Game Shooting: An Elite Sport c.1870–1980

Abstract

For the titled and moneyed male in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, game shooting was a sport in which many participated and a few excelled. Possession of a good pheasant shoot or partridge manor or grouse moor confirmed high social standing or offered a way into the elite. The adoption of the shotgun rather than the muzzle-loader, and driving birds up to the guns as against walking up with a gun, meant that the quality of hospitality was measured only in the quantity of birds shot. In the fifty years leading up to the First World War there were set records, both for individual ‘big shots’ and for teams of guns, that have never been reached since. This article examines how such large bags were achieved pre-1914. It reviews the impact of the First World War, and the economic, political and environmental factors that reshaped game shooting in the inter-war years, and the accelerated moves towards a commercial rather than class approach to shooting by landowners. It reflects on the situation post-1945 when the very existence of the sport has come under pressure, not least EC regulation, VAT, farming practice and land use, the anti-field sports campaigns and the protection of hawks.