A £10 gun and a lifelong love
Colonel Peter Hawker was born in 1786 and first visited Keyhaven in 1814. The following Tanuary, he first ventured eastwards from there with a gun, on to the mudflats that stretch for seven miles along the northwest Solent shore, past Lymington to Pylewell. The flights of wildfowl he saw were “prodigious” and, as a result, Keyhaven became his fowling base until his death in 1853.
“As a boy, I caught bass from the sluice only 100 metres from Hawker’s cottage”
My early life followed in Hawker’s footsteps, quite unknowingly. My primary school in Lymington was opposite the former premises of Alfred Clayton, Hawker’s favourite local gunsmith. Clayton built Hawker’s final punt-gun, which won the Prize Medal in the Great Exhibition of 1851. As a boy, I
