The Last English Poachers (4 page)

I took the fish from the private streams and lakes for miles around. I mean, how can a man say a fish is his, as it swims upstream from one estate to another? Or, if one bank is on private land
and the other’s on public land? It’s codswallop. I’d use night lines and funnel nets and even tickle the trout. If you knew the water well enough, like I did, you’d find
where the fish rested, under rocks and out of the current. I’d lie face down and lower an arm into the stream – slowly, very slowly. I’d let my fingers brush up agin’ the
trout’s side. The fish would move away at first, but my fingers would follow it until it got used to the brushing sensation. Then I’d work along its body to the gills, the only place a
big trout can be gripped without it slipping away. I’d hook it out and it was mine!

Catching salmon by hand was a bit more difficult. I’d operate in shallow water on dark nights, wading upstream with a handheld torch and a hessian bag over my shoulder. I’d flash the
torch into the salmon’s lie and the curious fish would rise towards the light. I’d have to be quick and grab it by the gills and heave it into the bag.

I was ten years old when my Uncle Ted died. He left me his gun and seventeen cartridges and I went to the post office and got a licence for ten shillings. It was a .410 shotgun, a small gun
which used to fire a little two-inch cartridge with not much lead, so’s not to do too much damage to the meat when you shot a pheasant in the head with it. With a three-inch cartridge, the
.410 can shoot nearly as far as a 12-bore and it don’t make a lot of noise, neither, not like the bigger bore guns, so it’s less likely to be heard by a prowling gamekeeper. A 12-bore
would put a big hole in an elephant’s head and they’re favoured by the keepers, but not by us poachers.

Once I had the gun I could go lamping of a night for pheasants, using a handheld torch with an easy beam. I’d shoot the quarry and the spaniel would fetch ’em back to me and
I’d reward him with a biscuit. Pheasants roost facing the wind, so’s not to get their feathers ruffled the wrong way. I’d move downwind through the wood and see ’em
silhouetted agin’ the sky. After shooting them, I’d try to collect all the feathers where they dropped, so the keepers never even knew I’d been there.

I learned how to use the weather – on wet, dark, windy nights it was always better to work the open country; on still, clear nights I took to the woods. A short duck’s frost in the
morning was dangerous, because footprints showed up clear for a while – and you couldn’t set snares nor use ferrets in the snow – and it was easy to get lost in a mist and hard to
spot a roosting pheasant, but it muffled the report of the gun. All these things I learned as I made my way through my early little life.

There were skills to be practised too; you has to have a good eye to be a poacher. You must be able to see game at a distance, camouflaged in a field or hidden behind trees or blending in with
the bushes. And be a good shot, and a good bluffer. If I was out with my gun in daylight I’d always keep to the public ways, like paths or lanes. As long as I had a licence, I was legal to
carry the gun and, if I saw a bird, I’d take a shot at it and come back for it after dark. That way, if I was suddenly come upon, I’d be carrying nothing and, no matter how suspicious I
looked, there was bugger all a keeper or a landowner or a farmer could do. So you can see, in the early days I grew up setting snares and traps and hunting with ferrets and dogs, but once I got my
first gun, I always preferred it to anything else, as it was the easiest way to get game.

I remember one time going down to a private stretch of water on the Earl of Ducie’s land. It’s about two in the morning and I’m wearing nothing but a pair of plimsolls and old
shorts and carrying my .410 shotgun. I hides myself quietly until I hears the quacking of the ducks I know is there, then I slip waist-deep into the water. I wade along through the reeds and
rushes, keeping out of sight as much as possible, because ducks can see in the dark and they has good eyes. I know I’ll only get one shot in and it’ll have to be a good ’un. I
come across a whole paddling of them – maybe seven or eight. I’m so close the shot kills three of them and the rest fly away, feathers everywhere. I get the three dead ’uns and
make a run for it, in case the shot brings the keepers, even at this hour of the night.

When I gets to the road, I sees one of the ducks that flew away running about between the hedges, wounded. So I catches it and puts it out of its misery. I goes down a quiet lane and hides the
four dead birds and the gun and slopes back to the water, to see if there’s any more ‘runners’. Many a poacher’s been caught chasing a runner and it’s better to leave
’em, but I hates to see an animal suffer, or a bird for that matter. There’s nobody about – the keepers is too lazy to get out of their warm beds, even if they hear the shot. So I
search the rushes and the area about, but there ain’t no more wounded birds. I goes back and collects my bag. Four ducks with the one shot; not bad for a night’s work.

I’m only fourteen.

And so, as a boy, I hunted and poached and beat out for long-netters all over the countryside around my village, which was in a rural diocese that was surrounded by land belonging to the lords
and earls of England: the estates of the Earl of Ducie and the Duke of Beaufort and the Earl of Berkeley and Lord Moreton and the Codrington Estate – whose family were slave-traders in the
West Indies – and the Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetland Reserve, and around Dursley, which means ‘Deer’s Lay’, and was owned by the Seymour family, descendants of Sir John
Seymour, who was a nephew of Jane Seymour, who married Henry VIII. There was also Badminton and Gatcombe and Sherbourne and many other places besides. I wore a long coat with deep poachers’
pockets, until later when I traded a few pheasants for postbags, and I used my .410 bolt-action shotgun and my greyhound and spaniel. I was never convicted of a crime in all my days as a poacher,
apart from being fined a fiver once, and I never will be now. They tried to do me many times, but I was always too clever for ’em and one step ahead.

Some things I never had much to do with, like fox-hunting and badger-baiting. Hunting a fox was alright if you killed the animal cleanly. It was the poncey bastards on the horses I had a problem
with – the ‘get out of my way’ types; the saddle-bumpers who weren’t satisfied with the chase, and who had to dig the fox out when it went to ground and let their pack dogs
tear it apart. That wasn’t for me. So I never got involved. And, anyway, hunting foxes was for the toffs – they’d go round the houses and show the old people their dogs and
horses, when it was legal. I’d watch ’em prancing about in their get-up and tooting their silly horns and stuff. It was supposed to be symbolic or something, but I never did like that
word – especially the bolic bit.

Badger-baiting ain’t nothing more than pointless bloodshed. Alright, people ate badgers years ago, when it was legal to kill ’em; they called ’em ‘pigs’ and had
badger roasts and they called the meat ‘ham’, but that ain’t nothing to do with badger-digging and -baiting and no one eats ’em now. I never used gin traps neither, because
they can catch an animal and hold it by its feet instead of killing it outright.

I learned respect for the countryside and for all the wild things that roamed through it and flew over it and it made me into a man. What my father taught me I taught to my sons, and
there’s more they learned for themselves, just like I did. And all those skills that’s been handed down will be lost when the last of the old-fashioned poachers hangs up their guns and
turns their dogs into docile housepets.

3

When I turned sixteen, I joined the Navy. My father was agin’ it, because he knew it wouldn’t suit me, but there was a history of Navy in the family – my
grandfather, George Neal, went down with the HMS
Monmouth
when it was sunk during the battle of Coronel in 1914. I thought the Navy would lead to a life of freedom, travelling the world,
so I signed on as a junior stoker at Victoria Street in Bristol and was sent to HMS
Raleigh
Basic Training Facility at Torpoint in Cornwall. But I never did like authority in any shape or
form – always agin’ orders and officers and the high holy born-again freemasons and all their fundamental friends and pointy-hatted partners, on account of them being a dangerous shower
of shit-stirrers and nuisance-causers. So I was always going to be in trouble for one thing or another, right from the start.

After basic training, I was assigned to HMS
Sluys
, a battle-class destroyer in reserve – that’s where I learned all about being a stoker and finished my training. But my
feet was itching to be off and I couldn’t wait to be given a posting so I could get going round the world to see all the sights and sleep under all the stars. My first real ship was HMS
Pickle
, a minesweeper based at Harwich, and I was drafted to her when I knew what I was supposed to be doing. Some sailor asked me if I had a rubber when I first came aboard and I thought
he was talking about a French letter. Now, I’d heard a bit about buggery and stuff like that going on in the Navy and I was worried. The big burlys could see I was shaking in my shoes and
they all had a good laugh, because a ‘rubber’ was a pound note in Navy slang and a half-sheet was a ten-bob note, and nothing at all to do with sodomy or shirt-lifting.

But I had to start growing up, fast. I might have been Bob Tovey the poacher in my village, but nobody knew that in the Navy, and nobody cared. I was given a bucket, and that was for washing
myself and my clothes. We slept in hammocks and I thought that was the bee’s knees because I was always upright, no matter how the ship rolled. We had to lash ’em up in the morning and
put ’em away and, on the first morning after I got up, I went to the mess hall and made myself a bacon sandwich. The next thing I knows, some bloke hits me and knocks me out. There was this
big Scouse stoker called Tommo, and he helped me up and told me it was because I didn’t wash before I went to get the grub. He told me I had to be very clean onboard ship – before I got
in my hammock I had to wash myself and my clothes and take ’em to the boiler room to dry. I had to wash again after I got up, before breakfast, and it was all because of living and eating in
such close quarters – to prevent illness and infections. If you didn’t keep yourself clean, you got walloped. I was to find out the importance of this when I served on the
Ark
Royal
, later on. Anyway, Tommo took me under his wing and I soon learned the ropes. It was a rough place, down in the stokehold, and it wasn’t long before I got into a fight with another
stoker. I can’t even remember what the argument was all about, but they were a short-tempered crew and it didn’t take much to spark off a row. I was lucky to have Tommo on my side, but
nobody totally looks after you in the Navy, so I still had to learn how to look after myself. I grew up in the Navy – I was a boy going in, but I was a man coming out.

HMS
Pickle
went down to Portsmouth for repairs first, before going to sea. Repairing a ship throws the compass off; even if you put three rivets in a bulkhead, it’ll offset some
bloody thing. So, when the work was done, we had to steam round and round in the Solent till I nearly got dizzy from the circling. This was to get the compass right and, once it was reset, we
sailed up to Invergordon, in the Cromarty Firth on the west coast of Scotland. When we got up there, Tommo told me to get my wash-bucket and take it across to the dockyard canteen and fill it with
beer – which I did. The two of us took it down to the stoke-hold and kept dipping our glasses into the bucket until I got so drunk I couldn’t see for several hours. But Tommo kept
drinking until all the beer was gone. And that’s how I learned to be a heavy boozer.

In the Navy.

My first real voyage was across the Norwegian Sea to Tromsø in Norway, over 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The weather was rough going over and I was sick as a spaniel and spewed
yards from the afterdeck, with my legs wobbling like jelly and my guts as green as my gullet. I was alright after we got to Tromsø and, from there, we traversed up and down the fjords in
lovely calm waters – all the way round northern Norway, through the Arctic Ocean to Vardo in the Barents Sea. Our mission was supposed to be fishery protection, but we were really keeping an
eye on what the Russians were getting up to.