Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (30 page)

It was still a far cry from the open plains of Africa or the medieval charms of Bavaria, but I had travelled a short distance from my home, heading south of the river, to talk to Marc Newton. I had first met Marc at his African fantasy pavilion at the IWA show, and as he was the managing director of John Rigby & Co., one of the oldest gun companies in the world, I had asked to see him again. He had agreed, knowing that I wanted to talk about the culture of the huntsman and he was well placed to have such a conversation.

He oversaw a venerable company that had, over the years, become renowned among big-game hunters for its powerful guns, particularly among a certain type of larger-than-life American hunter. It was the gunsmith of choice for bold whisky-touched men and for crown-touched kings. They had made rifles under Royal Warrant for the last three King Georges and for Edward VII.

Rigby were in the middle of a refit. As I rang the doorbell, the buzz of drilling and the murmur of polishing buffers sounded through the door. Inside, the décor was evolving; it promised to be in sharp contrast to the industrial grime outside. Here you were spirited away to a privileged world of deep-shine leather and aged spirits drunk from fine crystal.

‘Everything is here for a reason. We went for a colonial, East African feel,’ said Marc, pointing at the heads of impalas hanging from the wall.

Marc was an outspoken and yet disarmingly engaging man, and surprisingly young for the head of such a historical gun company. But then again, his father and his grandfather had both been game-keepers, and he had been raised on the virtues of hunting.

He spoke plainly. ‘Let’s call a spade a spade. There is bullshit about guns in all their aspects. Something about guns seems to empower people, giving them a right to lecture others. Gun is just one word, but it says a million words. It’s one of the most emotive words in the English language,’ he said, settling into a leather high-backed chair.

I asked him what guns meant to him.

‘Hunters love guns; we have a deep passion for fine-quality items. We enjoy hunting because it’s so different from the society we live in, where we are trapped in front of computers. A fine hunting rifle is your ticket to transforming your dull life into those scenes you see in these black and white photos – back to a time of adventurers. When someone buys a Rigby they buy into that image, a key to that lifestyle. On a Friday night they can transform themselves into Denys Finch Hatton.’

Finch Hatton, an old Etonian and Oxford-educated aristocrat, was an interesting example to use. He was a big-game hunter, who,
when on safari with the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was asked to creep up on a rhino and stick the king’s head – taking the form of postage stamps – on its bottom. He did so, one for each buttock. When Finch Hatton died in a plane crash in 1931 his brother had a quote from Coleridge inscribed above his grave: ‘He prayeth well, who loveth well both man and bird and beast.’ I was not sure that most bankers picking up a rifle on a weekend had such noble sentiments or romantic sense of style, but I got Marc’s point.

Here Marc was selling a lifestyle as much as a weapon – the life of the big-game hunter in South Africa, a whiff of Hemingway in metal and wood. It was, at the very least, a good business tactic – because even though they sold only about 250 rifles a year, some went for $100,000 and more. The most popular of their line was the 1911-designed .416 Rigby, a $20,000 rifle that could take down an elephant. All of this epitomised, he told me, a certain spirit.

‘It’s a real roll-up-sleeves culture,’ he said. ‘What I find fascinating is that people look at me – a young man going out stalking, shooting, butchering – as barbaric and macho. Yet the same people see a
National Geographic
video, and all of a sudden that is “cultural”. But to that I say: “What about my culture?”’

Of course, this being England, I could not help but think that this culture was one notable for its privilege. Even this room, with its bespoke furniture and leather-bound books, spoke of inherited wealth or city bonuses. But it was not the first time that people I’d met in Britain had been defensive about their right to hunt. People were quick to claim they and their sport were misunderstood, even persecuted.

One bluff Yorkshire huntsman had sounded indignant on the phone when I suggested that hunting cultures in Britain were exclusive, even though his own website showed only photographs of middle-aged white men dressed in matching orange-brown tweed, sat in leather chairs enjoying a post-shoot drink. He told me, in a hectoring way, that the people he employed to work on a grouse shoot were from all walks of life. Then he reprimanded me for describing shooting grouse as hunting.

Many, though, have a perception of hunting as the sport of the
British gentry, one as much about class as it is about animal welfare – a measure of status. It is something underlined by things like press interviews where Princess Michael of Kent once claimed she was experiencing economic austerity, too: ‘I sew better than any nanny we’ve ever had . . . And my father had a farm in Africa. Have you ever taken the insides out of a stag?’
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It’s not surprising, then, that left-wing polemicists saw class lines when the British Conservative-led government kept the cost of gun licences at £50, resulting in a government subsidy of some £17 million a year, just as they saw privilege at work when the subsidy for grouse moors was increased from £30 per hectare to £56. The left-wing critic George Monbiot wrote at the time: ‘So back we go to the hazy days of Edwardian England: a society dominated by rentiers, in which the city centres are set aside for those with tremendous wealth and the countryside is reserved for their bloodsports . . . our money is used to subsidise grouse and shotguns.’
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But, for me, such issues spoke more about the hoary British class system than guns. So I steered the conversation with Marc back to hunting and asked about the controversies around big game – the horror many feel when someone is photographed kneeling next to a felled leopard or cheetah.

‘Anyone who can shoot a beautiful animal like this one,’ he said, pointing to the skin of a lion on the wall behind, ‘anyone who can do that without having a pang of guilt – well . . . I feel guilty.’

‘But,’ he said, and I was expecting the ‘but’, ‘there is a use to the flesh. Within half an hour an elephant will be chopped up. We shot a hippo two years ago, and out of the bush people just appeared and chopped it up into pieces, and the meat went back to the local people.’

I did not buy this argument at all. Hunting for a deer, sure. Hunting for a lion that has killed someone, fine. But killing a lion just because you wanted to: I couldn’t understand it. I was pretty sure most didn’t kill them just to eat their steak.

A few months before, I had been in New York. The glittering heart of Madison Avenue had revealed a similar world of wealth and status. There I had gone to the sumptuous shop of the Italian
gun makers Beretta. They had chosen to have their flagship store in New York, not Milan, but stepping through its heavy entrance door, framed by a hand-cut Italian stone façade, you were immediately transported into a European world of precise luxury. The ground floor was devoted to thick shirts and jackets that were a frenzy of buckles and pockets. The top floor was filled with shotguns whose price tags you had to look at twice to make sure you had not misread them. But it was the middle floor, the walls filled with monochrome pictures of Africa and bookshelves heavy with coffee-table hunting books, that caught my attention. Because there stood a line of DVDs, and one leaped out.
Boddington on Cheetahs
, it read. But this was no David Attenborough-style film; rather it was highlights of the fastest animal on earth being taken down by a 12-bore. Others stood beside it:
Boddington on Lions
,
Boddington on Leopards
.

What Boddington had done was strictly legal, but the images on the back cover felt like the sort of footage, as an investigative journalist, I would have wanted for a film about the ugly world of animal abuse. It seemed unnecessary and cruel. I am sure I’d be dismissed as a naive, city-dwelling liberal for this sentiment. Those who bought these DVDs would argue that there is no philosophical difference between shooting a boar or a cheetah; the latter was just nicer-looking.

But as I shook hands to say goodbye to Marc, I couldn’t dispel the suspicion that perhaps he himself was not entirely convinced by the need to shoot lions and rhinos. I certainly wasn’t. But, perhaps to challenge my own prejudices – if that was what they were – I had made a decision. After my visit to Cape Town, meeting medics and police squads, and before I flew to the United States, I would drive north, through South Africa’s flower-lined Garden Route, to the remote frontier towns of the Eastern Cape.

The lodge lay about an hour from Cradock, a town of over 35,000 serving the farmers and traders of the districts that ran along the
Great Fish River. Cradock had begun its life as a military outpost and was lined with neat, modest homes and wood-fronted shops selling the basics to live in this hard land. I had come here, to the western region of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the poorest of all of South Africa’s nine provinces, to go on a hunting safari.

Cradock was the last town before the Veld, empty but for the endless grass and, for me, animals to hunt. The town had the feeling of a place once filled with people who would have fought for something passionately. Today, though, it seemed those who lived here could not recall exactly what they would have fought for. It was a forgotten place. Perhaps a sense of self-belief died with the killings of four young South African activists here in 1985 – shot by white security police in the darkest days of apartheid. I had meant to see a memorial commemorating them, but the rain had come down hard from nowhere, submerging the view of the city. Instead, I edged through the crawling traffic until I found a sign that read Route 61 and pulled over to get my bearings.

The name places here spoke of a Boer past: Graaff-Reinet, Hofmeyr, Sterkstroom. This land, with its rolling, fertile expanse, the sky huge over it, was to the Afrikaner God’s country. You could see why: here the winding light played across the plains, and the rain clouds could be seen for miles. I pulled out and drove on the empty road, a dark patch of sky approaching on the horizon.

The rain came harder this time, and then suddenly, through the water, a sign appeared: ‘Fish River’. I took its lure. Ten kilometres and eight cattle-grids later I reached my destination.

It had taken me nearly three days of solid driving to get here from Cape Town. But distance is a feature of all life here. The hunting ground for Richard Holmes Safari stretched for some 200,000 acres on either side, bordering the edges of the Karoo and Eastern Grasslands. And after much negotiation about hunting permits and emails that bounced back and forth, I had agreed that I would come to these spreading valleys and gentle hills to hunt two springbok, the national symbol of South Africa. This was no easy decision. In a very basic sense I was coming to hunt purely for this book. In order to understand the hunter’s allure, I felt I had to do this. I had
but one caveat – that whatever was hunted would grace the table later.

Getting out of the car, I looked around. I was in a shallow valley, and far away the tips of distant mountain ranges could be seen. Glossy starlings lined the road, high on branches that still dripped from the downpour, and the air smelled clean. And then, through the slanting rain, the owner of the Safari Lodge came out to greet me.

Richard Holmes was not who I had expected. Perhaps I thought he’d have a
Henderson the Rain King
spirit to him, a man with endless tales of derring-do. But instead he was considered and measured and had more the appearance of an accountant than a hunter. Of course, hunting was in his blood – he didn’t have to dress for the part. He was seven years old when he shot his first springbok and had taken down birds three years before even that. He had run safaris now for over two decades.

In that way he was like many others throughout this country. At the turn of the twenty-first century there were almost no game farms in South Africa. Today there are over 12,000 of them, with 10,000 permitting hunting.
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It’s a big thing for these remote economies. The hunting industry generated 7.7 billion Rand – about $800 million – in 2011, with a third of that from the 15,000 trophy hunters who came here from overseas.
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A lion hunt can cost up to $70,000, and a permit to hunt a black rhino recently raised $350,000 at auction.
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But, unlike some others, Richard only hunted free-range animals that he could eat; he would not shoot a lion or a cheetah for its pelt and had only ever hunted in South Africa. His wife, Marion, had the same approach. They also ran a conservation trust from their lodge for servals, caracals, African wild cats and black-footed cats.

The lodge was modest and neat. A section for butchering and refrigerating stood beside the Holmes’s house, and beside that were a few thatched huts for the shooting guests. To one side was a flower-lined garden, filled with red and yellow blazes, the purple starlets of the African lily and the tight orange heads of gerbera daisies: an oasis of contained beauty in this wilderness. Further along was a dining room and kitchen. There was a filled fridge with vodkas and tonics, and outside was a fire-pit for a braai – a South African barbeque. I
was told a dinner of game meat and vegetables would be served at dusk and was left to fall exhausted onto my bed.