The Last English Poachers

by Bob

  ‘None of your business.’

  I knew his reputation, but he also knew mine and, without his agent to help him, he didn’t fancy having a set-to. So I was able to drive off without interference.

  About a week later, I got a message from the same earl asking if I’d go see him. I went to the estate office and knocked on the door. He opened it. He was all nice and polite, not his usual arrogant self at all.

  ‘How are you, Mr Tovey?’

  ‘I’m fine. How’re you?’

  ‘Let me get straight to the point . . . if I give you all the rabbiting on the estate, will you leave the game alone?’

  I think I told you already, a rabbit is called a coney and it ain’t considered game – it’s classed as vermin by the people who attend pheasant and partridge shoots. I looked him square in his inbred eye.

  ‘I give you my word.’

  He started to smile, thinking he had me in his pocket.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘That I’ll shoot pheasants on your land whenever I want to.’

  The expression on his face was worth twenty pounds, as I turned and walked out. We was never going to be friends, but now we’d be worse enemies than ever.

  I didn’t care.

  And I was true to my word and took pheasants from his land every chance I got. You see, I didn’t consider them to be his pheasants. They was wild birds and there for the taking by anyone who had the skill to do it. I had that skill – the skill to know where pheasants are and how to get ’em. The skill to entice a bird to where you wants it. Like, I know pheasants love daddy-longlegs, or crane flies as they’re called. Pheasants will follow ’em anywhere. The daddy-longlegs is impossible to control and they’ll fly wherever they wants to, all over the place. But they sometimes eats the root hairs from vegetables, like carrots or parsnips or sugar-beets, and if you goes to the trouble of laying a trail of root hairs, you might get a good few of ’em to follow that trail – and the pheasants will follow the daddy-longlegs, away from the private estates and onto land where you can trap and shoot ’em. If you can’t be bothered with luring the daddy-longlegs, just lay a trail of corn – but the birds prefer the flying insects and, while they’re about in September and October, they’ll ignore the corn and most other kinds of bait.

  The folding .410 shotgun was always my choice, as you know, along with a good torch and a postman’s bag to put the birds in. I’d get enough for my family and a lot more to sell or give away. I used to be able to get £2 for a pheasant and £3 for a partridge and £2 for a mallard. But them days is all but disappeared, because people don’t want to eat game no more – the women can’t cook ’em properly these days. They don’t know how good a hen pheasant is to eat and think it’s cruel to kill animals when there’s plenty of meat in the supermarkets. But the beef and lamb and veal and pork had to be killed too – and it weren’t reared in the wild like the animals I killed. They say abattoirs kill the animals humanely and maybe they does, but it’s on an industrial scale and the animals know what’s happening – they can smell the blood and hear the calls of distress and, if you look in their eyes, they’re all wide and panicking. I kills game quickly, like with partridge – I’d use a drag-net that would take two men to work. It would be about twenty-five yards long and four yards deep. We’d drag it over stubble or clover and, when we came to a covey of partridge, they’d fly up and hit the mesh. We’d drop the front of the net and gently get ’em out. Then I’d bite their heads to crush the brain and they’d die instantly.

  Another way to get pheasants is to peg out a fighting cock on a length of baler twine in a field, at the end of January or beginning of February, when cock pheasants is pairing up with the hens. A cock pheasant could have up to four hens and the fighting cock will crow and draw them in, because they’ll think they’re being challenged by another bird entering their territory. ’Course, a cock pheasant ain’t no match for a fighting cock – be like an ordinary bloke taking on a prizefighter – so no damage will come to my bird and I just shoot the pheasants when they comes in to challenge it. Actually, sometimes you don’t even need to shoot ’em. When he gets into a bundle with the fighting cock, the pheasant don’t pay no heed to what’s going on around him and you can just get right up to him and wring his neck or hit him with a nut stick. Same thing if two cock pheasants is fighting each other – they’ll be so intent on scrapping, they won’t notice you approaching them. But, if the gamekeepers hear the fighting cock crowing, they’ll come along and kill it, so I don’t leave it pegged out for too long.

  I’ve never gone to jail for poaching like Brian has. Oh, I got pulled all the time, but never put away. I’ve been pulled dozens of times over the years. You can’t go a lifetime of poaching without getting come upon a few times. If getting pulled now and then is going to frighten you, then don’t do it. But you got to keep your wits about you and let the buggers know you’re not afraid of them and you know your rights, few and all as they may be. I remember once coming down by Little Wood with the greyhounds – up comes a keeper.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Out for a walk.’

  ‘No footpath here.’

  ‘There’s one through the wood, right by the side of your release pen.’

  Nothing he could do, and he knew it. There’s rights of way all over the countryside and, if you’re on one, the lackeys can’t do nothing to you. But they’ll test you out to see if you’ll back down. If you does that, then they has you.

  Just like on the Severn foreshore – there’s hares on the land round there and I can get a good flat run. If I’m come upon, I can get onto the foreshore between low and high tide and there’s nothing they can do about it – although they’d like to. A lot of the time they got binoculars and they watch from towers and they’ll come after me in Land Rovers. But I knows the lie of the land and can give ’em the slip, because no one knows terrain like a poacher. But you’re bound to get a lot of pull-ins, especially if you’re out poaching thousands and thousands of times.

  If you’re a poacher, every grass and grumbler’s after you – from the lords and ladies to the farmers and estate workers and police and vicars and Uncle Tom-bloody-Cobley and all. Everybody! They’re driving along the roads and they see a light in the woods and, instead of carrying on and minding their own business, they can’t leave it alone. They has to ring someone.

  ‘Oh, I seen a light in such and such a place.’

  I was on my way to do some lamping one night, but didn’t have anything but a rabbit skin in the motor. This copper stopped me for no other reason than to be a nuisance.

  ‘What have you got in there?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Get out of the vehicle.’

  I gets out and he starts searching around on the floor, to see if he can find something. He cops hold of the skin that’s underneath the seat and he nearly shits hisself.

  ‘Jesus! What’s that?’

  It’s just a skin I uses for geeing the dogs up, but I don’t tell him that.

  ‘It’s a scalp.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A scalp . . . you know, I bought it off a redskin when I was over in Arizona.’

  I takes the skin out of the motor and shakes it at him.

  ‘I don’t know what the procedure is for this . . . ’

  ‘D’you want it as evidence?’

  I throw it towards him and he jumps back, afraid to pick it up.

  ‘I’ll let you go with a caution.’

  ‘What kind of caution?’

  ‘Eh, just a caution.’

  He buggers off and I picks up the skin and puts it back in the motor and goes on my way, laughing. But there was always that kind of harassment – being stopped for nothing at all. Some local coppers like PC Harris, men who knew me, were alright sometimes. But mostly they was a bunch of bastards that loved licking up to the lords.

  I started this chapter about lamping and I’ll finish it with a lamping story. I remember going out one night
with a Welsh friend of mine – I had a greyhound and he had a lurcher. We made a few kills and were about to go home when the dogs put up a fox. They chased it and caught it and my mate said he’d take it back to Wales with him. That was alright with me, because I didn’t want it. You can’t eat a fox, so what good is it? It’s like Oscar Wilde once said about the foxhunting fraternity: ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’ – and that just about summed up the bum-bouncers and their prey. Anyway, he put the fox in a bag and drove me back to my house. When we got back there, he tipped the bag up and the fox grabbed hold of his hand and wouldn’t let go. It was only playing at being dead and that’s how clever the fox is; if he’d waited and tipped the bag up outside the car, the fox would’ve run off and escaped. He was screaming and the dogs were going mad in the back and I had to run in and get my .410 shotgun and shoot it. He was leaping about all over the place and he was lucky I didn’t blow a few of his fingers off along with the fox.

  And they say a hot-cross bun baked on a Good Friday is great for the gout!

  11

  Bob – Long-Netting

  I’ve been long-netting for as far back as I can remember. When I was a lad, I used to set out the nets and pegs in a field, then walk round with a box of matches, shaking the box and making a slight noise, driving rabbits into the nets. I’d catch about fifty at a time and kill ’em and, like everything else, we’d either eat ’em or sell ’em in my father’s butcher shop. It was a way of making a living for us country people who had little else to sustain us in the hard days after the war. People who was being rationed used to say ‘the farmers has plenty of food’ – and they had, so had the landowners. But they wanted to keep it all to themselves and not share it out with people who had no land to call their own. So I went out and took some of that food from them – especially the wild stuff that wasn’t theirs to begin with, the rabbits and game birds and fish and fowls and the odd deer, there and here – in the nets as well as other ways. But most of the long-netting I done through my life was for hares, not other wildlife, and for that you needs a special kind of skill.

  Let me explain it a bit, so you’ll know what I’m talking about. Long-netting ain’t for the lazy man; it’s a strenuous activity and a job for a group of people working together as a team. Over the past few years, we’ve only used nets that range in length from a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards – maybe a total length of two to three hundred yards altogether, because there’s very few good men to set out and gather in these days. They’re mostly either dead or too old. We used to set up nets that could total up to five or six hundred yards in length and use thirty or more beaters and ten or more netters . . . but you don’t know how it works, do you? I ain’t explained it. OK, I set the nets in a field, about fifteen to twenty yards in front of a hedge, or in a tramline made by a tractor. The boxes are laid out ready, and those of us who knows how to handle hares wait quietly in the hedge while the animals are driven through by the beaters. They run into the nets and get tangled up and the netters take ’em out and box ’em up.

  The boxes are made so there’s four compartments to each one, just the right size for a hare so’s they can’t hurt themselves. You has to be gentle with hares when you’re handling them. If you hold them the wrong way, they’ll die. The right way to hold them is just in front of their hind legs, by the loose skin on their backs. Once they’re safely in the boxes, they can be transported to where they’re needed and released. Now, you’d think a wild animal like a hare would go mad in a little box, but they don’t. They feels safe in there and you can tickle ’em on the head and they’ll settle down nicely. We’ve netted thousands of hares and very rarely had one die in the boxes – the one or two that did was weak and would’ve soon died anyway.

  Size of mesh is the difference between hare nets and rabbit nets. The mesh is bigger in hare nets so the animal gets its head through, but not its body, and gets tangled up. Rabbits will get their bodies through hare mesh and escape. With rabbit nets, the mesh is too small for a hare to get its head through, so it don’t get tangled and can get away. I set the nets tight where there’s plenty of hares so they’re easy to get out of the mesh. I don’t want ’em too tangled up so it’s taking a long time to free ’em and there’s other hares coming through fast and you’re running here and there and the hares in the nets are screaming out a warning to the others, who’ll turn away and run off in another direction. If there ain’t many hares about, I set the nets baggier so the animals get well tangled, because I wants to catch every one of ’em and I don’t want none getting away.

  You got to be fit and active, because continuously short-sprinting from the hedge to the net takes it out of you and it’s worse than jogging for ten or twenty miles. You need to know what you’re doing and there ain’t many left now who does. Once it’s out of the nets, I hold the hare where its back legs comes up to drive its body in running – there’s a piece of elastic skin there and that’s where I lift ’em, supporting the weight with my other hand or arm, so I don’t harm or hurt ’em. Hold ’em by the legs and they’ll kick out and break, or by the ears and they’ll squirm and maybe snap their necks. The boxes we use is specially made – the same size as a form where hares quat in the wild. Like I said, once the hares is in the boxes, I just tickle their heads and that quietens ’em down. Afterwards I gather in the nets and move on to the next field. The hardest part of it is the setting out and gathering in. Long nets is heavy, even when setting them out dry – and they’re even heavier if they gets wet and you’re gathering in – maybe half a hundredweight in a 150-yard net, hanging from a stick on your arm, and you needs to be strong enough to hold ’em.

  Everything’s sacked up afterwards so the nets don’t get damaged or dirty and we move on. On a single day, we’d net hares over a large area, not just in one field – we might re-set the nets half a dozen times and that’s a lot of work. And there’s a lot of things to worry about as well – the weather and wind speed and hedges and gates and all sorts of other considerations. I has about a thousand yards of long nets altogether but the trouble these days is, you can’t get hare nets no more – nobody makes ’em. So once the ones I use now are gone, that’ll be the last of it.

  I told you in an earlier chapter that we netted hares for the Waterloo Cup and other coursing meetings and you’re probably asking yourself by now why I still do this – why I still goes long-netting for hares, even though coursing’s banned. It’s because people wants ’em. They wants ’em and I supplies ’em. If someone rings the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust looking for hares, they get given my number, because me and my boys is the only people long-netting in the country now. There’s fewer hares about nowadays because of ‘lead poisoning’, and by that I means shooting, but we can still find plenty if we wants to.

  Sometimes we only catch a few and other times we can catch a few hundred. We relocate ’em to different parts of the country, from where they’re not wanted to where they are wanted. Like, we takes ’em from airport runways and farms, and sends ’em to the likes of gamekeeper colleges and university research stations and game reserves and over to Ireland, where hare coursing’s still legal. We takes ’em from military airfields and release ’em on army and navy bases, that used to keep beagle packs in the days before the hunting ban, but still likes to see a few hares running. Army and navy bases is fenced in, so the hares become isolated and smaller and they needs fresh blood. They can’t shoot ’em on the airfields for fear of damaging the planes with a stray bullet or buckshot, and that’s where we comes in. It’s a kind of countryside recycling: taking hares from where there’s plenty and they’re not wanted, because they’re doing too much damage and going to be shot, to where they are wanted. Places where the population has dropped off or where farmers and landowners likes to have hares on their land, just to see ’em boxing and gadding about in the mad March mornings or in the evenings when the sun’s starting to sink behind the hills.

  We’ve netted hares a
ll over – even on the shooting estates in February when the pheasant season’s over, so’s not to disturb the birds. The hoorays never had no problem with us being on their lands then, because we was doing them a favour. We also relocated some good strong hares from Salisbury Plain to Castlemartin tank range in Wales – before the war there was plenty of hares around that area and after the war there was none. People couldn’t understand why – but it don’t take a genius to figure that out, does it? They wanted a population of hares again, so we obliged ’em.

  The best time to release hares for breeding stock is in early spring. If you net ’em in springtime when they’re in young, you get two or three animals for every one you net and they stay around. But if you don’t relocate them far enough away from where you netted ’em, they can go back, because they got good homing instincts.

  Anyway, this pest controller fella gets in touch and asks us to come up to Broughton Airfield in Chester. The airfield was overpopulated with hares and it was dangerous having them running round all over the place with planes coming in. It’s always difficult on an airfield, because we got nowhere to hide. We can set the nets up and the hares are coming forward, but where do we hide? If they see us they won’t come to the nets. There was some red boxes on this airfield for fire hoses or something and we set up our camouflage scrim around them and hid down behind it. The beaters drove the hares forward and we had a successful day in the end. The local newspaper was there reporting and taking pictures, because it was a conservation thing and the hares was being released somewhere else, where they was wanted. We relocated them to this lord’s estate at Rhyl in North Wales, which is near the sea. The hares were released into a wood but, being used to the warm runway, seven of ’em came back out and just sat on the tarmac road, thinking they was still at the airport.

  They wouldn’t move, no matter what we did, and we was worried they’d get run over by cars or lorries. In the end, the lord had to go get one of his retrievers and the dog soon drove them back to where they was supposed to be.