Tally of a big shot

From 1867 until he dropped dead in the heather after a successful day’s grouse shooting in 1923, his meticulously inscribed gamebooks reveal that he accounted for a staggering 556,813 head of game. Pheasants were his prime target – he downed 229,976 at his Yorkshire estate of Studley Royal and other top estates between in the years between 1867 and 1895 alone.

Over 46 years, he also bagged 97,503 grouse, 11,258 partridge, 2, 454 woodcock, 2,882 snipe, 3,452 wild duck, 30,280 hares, 34, 118 rabbits and 382 red deer.

Little that came in the sights of his trusty .12 bores ( he took three guns with him, rather than two) escaped. An entry for 1886, for instance, during a tour of Spain, records: “Green woodpecker hard to kill.” At Croxteth in 1883 he claimed the incredible record of 2,105 game from 2,800 shots over three days – and at Lambton in the same year he bagged his best ever pheasant haul: 894.

Nor was the noble lord – Earl de Grey before succeeding his father as 2nd Marquis of Ripon in 1909 – averse to a spot of bragging. The entry for 30 August 1887 states baldly: “328 grouse; next highest 79. Wind puzzled others.”

I first learned of Lord Ripon’s astonishing prowess when one of his prized Purdey shotguns came up for auction in 1999 and fetched £40,000 at Sotheby’s in Gleneagles, Perthshire.

Examining his 1905 game book which accompanied the lot, a page opened at random revealed evidence of Lord Ripon’s voracious appetite for shooting. The entry for December 6 shows that at Hutton Moor he and a small party of friends bagged in that single day 1,073 pheasants, 65 hares, 38 rabbits and 16 partridges.

Now a further reminder of the ace marksman’s skills emerges with the sale of his cork-handled walking cane, engraved with the family coat-of-arms.

The cane, which appears in almost every photograph of Lord Ripon shooting in his later years, is expected to fetch £800 to £1,200 at a Gavin Gardiner auction of sporting guns at the Gleneagles Hotel on August 22. Nowadays it would be considered bad form to record and compare one’s personal performance with that of other guns, especially in such meticulous detail.

Lord Ripon, who was married to society beauty Gladys Lonsdale and was a close friend of George V, maintained his amazing shooting skills to the end, dying with gun in hand at Dallowgill Moor, near Ripon, aged 71, in 1923 after a drive in which he had bagged 51 grouse.