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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2021
The gamekeeper was an important but controversial presence in the late Victorian and Edwardian countryside. Admired by some for his skills in woodcraft and deep understanding of nature, for others the keeper was much less benign: a destroyer of wildlife; a barrier against wider public access to the land; and the upholder of fiercely contested laws. At a time when debates about the land and its present and future use formed a major part of contemporary political discourse, and when an urbanising society was investing ever more meaning in its idea of the rural, consideration of the keeper takes us beyond the study of field sports towards broader histories of the English countryside and its attendant ruralist culture. Situating the keeper in a dual setting of material production and recreational service provision, the following examines both what he did and was expected to do, and the ways in which this was represented. Not only were keepers active agents in their own representation, eager to project themselves as skilled professionals, they might also elicit support from unusual quarters. As will be seen, keeper representation was as varied as his many roles.
1 Richard Hoyle, ‘Field Sports as History’, in Richard Hoyle, ed., Our Hunting Fathers: Field Sports in England after 1850 (Lancaster, UK, 2007), p. 12.
2 Pamela Horn, High Society: The English Social Elite, 1880–1914 (Stroud, UK, 1992), p. 129.
3 Ibid., ch. 6.
4 Lord Walsingham and Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey, Shooting: Field and Covert, vol. 1 (London, 1892), p. 290.
5 For a statistical comparison between Edwardian game preserving and its modern counterpart, see Stephen Tapper, Game Heritage (Fordingbridge, UK, 1992), pp. 98–100.
6 Richard Jefferies, The Gamekeeper at Home (London, 1878).
7 British Quarterly Review, January 1880, p. 273.
8 Peter Munsche, ‘The gamekeeper and English rural society, 1660–1830’, Journal of British Studies, 20:2 (1981), 82–105; David S. D. Jones, Gamekeeping: An Illustrated History (Shrewsbury, UK, 2014). See also, Owen Jones, Ten Years of Gamekeeping (London, 1909); T. W. Turner, Memoirs of a Gamekeeper: Elveden, 1868–1953 (London, 1954). John Wilkins’s Autobiography of an English Gamekeeper appeared in 1892 but was largely concerned with mid-Victorian keeping.
9 Gilbertson & Page, Poachers versus Keepers (1894, Rhyl, UK, 1983), p. 39.
10 Richard Jefferies, The Amateur Poacher (London, 1879); Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (1862, London, 2008), p. 9.
11 Robert Colls, This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England, 1760–1960 (Oxford, 2020), pp. 43–4; Caractacus, The Autobiography of a Poacher (London, 1901); Academy, 15th February 1902, p. 168. For another poacher-turning-gamekeeper, see Frederick Rolfe’s I Walked by Night (London, 1935).
12 Mary Augusta Ward, Marcella, ed. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck and Nicole B. Meller (Peterborough, Ontario, 2001), p. 106.
13 Ibid., pp. 120, 241; G. T. Teasdale-Buckell, ‘Shooting’, in F. G. Aflalo, ed., The Cost of Sport (London, 1899), p. 5.
14 Isaac N. Ford, ‘English and Scottish Shootings’, Outing, April 1909, p. 71.
15 David Lloyd George, The Rural Land Problem: What it Is (London, 1913), p. 14.
16 Stephen Ridgwell, ‘The “Mangold’s Champion”: Lloyd George, the game laws and the campaign for rural land reform in Edwardian England’, Journal of Liberal History, 105 (winter 2019–20), 18–29. For keepering in Scotland and Ireland, see David S. D. Jones, Gamekeeping.
17 Krissie Glover, ‘Gender, Class and Property Crime in South East England, c. 1860–1900’ (MPhil thesis, Royal Holloway, 2018), ch. 3.
18 John Henry Walsh, Manual of British Rural Sports, 16th edn (1886, Stroud, 2008), p. 2.
19 Jeremy Musson, Up and Down Stairs: The History of the Country House Servant (London, 2010), pp. 236–7.
20 Isabel Colegate, The Shooting Party (London, 1980). See also Jonathan Ruffer’s, The Big Shots: Edwardian Shooting Parties (London, 1984).
21 Hugh S. Gladstone, Record Bags and Sporting Records (London, 1922), p. 128. On varieties of shooting, see John Martin, ‘The transformation of lowland game shooting in England and Wales in the twentieth century: the neglected metamorphosis’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 29:8 (2012), 1141–58.
22 Hoyle, ‘Field Sports’, p. 11. On the impact of the First World War on game preserving, see Edward Bujak, English Landed Society in the Great War: Defending the Realm (London, 2019), ch. 5.
23 Gamekeeper, January 1905, p. 93.
24 Percy Stephens, ‘The Cost of Shooting’, Badminton Magazine, July to December 1905, pp. 190–3.
25 F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Landowners and the Rural Community’, in G. E. Mingay, ed., The Unquiet Countryside (London, 1989), pp. 84–5; Harvey Osborne and Michael Winstanley, ‘Rural and urban poaching in Victorian England’, Rural History, 17:2 (2006), 197–200.
26 Era, 26th January 1907. Hepworth was one of the leading producers of the time.
27 Norfolk Record Office (hereafter NRO), Bulwer of Haydon Papers, BUL 11/521, 618X9.
28 NRO Game Books and Accounts, BUL 11/159-96.
29 Henry Rider-Haggard, A Farmer’s Year: Being the Commonplace Book for 1898 (London, 1899), p. 385.
30 Mark Rothery, ‘The Shooting Party: The Associational Cultures of Rural and Urban Elites in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in Hoyle, ed., Hunting Fathers, pp. 96–118.
31 Nicholas Everitt, ‘Shooting’, in Victoria County History of Suffolk, vol. 2 (London, 1907), p. 365.
32 Baily’s Magazine, ‘The Gamekeeper-Old Style’, June 1904, pp. 421–2; Spectator, ‘The Modern Gamekeeper’, 3rd March 1910, pp. 962–3.
33 Owen Jones, Gamekeeping, p. 265.
34 Owen Jones, The Sport of Shooting (London, 1911), pp. 181–3; Gamekeeper, December 1912, pp. 59–60.
35 Willoughby de Broke, The Passing Years (London, 1924), pp. 48–55.
36 Gamekeeper’s Gazette, November 1908, p. 2.
37 Glover, ‘Gender, Class and Property’, p. 141.
38 The September 1914 edition of the Gamekeeper’s Gazette used its front page to urge every unmarried keeper to fight for the ‘honour and glory of Old England’. By the start of 1916 Country Life was reporting on the large number of keepers who had ‘flocked to the Colours’. See Bujak, Landed Society, p. 71.
39 Gamekeeper’s Gazette, November 1908, p. 3; David S. D. Jones, Gamekeeping, pp. 171–2.
40 Nicholas Everitt, Shots from a Lawyer’s Gun (London, 1910), pp. 435–52.
41 William Carnegie, Practical Game Preserving (London, 1884), p. 511.
42 Charles Row, A Practical Guide to the Game Laws (London, 1907), pp. 143–5.
43 Walker & Mackie, Keeper’s Book, p. 17.
44 Bernard Gilbert, The Hordle Poacher in King Lear at Hordle and Other Rural Plays (London, 1922), pp. 161–2.
45 Stephen Ridgwell, ‘Poaching and its representation in Edwardian England, c. 1901–14’, Rural History, 31:1 (2020), 46.
46 See the weekly ‘situations wanted’ pages in the Field. In this case, 6th January 1906.
47 Owen Jones and Marcus Woodward, A Gamekeeper’s Notebook (London, 1910), p. 14.
48 Brian P. Martin, The Great Shoots (London, 1999), p. 15.
49 Tom Williamson, An Environmental History of Wildlife in England, 1650–1950 (London, 2013), pp. 122–6, 147–51.
50 Author correspondence with David S. D. Jones. John Martin suggests a prewar total of 21,000. Martin, ‘Transformation’, p. 1145.
51 National Records Office, HO 144/243/A53699.
52 Carolyn Steedman, Policing the Victorian Community (London, 1984), pp. 149–50; Thompson, ‘Landowners’, pp. 82–3.
53 Poachers versus Keepers, p. 19.
54 Max Pemberton, Game and the Land: Tyranny in the Villages (London, 1913), p. 5; Joseph Arch, From Ploughtail to Parliament (1898, London, 1986), p. 158.
55 Peter Munsche, Gentleman and Poachers, The English Game Laws, 1671–1831 (Cambridge, UK, 1981), p. 184.
56 Walsingham and Payne-Gallwey, Shooting, vol. 1, p. 294.
57 Jane Cobden Unwin and Brougham Villiers, The Land Hunger: Life Under Monopoly (London, 1913), pp. 77–8.
58 Edward Thomas, ‘Old Song: 1’, in Edna Longley, ed., Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Tarset, UK, 2008), p. 46; Mathew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (London, 2011), pp. 175–81.
59 Pearson’s Weekly, 27th September 1906, p. 201.
60 Stage, 23rd May 1908.
61 F. E. Green, The Tyranny of the Countryside (London, 1913), ch. 6.
62 Sir Thomas Skyrme, History of the Justices of the Peace, vol. 2 (Chichester, UK, 1991), pp. 116–26.
63 NRO SO167, Sixth Annual Report of the Norfolk and Suffolk Poaching Prevention Society, 28th January 1902; Haggard, Farmer’s Year, pp. 227–8, and see Charles Walker, Shooting on a Small Income (London, 1900), pp. 107–08.
64 Tracy Young, ‘Popular Attitudes Towards Rural Customs and Rights in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England’ (PhD thesis, Hertfordshire, 2008), p. 176; Carolyn Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (Oxford, 1991), pp. 199–201.
65 Nicholas Everitt, Broadland Sport (London, 1902), p. 343.
66 Turner, Memoirs, pp. 97–8.
67 Gamekeeper, November 1913, p. 32.
68 Ridgwell, ‘Mangold’s Champion’, p. 27.
69 F. E. R. Fryer, ‘Management of a Shooting Estate’, in Horace G. Hutchinson, ed., Shooting, vol. 1 (London, 1903), pp. 142–3; Gamekeeper, August 1898, pp. 3–4; July 1901, pp. 215–16.
70 A. G. Street, Farmer’s Glory (1932, Oxford, 1983), pp. 19–21.
71 Walsingham and Payne-Gallwey, Shooting, vol. 2 (London, 1893), p. 336.
72 J. H. Porter, ‘Tenant right: Devonshire and the 1880 Ground Game Act’, Agricultural History Review, 34:2 (1986), 188–97.
73 Hansard, 4th Series, 9th March 1906, col. 816. A Liberal MP from Norfolk, Winfrey was speaking in the second reading of the debate over the Agricultural Holdings Bill (Act). He later sat on Lloyd George’s Land Enquiry Committee.
74 Musson, Up and Down Stairs, p. 167.
75 Author correspondence with David S. D. Jones.
76 Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (Stroud, UK, 1995), p. 148.
77 David S. D. Jones, Gamekeeping, pp. 34–50; Owen Jones, Shooting, ch. 17.
78 Walker & Mackie, Keeper’s Book, p. 341; ‘On Tipping Keepers: What the Keeper Thinks About It’, Shooting World, August 1912, p. 13.
79 Author correspondence with David S. D. Jones.
80 David S. D. Jones, Gamekeeping, p. 50. Smaller shoots sometimes made do with a so-called single-handed keeper.
81 Pamela Horn, The Changing Countryside in Victorian and Edwardian England and Wales (London, 1984), p. 218.
82 Matthew Cragoe and Briony McDonagh, ‘Parliamentary enclosure, vermin and the cultural life of English parishes, 1750–1850’, Continuity and Change, 28:1 (2013), 27–50.
83 Roger Lovegrove, The Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation’s Wildlife (Oxford, 2008), ch. 2.
84 Florence Anna Fulcher, Among the Birds (London, 1900), p. 152; Edward Thomas, The Heart of England (1906, Oxford, 1982), p. 171.
85 Gamekeeper, ‘A Defence of the Keeper’, 13th October 1897, p. 6.
86 Owen Jones, Gamekeeping, pp. 76, 301.
87 David S. D. Jones, Gamekeeping, p. 116.
88 Owen Jones, Ten Years, p. 69.
89 Raymond Carr, English Fox Hunting (London, 1986), pp. 223–7; Neil Tranter, Sport, Economy and Society in Britain, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, UK, 1998), p. 16.
90 Carr, Foxhunting, p. 223.
91 Rudyard Kipling, ‘In Ambush’, Stalky & Co. (London, 1899); John Galsworthy, The Eldest Son (London, 1912).
92 Gamekeeper, December 1912, p. 59.
93 Munsche, ‘Gamekeeper’, 82.
94 Punch, 21st January 1893. And see the collection With Rod & Gun (Punch offices, nd.)
95 Ridgwell, ‘Poaching’, pp. 35–51.
96 Walter Raymond, A Book of Crafts and Country Characters (London, 1907).
97 George Dewar, The Glamour of the Earth (London, 1904), pp. 88–9.
98 Walsingham and Payne-Gallwey, Shooting, vol. 1, pp. 295–6.
99 Philip Howell, At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain (Charlottesville, VA, 2015).
100 Gamekeeper, ‘A Gamekeeper’s Dog Show’, June 1900, pp. 164–5.
101 Stage, 12th September 1907.
102 Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies (1909, London, 1938), p. 117.
103 Alfred Williams, Villages of the White Horse (London, 1913), p. 82.
104 Helen Allingham, Happy England (London, 1903).
105 ‘The Gamekeeper’s Home’ (1910) in 125 Years of the Shooting Times (London, 2007), pp. 24–7.
106 Owen Jones, Gamekeeping, p. 302.
107 Owen Jones and Marcus Woodward, Going About the Country with Your Eyes Open (London, 1911); The Woodcraft Supplementary Reader for Schools (London, 1911). Woodward was a journalist and popular nature writer.
108 Owen Jones, Shooting, p. 181. Also see for example, Pearson’s Weekly, 13th September 1906; C. B. Fry’s Magazine, March 1910; Badminton Magazine, July to December 1914.
109 Owen Jones, Shooting, p. 195; Jones and Woodward, Going About, p. 51.
110 Era, 16th January 1892; James Willard, In the Shadow of the Night, British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Papers, Add. MS 53668/B. The play was still touring a decade later.
111 Era, 29th April 1893.
112 Daily Herald, 27th November 1912.
113 Galsworthy, III.I.
114 W. Somerset Maugham, Landed Gentry (London, 1913).
115 Maugham, II.I.
116 Ibid.
117 On the idea of the ‘sacred trust’, see Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth Century Britain (London, 2013), pp. 113–14.
118 Maugham, IV.I.
119 Violet Greville, ‘Men Servants in England’, National Review, February 1892, p. 818.
120 Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (London, 2020), p. 209.
121 D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock (1911, London, 1987), p. 207.
122 Munsche, ‘Gamekeeper’, 105.
123 The song can be heard at <https://www.musichallcds.co.uk/cdr9_page.htm≥.
124 Oswald Crawfurd, In Green Fields (London, 1906), p. 26; ‘Rustic Oddities’, National Observer, 26th January 1895, p. 291.