How the sport of trap shooting really took off

Diggory Hadoke charts the history of trapshooting from the days of top hats to the era of sophisticated machines

- Diggory Hadoke

Clay traps today are super-powerful, complex, remotely controlled and capable of throwing clays on many different flight patterns to simulate a variety of birds.

Their journey has been long and storied, from the earliest days of competitive shooting at captive birds placed under old top hats to modern Olympic disciplines, requiring faultless repetition. The invention and ingenuity of each age has always shaped the machinery.

In the beginning, there was live pigeon trap shooting. Competitive as human beings are, boasts of who was the best shot demanded proof and the field was too random. It required a scenario in which multiple, repeated flying objects (captured birds) could be shot and a venue (usually behind a pub) where spectators could observe and bet on the outcome.

Given that the original clays were live birds, the original traps were containers from which the bird could be released. There was no need to throw it as, once airborne, it provided flight by its own means.

The first traps were old top hats. The bird would be placed under the top hat, in a small scrape in the ground. A string was attached to the top hat and on the command ‘pull’, the trapper pulled the string and the hat rolled over, releasing the bird. The first pigeon shooting club was unsurprisingly called The Old Hats, founded in the early 19th century and meeting around north London.

Traps became gradually more sophisticated. By 1793, they had morphed into a shallow box with a sliding lid. Now, ‘pull’ instructed the trapper to pull a string and the lid would slide off the box, freeing the bird, which by this time was a blue rock pigeon in genteel circles, while the riff-raffstill shot at starlings and sparrows, which were cheaper.