WE fret, at times, about Continentals coming in for the shooting in winter and stories are told (or fabricated) about them killing our small non-game birds. We wince at the thought of pate de grive (thrush) though not so much at pate de foie gras, the hugely distended liver of the poor goose, force-fed through a funnel. And as to what bird may be shot by gentlemen and others well fashions change as the wild life laws change.
Who would think of going on a shoot of blackbirds today? But some time early in the century, and it would be between 1912 and 1920. Maurice Headlam, a very high civil servant in Dublin castle under the old regime - his title was Treasury Remembrance and the salary was the then very decent sum of £1,200 per annum - and his host did. This before many wildbird acts.
The shoot was at Marlfield, near Clonmel "with Jack Bagwell. We used No 10 shot and walked on each side of the high hedges which, rather rare in some parts of Ireland, were grown on the Marlfield demesne. We were attended each by a small boy carrying a sack, and my recollection is that we got far more than the traditional `four-and-twenty', and that an excellent pie was the result."
They cannot have been very hard to bring down. No high birds. Plenty of noise and fluttering. Mr Headlam wrote interestingly of his sporting activities in Ireland, and of social and club (Kildare Street) life. He recalls Edward Martyn, one of the early figures in the literary revival. Martyn dined several nights a week in that club, a companionable man, according to Headlam. He generally began with oysters, followed by a kipper and then a huge porterhouse steak with onions, and washed this down with strong tea.
Mr Headlam wrote intemperately of nationalists and Nationalism. A man who was on that side of things during Headlam's period in Ireland wrote: (the book didn't appear until 1947): "I have been perhaps more amused than disappointed. With some of these people, however, our tolerance is wasted. With all his loyalties and English civil service integrity. Headlam's book is another condemnation of the Castle regime. He was intolerant, narrow-minded and, imperially, shortsighted . . . The trouble was that he plainly and stubbornly refused to recognise any claim to nationality. And berated Lloyd George, Birken head and Chamberlain for giving in at the Treaty. Still, he wrote A Holiday Fisherman. The book in question is "Irish Reminiscences", Robert Hale0 1947.