuit by hawks, foxes, egg eaters, rats; and then in the autumn by the over-excited tweedy types.
They live there in such numbers because the pattern of land ownership enables professional organised shoots to be run, if not profitably then at least at a level which enables the landowner to fool himself that one day he might make some surplus cash from it. (Shoot owners have a common characteristic with farmers, in that they constantly complain at poor returns but for some reason keep on doing it.) What a pheasant shoot needs is quite a lot of land, preferably at least eight hundred acres, though some enthusiasts manage to enjoy themselves on as little as a hundred. But for a serious shoot, and one aiming at a surplus, a fair expanse is needed and the ideal is to have a great estate. Most of the great estates have serious shooting activities on their land; the growth in the popularity of shooting over the last thirty years and the increasing willingness of enthusiasts to devote largish amounts of income to it, has been a boon to landowners and larger farmers. It not only gives them a sporting rent, the shoots are often leased to a professional shoot captain, but also an opportunity to run bed and breakfasts in the stately pile and lunches and dinners for the sporty types. It means part-time employment for estate staff and pensioners, trade for local inns and restaurants. And increasingly, diversity in the offerings in the local farm shops and butchers to whom the unfortunate deceased birds can be sold.
Like grouse, there is a bit of etiquette involved, mainly on the dress front (plus-fours, flat cap, Barbour jacket, or similar) for those who wish to be asked back. Not shooting one’s fellow guests or the host’s employees is also considered polite. We are dealing with a miniature replica of the English class system here. At the top is the landowner, who may or may not, probably not, appear on the day. He prefers to shoot with his chums generally, who with luck will also own shoots and can entertain each other. The landowner thus does not need to shoot over his own land much. He can instead get in the middle classes, who arrive fired with a mixture of envy that wishes they were, and relief that is glad they are not, great aristocrats with rolling estates. For one day they can dress up, eat breakfast in the castle dining room and lunch in the Temple of Diana, and pretend that this is the life. An essential role in this is played by the working classes without whom shooting, like life, is more or less impossible.
Pheasants are idle birds, and left to their own devices they, like many of the landowners whose property they grace, would spend their days strutting about, eating, admiring the view, creating a bit of trouble with their neighbours, and chasing lady pheasants. So they have to be persuaded to fly. And modern shooting lore insists the pheasants fly high; the higher the better. This makes them much more difficult to shoot. This may seem a little odd to the bystander of this already odd-seeming set of rituals, but remember, most shooters are taking part in this vastly inconvenient, wet, bizarrely-dressed, expensive sport to show off. The more impressive the shooting skill, the better. To get the birds to fly at all, and especially at great height, requires an army of energetic locals, many with disputable dogs, who spend all day walking round the land, making noises (clicking with sticks is regarded as the most professional), waving flags made of old fertiliser sacks, and muttering into short wave radios (this is nothing to do with incentivising the pheasants, it is to draw sniggering attention to the poor shooting skills of the guests). And then spend half an hour looking for birds that have dropped in rivers, in trees, in brambles, and quite often, have dropped only in the shooter’s overheated imagination.
But when all is said and done, everybody tends to get along and have some pleasure and exercise, pheasants are good to eat and usually more healthily reared than battery chicken, some extra employment is provided in areas that need it, and otherwise redundant large houses are put to appreciative use. Best of all, large number of Range Rovers that otherwise prowl Chelsea in a state of high frustration, get to wander about the countryside and have the mud to prove it.
