Will an HPR help you fill your game bag?

An HPR can be the difference between a good bag and heading home empty-handed — but which breed is best, wonders David Tomlinson

- David Tomlinson

My first shoot was a 250-acre farm perched high on the North Downs. There were lots of hedges, a couple of small spinneys and one wood. It was enough to keep my shooting partner, Tim, and I entertained on Wednesday afternoons when I escaped from games at school and he bunked off from art college.

Our bags were small — mainly pigeon and rabbits. There were a few wild and wary pheasants, but rarely did we manage to get a shot at one. Frustratingly, we were dogless: if only we had a dog, we were sure that we would at least double, if not triple, our annual bag of pheasants. As our season’s average seldom exceeded a single bird, that wouldn’t have been difficult.

Neither of us was in a position to own a dog, but that didn’t stop us dreaming. Tim’s ambition was to get a German shorthaired pointer (GSP), which in those distant days was not only a rare breed, but also about the only HPR available in the UK. I don’t think that he had ever seen one, but he had read about them in the pages of Shooting Times. They were, apparently, a wide-ranging dog best suited to ground where game was scarce, so ideal for our shoot.

Inspired by Tim’s enthusiasm, I tried to find out as much as I could about GSPs. My gundog bible, Peter Moxon’s Gundogs: Training and Field Trials (5th edition, 1965), was hardly forthcoming. Moxon noted that the GSP was one of several foreign breeds of pointer and it was becoming quite popular in England in the years that followed World War II. “As workers they are generally sound,” Moxon noted, “but highly strung and slow making up.” That was it. Dismissed in a single sentence.