Turn up for the books

Gamebooks are a fascinating insight into an estate’s shooting past or a Gun’s sporting life. Richard Negus delves into the pages of history

- Richard Negus

These days I tend to avoid National Trust properties. I dislike the obsession with romanticising life in servitude while moralising over those who dwelt upstairs. Add to this a need to apply for a mortgage to buy a cup of tea and a slice of Victoria sponge in the cafeteria and a day out at a stately pile becomes a penance rather than a pleasure.

I did, however, visit Ickworth House a few years ago, with my mother-in-law. Ickworth, near Bury St Edmunds, is famed for its Italianate architecture and the racy history of the Hervey family who once owned it.

I left the rest of our group to peer into the heavily brocaded bedrooms to make my way downstairs, a place where I felt markedly more at home. In the catacomb-like servant’s quarters, near the ‘finishing kitchen’, a room had been set up, purporting to be the gamekeeper’s office.

A few copies of Shooting Times, dated 1932, were artfully stacked. A pair of waxed, scratched field boots wedged in ill-fitting trees stood on the flagged floor. A weighty tweed shooting jacket and coffee-coloured bowler hat hung on a coat stand. In one corner, beneath a faded Alken etching, squatted a well-worn leather-covered desk.

Alongside the inkwell, roller calendar and pheasant-shaped paperweight lay the estate’s gamebook. In an instant, the eye-watering price of tea and cake was forgiven and forgotten thanks to the privilege of turning the pages of this piece of sporting reportage and to glimpse bona fide rural history.