Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Where have all the gamekeepers gone?
Lindsay Waddell explores the decline of gamekeepers over the past century but manages to find reasons to be optimistic in the uplands
Most of us who work or have worked as a fulltime gamekeeper are aware of how the job evolved and how it has changed in our own lifespan, but just what has happened to gamekeepers in the past 150 years?
The turn of the 19th century saw gamekeeping as a profession heading for its peak in terms of men employed, with some 23,000 full-time gamekeepers being recorded from census records. Just prior to World War II, that number had dropped to 15,000, and today the estimated number of full-time gamekeepers is around the 3,000 mark. So what has happened to all those jobs, and just how many are now single-handed as opposed to being one of a very large team?
The reasons for the decline are complex, and it was not all down to the losses following World War I when substantial numbers of estates were broken up. There was something of a shift in the amount of funds individual landowners were willing to spend on sport for themselves and their friends. As odd days were let to balance the books, it became more of the norm not only to balance them, but to show a black line at the end of the year’s accounts. The day of the commercial shoot had arrived, and not only for private owners but for bigger and bigger enterprises with more and more birds per man.
Exception not the rule
There were, and still are, large estates with a fair quota of full-time gamekeepers, but they are more of the exception now than the rule.
The underkeeper, or beatkeeper, has become a rarer individual as the decades have ticked by, in the lowlands at any rate. Mechanisation, in all its forms, has transformed what one man can do, and that has partially driven shoots to be able to carry on with fewer full-time staff, even though they are rearing or releasing far more birds per man.
It is also a reality that staff are being paid more in real terms than their predecessors, many of whom did well just to survive — and they were better off than some in rural employment. That real cost of full-time employment has also meant that many keepers have, at best, some sort of part-time help during busy times of the year in order to maintain that black line.
Estates have been split up, and whereas the block of land may have employed a headkeeper and two or three beatkeepers, the rearranged landholdings very often have men working them single-handedly; sometimes, it must be said, aided and abetted by a very good wife or partner and perhaps a hopper filler.
Political bias
As estates, shoots and gamekeepers have dwindled in the lowlands — one county going from around
100 shoots prior to 1914 to only about five just before World War
II — what of the uplands? It is an unusual thing that densities of gamekeepers have risen, fallen and once more risen again, but that is the case over much of the uplands, in England at any rate. Scotland is another matter, but there it is not pure economics that have driven the change, but political bias that is steering it.
Many typical grouse moors in England had a staffing level of one gamekeeper to around 3,000 acres way back before World War I. That ratio changed considerably on many moors after World War II to double or triple the acreage per man, as it was deemed sufficient to provide enough grouse for the Guns. Increasingly, as opposed to having to walk, keepers were given 4x4 vehicles to get around, and it was cheaper than paying another member of staff.
But what has happened over the past 20 to 30 years? Despite the fact there are now more methods of transport enabling access over the ground than ever before, gamekeeper numbers on many English moors are as high as they have ever been, some probably higher than they have ever been. What has driven that, you may ask? The simple answer would appear to be the thinking that higher staff density equals more grouse.
So rather than the odd beat and underkeeper on the moor, you now have two or three or more. I’m aware of some estates that were single-handed moors that now have three men on them. Some that had three now have seven or eight, and on it goes with a proportionate rise throughout.
Increased staffing
The real irony is that as access has become easier, in the lowlands staffing has declined while in the uplands it has increased. Grouse are letting for £200-plus per brace this season (plus VAT of course), and it does not take a financial genius to work out just how many grouse you need to pay for your keeper at those rates.
That said, there are still far fewer moors than at the end of World War
II, and that trend would seem set to continue north of the border at any rate, given the financial incentives to do anything with moorland except shoot over it.
So the prospects, if you wish to get started as an underkeeper, would seem to be more limited in the lowlands than in the past, but, if you don’t object to getting wet now and again and walking your share of a moor, then the uplands would appear to be the place to head for.
“In the lowlands staffing has declined, while in the uplands it has increased”