How does the public perceive our sport?

With the future of fieldsports under the spotlight, Alasdair Mitchell examines how attitudes to shooting have changed in recent decades

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At the age of 11, Robin Marshall-Ball was walking through a Welsh village with his Midland 20-bore under his arm when a police car drew up and asked him what he was doing.

Robin explained that he was on his way to shoot pigeons on a certain farm. The officer scoffed and said there were many more pigeons on another farm, which he named. “Get yourself along to there,” said the officer. “I’ll let them know you’re coming.” Then he drove off.

Fifty years ago, when Kenn Ball was at school in Northumberland, some of the boys would go offrat shooting as soon as the bell rang at the end of the last lesson. “Eventually, we were given letters for our parents, asking them to stop us bringing our air rifles to school,” he said.

When I was a sixth former, I used to wander around my school grounds with my shotgun, looking to pot the odd pigeon or rabbit. It was a boarding school in rural Buckinghamshire. Lots of boys came from shooting families. We used to keep our guns in the school armory, booking them out under the beady eye of the Cadet Force sergeant. We were allowed to use them without supervision, as long as we had certificates and written permission. This wasn’t in the dim and distant past; it was in the mid to late 1970s.

Fresh air and a rifle

Tiggy Legge-Bourke joined the royal family as a nanny in the 1990s. By all accounts, she was an exponent of robust outdoor activity for her princely charges. She famously said: “I give them what they need at this stage: fresh air, a rifle, and a horse.” Even then, this caused a certain stir, but nothing like it would today.