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Our Low Life correspondent had never really approved of shotguns. Then we put one in his hand…
John Carey / Getty
Jeremy Clarke ‘Do you shoot much’ asked Edward Walters, manager of the West London Shooting School (1901), the oldest shooting school in the world. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I prefer to see the dogs work.’ This was deliberately pompous: an attempt at humour. And yet I have always disliked the idea of shooting at wildlife with shotguns. Too much technology, too little art. I’ve been on a farmers’ fox shoot and seen the lads banging away at a fox that was running across the guns, and was clearly being peppered, but poor Tod kept on running. Ghastly. The best I could say about blasting away at small living things with a shot pattern 30 inches wide is that it isn’t cricket.
And to be frank, as the former vice chairman of the South West Terrier, Lurcher and Ferret club, and an Essex man, there was an element of chippiness in my antipathy. People who shoot, I thought or imagined, were by and large either members of a social class who prefer to have their sport dished up on a plate, or dilettante sportsmen from the up and coming silly-money set. Edward Walters and I were standing chatting in the club lounge a few minutes before my one-hour shooting lesson began. On a recommendation, I’d booked my lesson with the school’s senior shooting instructor, Mr Alan Rose, who has been a WLSS instructor for 40 years. He learned to shoot under the famous British shooting 33