FIFTY YEARS ON - SHOOTING AT BISLEY

Artists Rifles Clubhouse at Bisley

In his novel ‘Any Human Heart’  William Boyd has his his protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, reflect on playing golf and getting a hole in one.  One day Logan, a lifelong amateur golfer,  is on a course in Nigeria, playing just for fun with a work colleague when he wallops the ball hard on a par three hole and then watches as the ball runs unerringly into the hole.  As Logan acknowledges, his shot could not have been played better, even by the most accomplished golfer in the world and he concludes that in no other sport could a rank amateur perform, if only on a single occasion, as well as someone who was at the top of their game. Well, there is another sport and that sport is rifle shooting.

    Last Sunday I went to the National Shooting Ground at Bisley for a reunion of some of the members of my school’s old shooting team.  I hadn’t shot a rifle for more than 50 years and so the invitation to have lunch and then a shoot in the afternoon was too good to miss.  I had never been a great shot: I was always too erratic; good on my good days but indifferent at other times.  I had a good day one summer afternoon on Otmoor where I became the Under 16 Oxfordshire full-bore champion and I shot at Bisley for my school on several occasions, though to no great effect.  After school I gave the sport up and since then I haven’t shot a rifle in 50 years.

    So it was with trepidation that I approached the occasion.  First there was the nervousness, exactly like entering a new school, of finding Bisley and then the right clubhouse within the camp and then meeting new and strange faces, but I needn’t have worried.  Ducks to water, even.

     The lunch was at the aptly named Artists Rifles clubhouse - originally deriving from the Artists Rifles regiment which must have been great fun to be in, composed as it was of writers, poets and actors, composers, painters and musicians of every kind.   Yet they were a serious bunch and won 8 Victoria crosses in the First World War.  Noel Coward was a member of the regiment at one point.

    All the clubhouses at Bisley must have been built, I imagine, about 100 years ago and they are redolent of Edwardian England.  Indeed collectively they look like something you might find in India, perhaps, from the days of the Raj.  Inside the Artists Rifles Clubhouse the decoration was as eclectic as you might expect, full of regimental memorabilia and recruiting posters from the first world war.  The service and linen tablecloths also spoke of a bygone age. 

    Sixteen of us turned up and incredibly five of these were people I had shot with at school, so once we had recognised each other it was just like old times.  It is strange how people change.  Appearances change, though the eyes are a constant as are people’s mannerisms, their ways of smiling, moving, walking and their tone of voice.  What was also slightly comforting to me was that they were all deaf or, like me, heading in that direction: a consequence of the lack of hearing protection in our younger days and the regular blast of the .303 service rifle in your ear from a couple of feet away.  Nowadays hearing protection is mandatory: you can see why.

    So after a good lunch and a chance to catch-up, it was on to Bisley’s great Century Range - so called because there used to be 100 targets there.  Now there are 108, colour coded alternately red and yellow.  The assets are being sweated.

    Fifty years ago we used army service rifles - No 4’s from the second world war - and ammunition left over from that conflict.  I remember someone saying that there was enough .303 ammunition to last 50 years.  Well, the 50 years are up and today shooters use mainly modern  0.762 millimetre rounds;  it is more accurate they tell me.  The rifles have changed too.  Gone are the heavy service rifles; the shooting today is with modern target rifles which are lighter.  The targets have changed, too: they are smaller now to match the greater accuracy of the rifles.  Even the bull has been changed and is now divided into an inner and an outer bull - on the same principle as the A* at A Level.  The inner bull (called the ‘V’ bull) is now the equivalent of golf’s hole in one.

    Certain things, however, do not change and induce nostalgia.  The crack of the report that seems to carry its own momentary echo, the dull wetness of the grass of the firing point, the flags that indicate the wind strength and direction, for a bullet is carried by the wind like a bird and you have to allow for this.  Above all the faint scent of burnt cordite drifting in the air.

    Shooting at 500 yards and using a borrowed rifle too long for me in the stock I nevertheless shot a 27 (out of 35) including one of those ‘could not be bettered’ ‘V’ bulls:  a score which would have let down my shooting team in the old days but which nonetheless would not have been unknown.  Incredible, I thought.  50 years on and so little  changed.