Loch Hope

Scrap Book

Sir Max Backs the SCA

This is the text of a speech given by Sir Max Hastings at a fund-raising dinner for the Scottish Countryside Alliance on 18th October 2005. It is published here with his kind permission.

The purpose of most after-dinner speeches is to make one’s audience feel good. On that basis, I feel especially well-qualified to address this room tonight, because I am, probably by a distance, the worst game-shot present. When I was in my twenties and got maybe only four or five driven days a year, I used to watch my fifty-something neighbours pulling them down and think: ‘when I’m their age and get as much shooting as they do, I too will be that good’. Yet here we are now, thirty years on with plenty of practice, and I feel myself forced to look in the mirror and think: ‘This is as good as it gets’.

I long ago despaired of becoming a big shot. I was reading recently the gamebook of a late 19th century figure named Sir James Lamont. Lamont did not go shooting, he devoted his life to genocide. In 1886, for instance, he recorded that he killed 2,063 grouse for 3,883 cartridges, and another 6,810 head of other species for a further 11,214 cartridges. His average, he wrote, was 72.7 birds for 123.74 cartridges on each of 122 days. With one barrel or the other, he reckoned to have killed 67% of what he shot at. In 1898 he records that his average fell to a mere 54%, and his gamebook stops. We must assume that he gave up shooting in self-disgust.

Sir James Lamont must have been the most frightful shit, and absolutely insufferable to go to the hill with. For most of us, shooting, like fishing and stalking, are pastimes not professions, which can give boundless pleasure even to the least skilful exponent. Edwardian shooting parties provided opportunities for an orgy of adultery, facilitated by the fact that in large Norfolk or Perthshire country houses, husbands and wives occupied separate bedrooms. Nowadays when most of us inhabit more modest quarters, it requires a good deal of ingenuity for a couple bent on infidelity to find space to swing a cat, never mind themselves, amid a houseful of visiting guns. A friend once told me that a billiard-table provided the most discreet rendezvous that she and her weekend quarry could commandeer for naughtiness. King Edward VII would have been proud of her. A big shot like Sir Ralph Payne-Galway would have deplored her bloke’s frivolous attitude to more serious purposes.

The joy of sport is that it brings us together in fellowship amid the British countryside with dogs, guns, rods, and- usually- like-minded and sympathetic companions. Tonight, I want to say a few serious words, about where those of us who love field sports find ourselves today, amid the shadows which politics and social change have cast upon this great heritage.
In the eyes of all of us here, the countryside is fundamental to the vision of the Britain which we love. This is why we find it so dismaying to be ruled by a government which not only cares nothing for the rural community, but has shown itself contemptuously hostile to it.

The countryside and its inhabitants are perceived by New Labour and the Scottish Nationalists as anachronisms, reflecting traditions of patrician paternalism, plebeian deference and bloody pastimes which have no place in the pavement society Tony Blair and his party, together with most of the Scottish Parliament, aspire to enforce. While Labour claims to have abandoned the old ideals of socialism, it displays a disdain for rights of private ownership of a single commodity- land- which would be deemed intolerably socialistic, if applied to any other form of property. New duties of care are thrust upon landowners, even as a host of new rights of access are granted to the public. Foremost among the aspirations of country dwellers today is a desire to see those who rule us once again acknowledge the virtue and importance of Britain's countryside, not as a mere park in which the urban population can seek recreation at appointed hours on licence, but as a place where the wilderness sustains its historic freedoms, not least those of the hunter, both animal and human.

The saddest change over the past 50 years is the fungus-growth of public hostility towards traditional sports. The banning of foxhunting signals a threat to the future of all Britain’s field sports, as well as a body-blow to the historic life of the countryside. For centuries, hunts have provided a focus for the social lives of many rural communities. At a stroke, and with malice aforethought, the great tradition reflected in the art of Stubbs, Alken, and a thousand lesser brushes, and by the pens of Trollope, Surtees, White-Melville, Siegfried Sassoon, has been swept away. Now that parliament has established the principle that it is wrong to kill one species of wildlife for pleasure, there is absolutely no logical reason why politicians should not move against shooting and fishing also.

The hunting bans north and south of the border, whether or not they have yet been effectively implemented, are the acts of a government set upon creating a new Britain in its own image, confident that it faces no political opposition strong enough to frustrate its purposes. The government assures us that it has no intention of legislating against shooting and fishing. We would be rash to swallow such bromides, from ministers who have shown itself chronically deceitful on a host of other issues. There has never been a time when the importance seems greater of supporting our sporting organisations- the Countryside Alliance, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, the Game Conservancy.

Yet, amazingly, right now all these organisations are meeting more scepticism from the sporting community than ever before, reflected in flagging membership and fundraising. Critics shrug: 'What's the point ? Nobody has been able to stop the hunting ban. Nobody can stop this government attacking shooting, or land ownership'. Yet, just as no thoughtful countryman regrets the struggle to save foxhunting, which delayed legislation for years and is still making it veryhard to enforce, so surely we cannot now succumb to defeatism about shooting, fishing, and land reform. Silence, from our side of the front, is construed by our enemies as defeatism, impotence. It is vital to sustain the public argument against hostile legislation, ditch by ditch and issue and by issue. We have to keep going on making a noise, a fuss, spelling out the evidence. If we do not fight, then our sports and our landscape do not deserve to survive. And, whatever the imperfections of our field sports organisations, the Countryside Alliance foremost among them, they are the only game in town. If they don’t wage the battle for us, who else is going to ? And how can they do it, if they lack the money which is the vital ammunition to pay staff, mount demos, fund advertising, hire staff, collect evidence ?

We must make strategy in the consciousness that we shall be ruled by Labour governments for quite some years yet, almost certainly past the 2009 general election. Tony Blair’s party thinks so, too. Political arrogance fortified Labour’s enthusiasm for banning foxhunting. It imbues the party's MPs with a dangerous boldness about the possibilities for going further in their crusade ‘irreversibly to change the nature of British society’. On our side, in seeking to resist new encroachments, we should fight a non-party battle, on an environmental and libertarian platform. Economic arguments, about jobs and rural income at stake, butter few parsnips with our opponents, for the numbers are too small.

We face a cultural issue, which extends far beyond field sports. Britain is changing. Those of us who live familiar rural lives amid our rose gardens and the routine of planting broad beans, casting a fly for trout, pursuing grouse, decoying pigeons, should perceive that we inhabit a precious yet increasingly isolated social capsule. It is magnificent, but in the eyes of many of our fellow-countrymen, it represents a charade rather than reality. Out there beyond the gate, there is another world far removed from ours, and politically much more powerful. It is only necessary to ride on a London tube or walk an Edinburgh street and glance at one’s neighbours and passers-by, to perceive its nature. Many inhabitants of New Britain and Young Britain have no interest in Old Britain's history or culture. From our viewpoint, it’s a waste of time to bemoan this. If we want our fragment of society to survive, we must somehow achieve an accommodation with this new world, which is mistrustful of old elites, inherently sceptical of old values. And any sort of accommodation will have to be based not on the other side’s goodwill, which is non-existent, but on our ability to fight our corner.

A while back, a Field reader who proudly described himself as a ‘toff’, accused me of inverted snobbery. Yet it seems only common sense to recognise that the people banning foxhunting are motivated chiefly by a commitment to class warfare, not animal welfare. One Labour minister has acknowledged explicitly that the measure represented, in the eyes of himself and his comrades on the Commons benches, 'revenge for the miners'. Tony Blair and his successors may only be dissuaded from further assaults on field sports if they perceive that such action would antagonise those whom they classify as ‘ordinary people’, rather than merely an old 'privileged class' whom it delights them to punish.

The most admirable quality in politics, as in life, is generosity of spirit. What was done in the House of Commons last year, and in the Scottish Parliament before that, represented a great meanness. Henceforward, to paraphrase Hugh Gaitskell in a somewhat different context: we must fight, fight and fight again to save the way of life we love. We can succeed only by representing this as a battle for social liberty and for the rural environment.

Our forefathers would have recoiled, of course, from the necessity of justifying to the urban population the chosen activities of the rural community. They regarded the pursuit of wild quarry as the most natural of human activities, and they were right. Yet today, we must recognise that if we want to go on doing the things we have always done, we will have to fight every day of every year for the right. If everyone who shoots and fishes gave even 3 or 4% of what they spend annually on sport to the Countryside Alliance and its brethren, we would be in incomparably better shape than we are today. If we are not willing to give something, to sacrifice something to sustain our cause, then why should we deserve to prevail, never mind succeed in doing so?

Field sports are always changing, and not always for the worse. It is over a century since that great authority Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey wrote: ‘We have done some execution on swans, both sitting and flying, with a rook rifle, but they are useless birds to the gunner and scarcely worth following’. It is almost as long since an uncommonly deaf old peer was accosted at the end of a drive by the keeper, who said: ‘Beg pardon, sir, but you have wounded a boy!’. ‘Wounded a what ?’. ‘A boy, sir !’. ‘Careless idiot ! Serve him right for getting in the way ! Send him home at once and tell him not to let me catch him out again today !’.

For all the threats to field sports and the countryside, we are today privileged to be the inheritors of a great and wonderful legacy, which continues to give us much happiness. It is our responsibility to see that this continues through the generations. If we succeed, then our children, grandchildren and those who come after them will know the joys we have shared. If we fail, then something that matters immensely to all of us will have been lost forever.

Thank you very much.


Scottish Countryside Alliance website