A shooting party in every sense
No matter how hot a day the shoot is having, there inevitably comes a drive – or even just a peg – where the birds are that little bit random. Lord and Lady Fairhaven’s Kirtling shoot just outside Newmarket had an excellent day last October, when The Field visited. Even so, when Aldred Drummond asked his host, the Hon Henry Broughton, where he should stand on the final drive, he was told: “Stand wherever you like, it won’t make any difference” – a clear indication that Drummond would not be in the money on that occasion. Having shot with stylish efficiency on previous, busier drives, Drummond took the dryish peg in the same good humour that characterised the whole day.
Broughton’s friends had joined him at his parents’ Kirtling Tower to shoot partridges as the culmination of a rolling 40th birthday party that had started earlier in the week in London and appeared not quite to have stopped since. But everybody managed to quieten down sufficiently as we tiptoed onto the
