The Last English Poachers (22 page)

I’ve used snares too, in case you’re asking. I’ll set up a feed bin near some thick blackberry bushes and the birds come through in a nice lot of cover to feed on the corn in
the bin. I set up an H-frame made out of nut sticks, with single-strand wire snares dangling off the cross bar, between the bushes and the bin. You need nice straight nut sticks, quite thick, so
they don’t bend. The frame’s got to be set at the right height so the pheasants go under it – the birds have to stoop down to get beneath the cross bar of the H-frame to get to
the feed, and they’re caught by the neck in the snares.

Depending on the length and strength of the H-frame, you can set up half a dozen or even a dozen snares from the one cross bar, to up your chances of getting a few birds. But you’re not
going to catch enough to get fat on with this method; you’re only going to get one or two every time – and that’s if there’s a lot of pheasants about in the first place.

There’s many snaring methods used for poaching. When keepers release pheasants, there could be thousands of them in some woods. They’ll be roosting everywhere. They can’t all
roost up in the big trees, there’s not enough room, so some have to roost lower. You find, going through the woods, that there’s opportunities for snaring them at different heights. Or
you can make a two-inch hole in the ground, going down a few inches, with corn in it and a snare set round it, or hooks with raisins on, and lots of other ways as well. All these methods will catch
you a few pheasants, if that’s all you want. But I’ll lamp hundreds over a few nights with a little torch and a .410. No matter how many tricks you learn, lamping on a night is by far
the most effective way – it’s hit-and-run. You see the pheasant roosting, there’s no keepers about, you’re in – BANG! BANG! BANG! – you got yourself a few dozen
and you’re gone.

At the risk of repeating myself, the thing about traps and snares is this: you’ll catch pheasants, or whatever you’re after, but you’ll also catch things you don’t want
to catch, like blackbirds and magpies and vermin like rats and squirrels, especially in hard weather when it’s cold. Then there’s the keepers – keepers will even put a pheasant in
a trap, then lie in wait for you to come and get it. So you got to be careful on the approach – first scan the surrounding area from a safe distance. If there’s one watching,
you’ll soon spot him. Then chuck a big stone at him so he breaks cover and gives himself away. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse with the keepers. I know where they set their own traps
– a layman wouldn’t – so I go along and take them and I got my traps for free. But when you got a bit of land where you have permission, you can set nets and traps and snares up
to draw game in, without having to worry about someone pouncing on you from behind when you’re not looking.

Another way to trap pheasants is to make a cage with chicken wire, with a funnel leading in. The funnel’s wide at the entrance, but gets narrower, just like the crow-catcher I told you
about. The pheasant can get through it to eat the corn inside the cage, but can’t squeeze back out through the narrow neck at the other end of the funnel. I make those cage traps out of
battens and nut sticks. I put a lot of corn on the outside to begin with, until I have the birds coming every day. Then a little bit of corn on the outside and a lot on the inside. The pheasant
pecks the corn on the outside and wants more – he goes in through the wide neck of the funnel, squeezes through the narrow neck, and can’t get back out. I don’t set these cage
traps in the heart of the estate, where the keepers are watchful – I set them up on the edges, where the pheasants come when they’ve had enough of being shot at and rousted about by
beaters and dogs. There’s less chance of getting caught that way.

If I bring those pheasants onto land where I have permission and pen them in and feed them for a while, then they’ll stay about. I start whistle-feeding these pheasants early in the season
– whistle them in and feed them with corn. Once they start feeding, they’ll keep coming. They associate the whistle with the corn – and they associate it with no danger and
they’ll feed and feed and feed away. When the weather’s mild, there’s plenty of food for them, insects and berries. But once it starts getting into the winter, if it’s hard,
the corn’s got them. I had a red post office van once and, when I went down to the fields to feed them in, one cock bird in particular would run four hundred yards after the red van, because
he knew he was going to get fed. He connected the red van with food. I never shot him because he was such a character and he drew the other birds in.

The corn I used for drawing in pheasants and ducks and other game, I nicked that off the estates. I took it in a backpack, maybe a hundredweight at a time. They put tons of it down in feed bins
– they might have fifty or sixty forty-five gallon feed bins around the pens, where they released thousands of pheasants. They’d all be full to the brim. Well, I went round and took
some out of each bin and filled up the backpack. I bagged up the feed when I got it home and we used it for ourselves during the season, to draw in birds to where we had permission to shoot. So,
not only did I take their birds, but I used their own feed to draw in those birds. I had a half-ton of corn in store at one time and I was using it to feed my own fowls as well as drawing in wild
birds – more even than I could use.

So, you see, there’s many ways to catch wild game – or poach, if you want to call it that. Gypsies use catapults, with a metal or bone Y-frame and strong rubber bands for shooting
ball bearings. I’ve used them too, when I was younger. You can get a few birds if they’re on clear branches and you can get a clean shot. If they’re in bushes or thick cover, the
steel balls will ricochet and you’ve got no chance. It’s the same with an air rifle. Both of these are nice and silent but, if it’s too windy, it’ll put your aim off. Like I
said, a .410’s the best. Don’t matter where they’re roosting – and you can line several birds up with one shot. I know the best places to set up and I’ve shot birds
out of the same trees, the same bushes, for the past forty years. They keep coming there, and they always will.

It’s all down to skill – and the tricks of the trade.

15

As well as the poaching, I used to do a bit of sheep-rustling too. I remember being up on Oxwick Farm one time, near a building called Cromwell’s Barracks, where the
Roundheads gathered before marching down and laying siege to Berkeley Castle during the Civil War. I was in a ditch, cutting a sheep’s throat, and I had this idiot up a tree, keeping a
lookout for the farmer. He fell asleep, this bloke, and he never seen the farmer coming and the next thing I know the shit-kicker’s looking down into the ditch at me.

‘What you doing?’

‘Sheep run into some barbed wire, just trying to help her.’

‘Is she alright?’

‘I think so. I’ll have her out of here in a minute.’

‘Need any help?’

‘No, I’ll be alright.’

‘Good man, come up to the house and I’ll give you a drink.’

As soon as he was gone, I had the sheep on my shoulders and was away, leaving my snoring lookout up the tree.

Sally Grosvenor, the deceased Duchess of Westminster, was one of three illegitimate daughters of a woman called Muriel Perry. The girls were raised by a governess and rarely saw their mother,
who served as a nurse in the Great War and who was supposed to have little interest in them. The only one who visited them was a man they called ‘Uncle Bodger’, who’d bring them
presents – they had no other family or friends. Uncle Bodger’s real name was Roger Ackerley and he confessed on his deathbed to being the girls’ father. Sally and her twin sister
ran away from home when they was eighteen and she married Gerald Grosvenor, who became the Duke of Westminster and the wealthiest man in Britain. They never had no children and, when the Duke died
in 1967, Sally travelled round the world first, then moved back to the family home in Gloucestershire and lived in a big house with about thirty acres of land round it. She kept a breed of black
sheep and I used to poach the land and my greyhounds would bring down some of her flock. A greyhound will kill a sheep by biting into its throat or the back of the neck – they’re
powerful dogs for any kind of hunting. I butchered the beasts and sold the meat and the hides and boiled up the heads and the bones for the dogs. She had no keepers up there, so it was easy enough
to get away with.

I also used to steal her vegetables and she put a notice up in the window of the local post office asking – ‘If the person who is stealing my sheep and vegetables comes to see me, I
will give them some free of charge.’ But I never did, because I didn’t trust her not to call the law.

The Chief Constable for Avon and Somerset used to go up there for dinner parties and he’d bring a plod with him to stand guard at the bottom of the drive. There’s no street lights
anywhere near; it’s pitch black and there’s a bit of grass where the copper could keep back out of sight. He’d stand there on duty and you couldn’t see the bugger, barring a
car went by and you got the reflection of the headlights off his silver buttons. I was up there to get a few pheasants on one of the very rare occasions when I poached after having a drink –
I didn’t fancy going all the way in and there was some cockerels out clucking, so I got a bit of mortar out of the wall and chucked it down. They thought it was corn and I drew ’em over
and shot ’em. I stuffed them in my pockets and went on my way. As I was coming back past the house, I suddenly sees this copper standing in front of me.

‘What’s this, then?’

He gave me such a start, I kicked him hard in the shin and ran off into the dark, where he couldn’t see me to come after me.

After going past there a few times with the .410 folded and being taken by surprise by that copper in his hiding place, I decided I’d give him a fright, instead of the other way round.
There used to be a big stuffed grizzly bear up on the Duchess’s land and it was half-hidden in some trees. There’s no way the copper would know it was there, but I did. Anyway, I goes
up there one dark night and throws a stone at him. It hits him on the helmet and he starts to come after me. I let him keep sight of me until I disappear into the trees and he follows me in –
then he comes upon the stuffed bear. I’m behind it and I lets out a deep growling sound. Well, this copper nearly shits his trousers and he’s off out through the trees and away down the
road. I don’t know where the Chief Constable thought he’d gone when he came out after having his cigar and brandy, but he never got him back out there. The plod must’ve told all
his mates there was a wild bear up on the Duchess’s land because I never saw none of them on guard at the bottom of the drive no more.

The stuffed bear’s gone now. It rotted away in the rain.

Anyway, I was in the lanes shooting pigeons one day when Duchess Sally came past on a horse.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Shooting pigeons.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re eating my cabbages.’

She was having a problem with vermin on the estate and she had one of the Duke of Beaufort’s keepers over there, because the old Duke was always visiting for one reason or another, maybe
knocking her off or something, who knows. This keeper’s name was Barratt and he was useless. He’d bring over a dead squirrel or a rabbit that they’d killed on the Duke’s
estate and go sit at the bottom of her big garden under a tree and let off a shot every now and then, so she’d think he was doing his job. He’d take her the dead rabbit or squirrel and
she’d give him a couple of quid and he’d go and have a drink. I had a chat with her and she seemed quite friendly for a toff and, in the end, she asked me to go up there and sort out
the vermin – which I did with my son Robert, who had a little Jack Russell terrier that went under the sheds and killed the rats, while my spaniel worked the hedges and I shot whatever came
out.

I cleared all the land of vermin and she was as good as gold. She was nice and polite, for a ya-ya, and down to earth, and she’d send us out tea and biscuits. She even signed a book for
Robert and dedicated it to him. He still has it – it’s called ‘Just Dogs’.

But she wasn’t stupid, she knew what I was – it just suited her purpose to employ me. Anyway, I’m up there on my own one evening and there’s some kind of wedding
reception going on. The Duchess sends me out some sandwiches and her butler says I can come in for a drink if I wants. I tells him I don’t drink no more but I’d like to have a look at
the guests – just to be nosy and see who was there. He goes and asks her and comes back and tells me I can stand to the side of the main hall and, as long as I keep myself out of sight and
don’t interfere with the festivities, it’ll be alright.

By the time I goes in for a gawk, the guests are all well intoxicated. The bridegroom’s all done up in a silver suit and the bride’s far too young and beautiful for him. They has
this group of classical musicians up on a little stage and people is dancing round in a wide circle – all moving in harmony, in the same direction, like they all knows exactly what
they’re supposed to be doing.