Come Dawn, Come Dusk: Fifty Years a Gamekeeper - Hardcover

Mursell, Norman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0047990147 ISBN 13: 9780047990144

Publisher: Allen & Unwin, 1981

Synopsis

The most important work that Mr. Mursell was involved with as a gamekeeper at Eaton Hall: the painstaking and complicated task of breeding and raising pheasants -months and months of labour repeated year after year - all for the wages of a pound a month, and all simply for the sake of a vast slaughter on three or four shooting days every November. Viewed from a certain angle, there is certainly something decadent about this orgy of shooting, during which an average of a thousand birds were shot out of the sky in a few hours. Here is Mr. Mursell's description of the climax of a typical ''stand'': ''The pheasants were falling like autumn leaves, and to me it was a never-to-be forgotten occasion. I stood and watched Fred'' loading and ''changing guns with the duke with incredible speed, and never was his grace waiting for a gun, or a target for that matter. The shooting went on for quite half an hour, one continual bang, bang, bang, building up at times almost to deafening point. In the rare moments of comparative silence the tap, tap, tap of the beaters' sticks could be heard in the distance, and sometimes a muffled voice. The red and white of the beaters' garb eventually appeared through the bushes and the stand came to an end.'' creatures surrounding Eaton Hall. But there is more to the romanticism of ''Come Dawn, Come Dusk'' than that. Mr. Mursell's world of poachers and foxes and elm trees and badgers is almost mythical in its simplicity and timelessness. It may be passing away: ''Oh dear,'' he exclaims at one point, ''have the modern methods been an improvement?'' But his world lives on in our imagination. His memoirs help to keep that world fresh. To be honest, I envy him a little for having actually inhabited it.

About this title

Synopsis:

A manual by a man who spent 50 years as gamekeeper on the Duke of Westminster's Eaton Estate. This tells of how he reared birds, dealt with vermin and of his encounters with poachers and working with dogs.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Publication date: 1981
• ISBN 10: 0047990147
• ISBN 13: 9780047990144
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168