The Last English Poachers (23 page)

Then this young fella in a blue silk suit butts in and upsets the synchronicity – bumbling his way through to a tray of champagne held by a waiter. He’s obviously pissed, because his
tie’s undone and the tail of his shirt’s hanging out of his trousers. The dance stops and, when the next one starts up, the drunk grabs hold of the bride and drags her out for an
embarrassing display of stumbling around the floor. Everyone’s glaring daggers at him and the bride’s eyes are appealing for help. The groom eventually goes and rescues the girl and the
atmosphere lightens again, with high-pitched voices and ‘darling’s and ‘how delightful’s. Before the next dance can begin, the blue-suit stands in the centre of the big hall
and tries to lead everyone in a sing-song.

Regrets, I’ve had a few . . .

‘Sit down!’

The groom shouts at him and the guests start coughing politely and turning their heads away to pretend this ain’t happening and that makes the man more determined than ever. I’m just
enjoying the spectacle of it and seeing the toffs in their element.

He continues with his Frank Sinatra impression, then he’s up with an unsteady leap onto the little stage and grabbing hold of a microphone.

The band leader is trying to wrestle the microphone back from him, when someone’s foot kicks over the cello-player’s chair with a string-twanging crash and one of the fiddlers sticks
his bow up the oboist’s nose. By now security are on the scene and they grab the miscreant – but he’s being awkward as a tup and not wanting to let go of the microphone.

I’m imagining this fella must be some previous lover of the bride who’s been dumped for an older, richer man and is intent on disrupting the genteel reception and causing chaos.

A hefty pull by the bouncers sends the blue-suit flying off the stage and onto his arse, still clutching the microphone and entangling the flex round the flautist, sliding him off his stool and
taking several other instruments along with him. Everything’s in an uproar! And while they’re unravelling the waltzes from the reels, the blue-suit howls out some more of the gin-sodden
song before they drags him to the door.

A few minutes later, the Duchess’s man comes to me again.

‘The Duchess wonders if you might do her a favour.’

‘What?’

Apparently, the drunk’s the groom’s younger brother and he’s the prodigal son of the family, with a grudge agin’ his father for leaving everything to the eldest.
He’s threatening to come back in and spoil the party, but they don’t want to have him arrested and cause a scandal.

‘The family has a house in Wotton-under-Edge.’

He presses an envelope into my hand that has inside it an address and a key – and two fifty-pound notes.

‘Would you take him there . . . across the fields?’

I goes outside to find the blue-suit sitting on the gravelled driveway, slugging from a bottle of whisky. He holds the bottle out to me.

‘I don’t drink, and you’ve had enough.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve been trained.’

I take the bottle from him and hand it back to the butler, then I lift him to his feet.

‘Let’s go.’

‘Where?’

‘Home.’

I has to half-drag him, because he’s completely inebriated now and he’s still singing as we go.

He takes out a packet of cigarettes, but can’t find his lighter.

‘Do you have a light?’

‘No.’

It’s a trek across the countryside to Wotton-under-Edge and it’s about 2:00 a.m. when we gets there. The blue-suit’s sobered up in the fresh air and the night-time chill, just
as the Duchess knew he would, and he still has the cigarette dangling from his mouth. We’re making our way along Old London Road, towards Westridge Wood and the address in the envelope, when
this idiot goes and knocks on someone’s door. A muddled old pensioner in pale striped pyjamas looks out at us from the low light in his hallway.

‘Could you possibly oblige me with a light?’

‘Are you mad?’

‘Maybe.’

‘It’s two o’clock!’

A woman’s voice calls down the stairs.

‘Who’s that at the door, dear?’

‘Two escaped lunatics, love.’

‘What about my light?’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Surely you have a gas cooker or some such appliance?’

The old man slams the door, just as the blue flashing lights come racing down the road. Suddenly, we’re surrounded by a swarm of policemen.

‘And what have we here?’

‘Couple of poachers, sarge.’

It’s only the big fella who bet me the fiver his dog would catch Brian, and didn’t.

‘I know this one. Tovey, ain’t it?’

‘Aye, and you owe me a fiver.’

The blue-suit’s starting to get uppity, as his class tend to when they’re asked to be reasonable. But, after our trek through the brambles and bushes, his shoes are covered in shite
and his shirt’s torn and his face is scratched and his hair looks like an unruly rook’s nest – and he stinks of whisky.

‘I’ll have you know that I’m no damn poacher!’

‘Oh no, what are you then?’

‘I’m the second Marquess of Evesham.’

The coppers are in convulsions of laughter and we’re both arrested for causing a disturbance and dragged protesting to the station. And in the night I hears him howling and banging his
cell door and, to take my mind off it, I lie back on the bunk and imagine I can see the stars above in the sky and feel the free wind across my face and I sleeps for a short while. In the morning,
the Duchess comes and everything’s sorted out and I’m free to go with no charges pressed – they even gives me back my two fifty-pound notes.

And they says that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing – but complete bloody ignorance is a crime!

That was one Duchess. Another was Mary von Teck, who became the Duchess of Beaufort when she married the Marquess of Worcester – who became the 10th Duke of Beaufort. She
lived at Badminton House on the Beaufort Estate and died in 1987, aged 90. She was out riding one day when a Pyrenean Mountain Dog frightened her horse. Instead of getting all indignant about it
like the gentry normally did, she said to the dog’s owner, ‘What a beautiful animal, would you sell it to me?’

The owner wouldn’t sell at first, but she offered him enough money to buy six Pyrenean pups to take its place. She brought the dog back to the Beaufort Estate and had it shot. Then she got
her men to hang the carcass up on a clothesline and she beat it with a stick every day for a fortnight. You or I would be locked up in a nuthouse for behaving like that but, if you were one of
them, you were said to be ‘eccentric’ rather than insane.

They were a rum lot, all the aristos whose land we poached, and most of them thought they could do as they liked, until you stood up to ’em. They all had histories and skeletons in their
cupboards that they tried to keep out of sight. They were no better than us and, in some cases, a lot worse. Take Lord Podge, for instance, third son of the eighth Duke of Beaufort and a great
friend of the Duke of Clarence, eldest son of Edward VII. When a house in London was raided by Scotland Yard in 1889 and a number of male prostitutes arrested, they named Lord Podge as one of their
clients. Don’t forget, homosexuality was illegal in them days and Podge faced a hard-labour prison sentence just like Oscar Wilde. But, if Podge was brought to trial, the Duke of Clarence,
Queen Victoria’s grandson, would also be implicated. So Podge conveniently disappeared to the French Riviera. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but it was too late, he was long gone. He
never came back to England to face the charges and spent the rest of his life in the South of France with his male companions.

It was common belief that Podge was allowed to escape to save the monarchy’s blushes. The scandal was even debated in the House of Commons and the government accused of criminal
conspiracy. But there was never any inquiry or investigation. Less than two years later, the Duke of Clarence died, of pneumonia they said, leaving it clear for his younger brother to become the
next king.

And they had the gall to call us criminals!

But it ain’t just the aristos who was eccentric, if that’s what you wants to call it.

There’s a picture of me long-netting hares that was painted by a famous wildlife and animal artist called Mick Cawston. Cawston lived in a small cottage on a farm in Burnham-on-Crouch in
Essex. He loved to paint dogs – pointers and spaniels and terriers and greyhounds – and he rang me up one day to ask if he could come along to our drag and do some sketching. At the
time, we was running some whippet courses and he come along in his old battered jacket and long hair and torn jeans, looking like a bit of a tramp.

He took photos and drew sketches of the whippets and then painted pictures of them, and I’m sure he was able to sell them pictures to all the old women who’d pay a lot for oil
paintings of their dogs. We got talking about hare-netting and, as it happened, we was going down to Sir James Scott’s in Ropley, near Winchester, netting hares – Scott was an
acquaintance of the artist and Cawston came along a few times to the long-netting. That’s when he painted the picture of me. It was a miserable rainy day and he did a great job and the
painting’s hanging in my front room at home. He was recognised as one of the finest wildlife painters of all time and I found him to be alright. He was one of the boys and easy to get along
with. He was a very talented bloke and there was no edge to him – like, he weren’t up above no one else. But, under the surface, he was a haunted man who lacked belief in hisself and he
suffered from deep depression. He stabbed hisself in the heart in 2006 and died at the age of forty-seven.

Nowadays we rents land off a man called Albert Chadwick. Albert’s a big fella and he can lift a bale of hay with one hand. His family had two farms in the area – the Top Farm and the
Bottom Farm. Then Albert’s father died and left all his money to an animal sanctuary. From then on the family was struggling – they had fields of turnips and corn and wheat and barley
they couldn’t afford to have harvested. That was a benefit to us, because it used to attract the pheasants in the winter time and we’d just walk up there and shoot ’em. Over the
years, things deteriorated into bankruptcy and Albert had to sell the farmhouse and the barns, one by one, to townie yoikes who converted them into their sterile ‘living spaces’. Until,
apart from the fallow land itself, he was down to one yard full of rubbish and he lived in a cow barn – an old milking shed that was converted into a makeshift bungalow. He got a bit violent
with the builders who was doing the barn conversions – and who could blame him – and they called the police and he was locked away in Gloucester nuthouse for a while. And not for the
first time either, as it happened.

Now, Albert had a twitch in his left eye that he couldn’t control. And the story’s told that he used to frequent a bar in Bristol called The Pound Of Flesh, where the barman wore
pink chiffon shirts and Albert’s eye would wink and blink all by itself and he never had no problem getting served, no matter how busy the bar was. Rumour had it that the odd free double
brandy become involved, until one night the barman follows Albert into the gents’ toilet to negotiate terms. Chadwick, not being too sophisticated in the subtleties of these circles, lays the
bugger out on the piss-stained floor. He was barred after that.

As I was saying, we rents the shooting and sporting rights to Albert’s land for £100 a year – and we rents the twenty-acre field where we holds the drag racing for £80 a
month. We pays another farmer £50 a year for the shooting rights on his farm, which is beneficial to him because we keeps the land clear of vermin that would damage his crops and his poultry.
It’s always handy to have shooting rights. Like I said before, you can feed game onto land where you has permission and you can get back there quick if you gets come upon when out poaching.
If you’re coming home along a public highway, either walking or biking or in a car, and you gets stopped with game, you can just say, ‘Oh, that pheasant? I caught that earlier on land
where I have permission.’

For instance, I was long-netting one night over by Frampton-on-Severn with a 150-yard net. I was told there was a lot of rabbits there, so I set the net up but, as luck would have it, I only
caught one. I put the gear back in the motor and drove off to try my luck again, up around Berkeley Castle. Unbeknown to me, one of the back lights wasn’t working and I gets pulled by the
police.

‘You’re Bob Tovey.’

‘That’s right.’

Immediately they seen it was me, they was suspicious and decided to search the car.

‘Where did this rabbit come from?’

‘Found it on the road.’

‘Didn’t poach it?’

‘Don’t do any poaching now.’

They told me to get the brake light fixed and let me go. Now, if I had a dozen or more rabbits in there, I couldn’t say I found ’em all on the road, could I? That’s why
it’s always handy to have permission.

‘I caught ’em on Albert Chadwick’s land, where I has permission.’

‘Is that right?’

‘It is, officer. Just on my way to the pub now, thank you.’

Anyway, Albert’s another one of the many different and ‘eccentric’ characters I’ve come across on my way through the years.

Then there’s the tale of the two Colonels – Colonel Peter Hawker was a young soldier in the Spanish Peninsular War, who served with distinction under Wellington. He was seriously
wounded at the Battle of Talavera in 1809 and came home to live at Longparish, near Andover, in Hampshire. Hawker was famous for being a shooting man and he wrote a book called
Advice to Young
Sportsmen
, about hunting and wildfowling, which was published in 1814. Now, we was down round Longparish netting for hares nearly two hundred years later and we met another Colonel –
Colonel Ted Walsh, who was a keen photographer and who published books on sighthounds.

Ted wanted to come long-netting with us, so we brought him along several times and he took pictures – he also took pictures of my dogs running at the Cotswold Coursing Club, particularly
one of a greyhound with its mouth open and the jaws ready to snap shut on a hare. Some of them pictures are in this book. This probably ain’t much of a story, but it’s just a
coincidence that Hawker and Walsh were both colonels at Longparish a couple of hundred years apart.