by Bob
Then it got banned in 2005 and that was the end of a way of life for many people in the countryside. There’s nothing left of it now. A trainer friend of mine died recently and he left me a bronze hare – that’s the only trophy I kept from the coursing days. All the silver cups from Yeovil and Sherborne were sold off at auction and the money divided among the few members left. Because it wasn’t about cups and trophies, it was about being out with the dog – being equal partner with the dog – sensing its excitement, blood up, adrenaline flowing, quarry in sight. Whether it was dog agin’ hare or dog agin’ dog that was the joy of it, the sport of it, the meaning of what it was all about. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand dogs. And even if it hadn’t been made illegal there ain’t enough people in the countryside left who knows what they’re doing now, enough to be used as good beaters and flankers no more.
I has mixed feelings about hare coursing being banned. In one way, it provided a livelihood for many country people, not just us poachers and hare-netters, and it was a sight to behold – a little six- or seven-pound hare outsmarting two eighty-pound dogs, for the most part. In another way, when hares was brought in and not given enough time to settle in the area, two eighty-pound greyhounds chasing a six- or seven-pound hare that don’t know where it’s going ain’t really my idea of sport. One greyhound after a local hare or rabbit is fair and brilliant to watch for a man like me – just like one dog after a fox. I’m not saying it was right to ban hare coursing but, in the end, too many hares were being netted and put down too late – a week before the meeting or even the night before, like we was instructed to do by them who’d hired us.
One way or the other, we really got no say in whether this is banned or that’s banned. They tell us we live in a democracy and they give us the impression we has a say but, in reality, we got no say in nothing. The decisions are already made. Half a million people marched through London protesting agin’ the banning of hunting with dogs, but nobody took any notice of them. Everything has to be politically correct these days, and that correctness is put upon the many by the few who shouts the loudest. There was a time when you could go to the pub and stand your gun in the corner while you was having a pint. If you did that now the pub would be surrounded by an armed-response unit and somebody would get shot, not by your shotgun, but by some trigger-happy policeman.
As far as coursing’s concerned, I don’t give a damn about any ban. If I wants to go across a field and get a run after a hare, I’ll do it! As for the banning of competition coursing, I can take it with a pinch of salt because there’s nothing I can do about it – and it makes our drag track more popular.
But park coursing’s still economic in Ireland where, like I explained, hares is kept in pens and trained to run up a field and use the escape at the end of it. They don’t have the same class system over there and ordinary men can get a run for their dogs and the coursing’s fairer. It’s a big industry in Ireland and the government there is afraid to ban it. But English coursers like us can’t afford to run our dogs over there – all the expense of getting across, only to get stitched up by the Irish, like they was often stitched up over here. And open coursing was always a better sport, even if it was controlled by the bloody freemasons!
It’s gone now and it’ll never be coming back. And I’m still out there, when I can be, running my dogs – in spite of all the laws.
Slipping greyhounds at Yeovil & Sherborne cousing meet, 1998
9
Brian – The Law
I read somewhere recently that several senior police officers are being questioned in connection with corruption in the force. Hard to believe! And the tabloids tell us there’s a sharp increase in serious crime and all the prisons are full to overflowing, and they can’t fit no more in. We’ll have to build special camps to keep them corralled, penned in like the pheasants on the shooting estates. Or else send them over to one of the Central Asian ’Stans for rehabilitation, where they still use the old methods. And that’s not accounting for the psychos at large on the city streets and in the government, and begging babies and multicultural misfits and and all sorts of unrecognisable others, leading to further strife on top of the established turmoil. Murders and molestations after dark – pimps and procurers and perverts of the very worst kind. You’d think the cops and courts would have enough to deal with, wouldn’t you, without bothering with the likes of me and Bob?
I’m poaching over on Tortworth one night when I’m about fifteen. I leave my pushbike well hidden and make my way up to some woods. I shoot a dozen or so rabbits on the way and gut them and leg them and hang them in some nut bushes to collect on the way back. The wood’s small and there’s a full moon and it’s easy to see the pheasants up in the trees. I start shooting them with my bolt-action .410 shotgun and I stash them in the postbag I have over my left shoulder. I’ve already shot thirteen and the bag’s full and heavy. I shoot the fourteenth and it drops down out of sight. I unbolt the gun and put another cartridge in before going to retrieve the bird, then I hear some rustling in the bushes. Maybe the bird ain’t dead, I think, so I turn my torch on and shine it in the direction of the sound. But it’s not the pheasant; there’s a black Labrador standing there with the dead bird in its mouth. I growl at it: ‘You bugger, you got my pheasant!’
I put the gun up to shoot the dog, then I hear a shout:
‘Stop where you are!’
It’s the Earl of Ducie and his son, Lord Moreton.
‘Bollocks!’
I turn to run – straight into a big thorn bush. I’m all scratched to buggery round my face and arms and I can hear them coming into the wood. It’s not a very big wood and I get back out of the bush and run round the side – not the way I came in, but onto a ploughed field. I came in across meadows, but I’m forced now to try and get away across the ploughed earth, carrying a gun and thirteen pheasants in a bag down one side and wearing hobnailed boots. I switch the gun to my left hand for balance. Luckily it’s not real boggy plough and I run as fast as I can, trying to get to the road. Ducie drives a Land Rover with no lights down a track, trying to get in front of me, while Moreton chases behind, but not gaining any ground.
I get to the road before the Land Rover, but I know I won’t be able to outrun it – and they can hear my boots clip-clopping on the tarmacked surface, so I have to find a hiding place soon. I come across the entrance to another field and see a cow trough, which is fairly full. I chuck the bag of pheasants under the trough and climb into the cold muddy water with the gun. I know if they come into the field, the dog’ll sniff out the birds and I’ll be caught, but it’s my only option right now. The Land Rover pulls up at the gateway and Ducie looks out across the field, but can’t see me nowhere. He waits for Moreton, who’s coming on foot, to catch up. The dog’s inside the motor.
‘Where did the bastard go?’
‘Down that way.’
Moreton gets into the Land Rover and they drive off down the road. I climb back out of the cow trough, dripping wet, and retrieve the pheasants. Then I go back to the woods because my pushbike’s hidden in a ditch close to the road where I went in.
As I’m getting the pushbike out of its hiding place, a vehicle pulls up, lights blazing. I think it’s the ponce-faces come back again.
‘Are you alright?’
‘Piss off!’
I jump onto the bike and pedal away for all I’m worth. A bit down the road I look back to see if they’re following, but it ain’t the earl and his son who’s pulled up, it’s an old bloke and a woman. They thought I’d been run off the road and only stopped to see if I needed help. And I smile and think to myself, maybe human nature has something to be said for it after all. I got pneumonia a few months later. I couldn’t breathe and collapsed and passed out. My lungs filled up with fluid and there was no air getting into them. That’s why pneumonia’s called ‘old man’s friend’, your lungs fill up and you die in your sleep. I was taken to hospital and given strong antibiotics and I was
laid up for three weeks. I’m not saying the water trough gave me the pneumonia, but it might have.
There’s a big stream near Damery, which is about halfway between Bristol and Gloucester and, two days later, I’m up there on my pushbike again on the way to Michaelwood, because I know there’s a lot of game there. I’m above the stream now and I shoot two mallard ducks with the one shot. I retrieve them from the stream myself because the water’s not that deep, maybe knee-high, and I hide them in a hedge to be collected on the way back, just like I did with the rabbits before. I get back on the bike and carry on another two miles to where Michaelwood’s on the left and Furze Ground Wood’s on the other side. Then I hide the bike and go off to shoot pheasants. Unbeknown to me, the keeper’s driving round and sees a bit of the pushbike, because I never hid it well enough.
I come out of the wood with ten pheasants in my postman’s bag, put the gun in its sleeve and tie it to the crossbar. I’m cycling down the lane when this Ford Escort van forces me off the road and into the ditch. I know it’s keepers, so I get my gun out of the sleeve and run across the field with it and the pheasants, towards a barn. The police have already been called and I see them driving up to the barn, so I hide the gun and the birds. I got the coppers in front of me and the keepers behind, so I’m blocked off and I get nabbed.
Three coppers grab hold of me.
‘What you up to?’
‘Out for a run.’
‘In Wellingtons?’
‘Cross-country run.’
They have no sense of humour and the keepers’ dog finds the gun and pheasants. I get taken to Dursley police station and they tell me to take my boots off before they lock me up. When I do, four cartridges fall out of one of my socks.
‘You always take shotgun cartridges out for a run?’
‘I stick them up my bum for a sprint finish.’
‘How many more you got?’
Another two fall out of my other sock.
They give me a thorough search after that and lock me up to wait for my father because I’m still a juvenile. When they interview me, I tell them I was out shooting pigeons where I had permission and I was cycling around, knocking on farmers’ doors to see if I could shoot some rabbits. I deny I shot the pheasants.
‘I found them in the lane; must have been hit by a car.’
‘All ten of them?’
‘A lot of careless drivers in these parts . . .’
They let me go in the end, but bring me back a couple of days later and charge me with poaching, armed trespass and something else that I can’t remember now. I go to see a solicitor, but can’t get legal aid and, what I don’t know at this stage, the same solicitor acts as the prosecutor in the magistrate’s court and he doesn’t tell me when I’m giving him the full story. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a clear conflict of interests, but he never lets on and, when I go to court, there’s the bugger prosecuting me – or else it was his twin bloody brother.
‘I found the pheasants.’
‘Why did you run, then?’
‘Van forced me off the road. I thought they were criminals, going to abduct me.’
‘The gun was with the birds and cartridges fell out of your socks.’
‘Can you prove that gun or those cartridges killed the pheasants?’
‘No.’
The armed trespass charge is adjourned sine die, but they find me guilty of poaching and I ask if this means I’m now a criminal.
‘A petty criminal, MrTovey.’
So I says by that do they mean my crime was insignificant and, if so, will my sentence also be small? I’m fined £60 and £3.75 costs and the restitution of the pheasants. Nothing petty about that! They’re all laughing behind their hands in the court and I think it’s at the funny side of the solicitor I went to see being the prosecutor – as if I’m thick and don’t know I should’ve appealed. Which I don’t at that age. But I had no one to advise or defend me, so I had to take it on the chin. I was only young then and knew nothing about the law, so I promised myself I’d learn as much as I could about it as I moved along in life, so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen to me again.
And I did – how the British conscientious classes are easily outraged over the rights of dumb animals, but collude in the real injustices of the world by watching subliminal shite on the tele vision; and how social revenge can have a strange effect on the minds of some buggers and can turn perfectly respectable morons into salivating sadists – and how bumholes appearing as prosecution witnesses are full of their own sense of self-righteousness and couldn’t care less about the principles of probity and fair play. Most of all, I learned that the best way to avoid all this bollocks was to not get caught.
Despite my new knowledge, I get jailed three times altogether for poaching and pinching. The first time comes in 1982, when I’m about eighteen, after I poach a fallow buck on the Berkeley Estate. I cycle out to the deer park where a lot of deer escape and there’s always loads of them about. I go out there in the evening, with about half an hour of light remaining in the day – enough to stalk round the perimeter of the park and get a shot. Some fallow deer are coming out and I’m using a 12-bore with BB lead shot. I come up on this big albino buck and shoot him in the heart at twenty yards. I get up quickly and cut his throat and bleed him out and gut him, then I drag him behind some big fallen oak trees in the wood, so if anyone’s out looking and hears the shot, they won’t be able to see the dead deer.
Now, there’s no way I can carry a big fallow buck like that home on my bicycle, so I get to a public phone box and call my mate, who has a car, and I ask him to come out and pick the deer up. While I’m waiting, a misty fog blows in from the River Severn. It comes in real fast and I can’t see more than a few inches in front of me, it’s that dense. My mate comes and we can’t find the kill. We search around all over the place, but we’re getting nowhere and we won’t be able to see anyone coming upon us. We drive back home and I get old Jack, our spaniel, into the back of the car and take him out to find the deer before it’s eaten by scavengers. We park up, come across the fields in the dark dense fog, and head into the oak trees that are hundreds of years old. The dog finds the deer straight away, within seconds – he was a great old dog, Jack – and I put the buck on my shoulders and carry him to the car.
There’s a big tin shed on the playing fields in our village and I take the deer over there and hang it, cut its head off and skin it. Next day I joint it up and make £70 on the meat.
So I go up to Gloucester with my seventy quid and buy a new, powerful Weihrauch German air rifle, that’s just on the limit of being legal, and I’m eager to try it out as soon as I can. Bob has an old Triumph car at the time and we leave it in a pub car park and make our way out onto the Tortworth Estate, where I shoot eight pheasants. I hide the birds and the gun close to the road, so’s not to be come upon with them while we go back for the car. But some bum-licker has rung up Lord Moreton to say they’ve seen us out poaching in the woods – maybe seen the torch or something, or maybe it’s just some nosy nobody who can’t mind their own business and wants to suck up to the lord. When we drive back up the road to make the pickup, Moreton’s there with my new gun and his dog’s sniffed out the pheasants.
‘That’s my gun . . . and our birds!’
‘They’re my birds, you poached them.’
‘Give me my gun back, you bugger!’
‘I’m confiscating it.’
‘Give me my gun!’
‘No!’
He pulls an iron bar out of his jacket and waves it at me. So I pick up a brick and throw it at him. It hits him on the head and he falls to the ground, shouting at Bob in his posh accent:
‘Mr Tovey, help me.’
I pick up my gun and the pheasants. Bob doesn’t go near him.
‘Would you help me if I was on the ground?’
He starts screaming for his keeper.
‘Keepah! Keepah! Help me!’
This giant comes lumbering out o
f the night towards us.
‘I’m coming, your grace!’
When he gets close enough, Bob sticks his foot out and trips him up and he goes over on top of his grace. We throw the birds into the car and make off, while they’re trying to pick themselves up off the ground.
When we get home, we hide the pheasants, but the coppers ain’t long in coming round and I’m arrested and taken to the station five miles away, where I’m searched, and they take my wellingtons and socks away – but this time there’s no cartridges to be found. They question me about assaulting Lord Moreton, but I deny everything, saying it must have been someone else who hit him with the brick.
‘Like who?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe a Gypsy or someone like that.’
‘And why would he hit the lord?’
‘The bugger was waving an iron bar about.’
They lock me up, but release me later that night.
‘Can I have my boots and socks back?’
‘No, we need them for forensic examination.’
Now, that’s just pure maliciousness, because they haven’t got enough evidence to hold me, and I have to walk the five miles home in my bare feet. I get charged with ABH, assault with a brick, night poaching and taking game without a licence. They don’t take any fingerprints or photographs and I get legal aid to hire a solicitor to defend me. I’m taken to the magistrate’s court and I plead not guilty. Moreton identifies me and, without any other evidence or witnesses, it’s Moreton’s word against mine. They believe him and I get convicted and sentenced to Usk Detention Centre in Wales for three months.