Back on the rails

The coot shoot at Hickling Broad was once a big part of Norfolk’s sporting scene, says Simon Reinhold

- Simon Reinhold

There has been an inn on the edge of Hickling Broad in Norfolk since the mid-1700s. For hundreds of years the place just quietly ticked on, with pints poured and people put up for the night, until in an incident at the Pleasure Boat Inn made the papers. HRH the Duke of Edinburgh was a guest of Lord Cadbury for the annual coot shoot but their usual overnight accommodation, Whiteslea Lodge, was in danger of flooding, causing them to seek a bed elsewhere before their early start.

A young Prince Charles, accompanying his father, had managed to get on the wrong side of the Pleasure Boat Inn’s landlady for having a pillow fight in a bedroom and the press picked up the story. The regular drinkers were reported to have carried on as normal that evening, and it is perhaps no surprise that the redoubtable Mrs Amis was on a short fuse, having to contend with both her regulars and her last-minute notable guests. Certainly the picture taken the next morning of the pre-shoot briefing shows a young prince perhaps still feeling the effect of a proper telling off.

Hickling Broad, a large but shallow expanse of water, was first leased for shooting in 1908 by the Honourable Edwin Montagu, who had been shown its potential as a waterfowl shoot by Jim Vincent, the son of a local gamekeeper. When he returned with Lord Lucas, a friend and government minister, they both agreed that as a project it was worth pursuing. Returning again with the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, the three secured the impressively knowledgeable Jim as their headkeeper.

Montagu’s harriers