A disappointing DAY
Shooting last November in appalling weather with an old friend, Charlie Bingham, on his Wiltshire farm, he decided after a couple of drives to return to the warmth of his house mid-morning in the hope conditions would improve. Far from improving, the weather worsened, the rain turned to sleet and the shoot was abandoned.
We retired to the house for an early lunch when Charlie told me the following story. A couple of seasons past he had been on a shoot in Sussex where his host had called a halt after the third drive, before lunch, despite it being a clear, crisp January day with hardly a cloud in the sky.
“Why did he stop the shoot?” I asked.
“Let me tell you,” Charlie said. “Bishops Handley, the local estate agents, had taken a day at Lewescote Hall, an estate near Lewes and I’d been invited by Jeffrey Handley, the chairman, to join them.
“The estate had been purchased several years previously by Guthrie White, the Canadian oilman, boss of Canadian Sabre, a keen Shot. It already had an established shoot. White kept all the days for himself, except
