A vital role — for life
I vividly remember having a conversation with a retired gamekeeper in the early 1980s, when I was on a Government-sponsored Youth Training Scheme, about gamekeeping and its future. He was pretty adamant that things had changed for the worse, that there was little or no future in gamekeeping, and I would have been better choosing a different career.
By contrast, 12 months later when I was offered and accepted my first full-time position as an underkeeper in west Wales, my then headkeeper was pretty upbeat. While he missed the old ways and the old days, he understood change and accepted it. Furthermore, he had been born within sight of the Monmouthshire Hunt kennels and had always wanted to go into hunt service, but his father forbade him as he said there was no future in it.
Inevitable
His point, which is as true today
