Not for one but for all

In the first part of our series on fowling in the footsteps of the greats, Patrick Galbraith visits Hull — the birthplace of the modern sport

- Patrick Galbraith

You might not have heard of him but if you’re a member of BASC — and by my reckoning you ought to be — you owe a great deal to a railway engineer called Stanley Duncan.

In 1907 Old Man Duncan, as he came to be known, moved to Hull from Newcastle to work for LNER. It is said that one autumn day, while holed up in a black hut on the northern bank of the Humber, Duncan realised he was under attack.

It is tempting to look back at the past as a foreign country, where fox hunting and wildfowling were seen as integral and valued parts of British life, but in reality it wasn’t so.

Duncan feared for recreational wildfowling on two counts. He noted there was a growing number of extremists set on a wild bird shooting ban and he worried that drainage, in an effort to bolster the nation’s agricultural output, was ruining vital fowling habitat.

In 1908, after canvassing opinions from other sportsmen including that legendary gentleman of the marsh, Sir Ralph Payne-Gellway, Duncan called a meeting at the hut. Upon agreeing that steps needed to be taken to safeguard the sport, the Wildfowlers’ Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (WAGBI) was born.

The long-anticipated Protection of Birds Act came in 1954. Thanks to WAGBI’s intervention, it was a much more reasonable piece of legislation than many had feared.

Twenty-seven years after Duncan’s death, the world was changing fast and the likes of pheasant and partridge shooting were also firmly in the line of anti-field sports fire. Accordingly, at the 1981 AGM, it was decided that the organization should be rebranded as the British Association for Shooting and Conservation — BASC — to spearhead the fight for our sport as a whole.