Bag a McNab
Dominic Midgely
Porsche and Aston Martin haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the recent boom in City bonuses. There’s a new generation of customers at Holland and Holland, Barbour and Land Rover stockbrokers, traders and lawyers who are swapping their pinstripes for plus-fours of a weekend, and heading to the country for a spot of shooting. Hunting with foxes may be in abeyance but when the roe deer stalking season begins on the first of next month, there will be more takers than ever, and all the big banks have started organising shooting days at venues like Bisley and the Royal Berkshire Shooting Ground.
The Holy Grail for this new breed of young, competitive hunters is something called the ‘McNab’. Bagging a McNab involves shooting a deer and a brace of grouse and catching a salmon on the same estate in a 24-hour period, though any would-be McNabbers will need to wait until August for the various hunting seasons to coincide.
The term McNab is derived from John Buchan’s 1925 novel John Macnab, which revolves around the efforts of three bored London clubmen to spice up their lives by going poaching on three Scottish estates. After informing the landowners of their intention to hunt game on their estates under the pseudonym John Macnab, they go ahead with their jaunts, with dramatic results. For some of the more inexperienced guests at Donald Trump’s sporting estate at Menie in Aberdeenshire amused locals invented the Menie McNab, which allegedly involves shooting a cormorant a protected species — a Highland cow and a beater! And the highlight of the year for many City hunters is the McNab Challenge, organised by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), which takes place on 25 August.
One man who’ll definitely be there is Mike Pullen, head of EU and competition law at the City law firm DLA Piper. ‘Since I started shooting last April, I’ve been out 15 times, for one, two or three days at a time,’ he says. ‘We go out to the West Country a lot, near Glastonbury, and also to West Suffolk.’ Not that Pullen restricts himself to mainland Britain. He has been boar-hunting in France and shoots ‘plains game’ in South Africa, which includes breeds such as antelope, onyx and zebra. All of which, he points out, are shot for the pot. But as Pullen found out, the tools of the trade didn’t come cheap. His Browning shotgun set him back about £1,000, a Blazer hunting rifle with telescopic sights took the total to £3,000, and when he invested in ‘a good pair of Leica binoculars’ another £1,800 was added to the bill.
Pullen is keen to stress the conservation aspects of his sport and the fact that with no wolves around to keep down the deer population, predatory City boys make one of the better alternatives. ‘The main reason deer die is because their teeth wear away and they can’t eat,’ he says. ‘The only alternative to stalking is industrial killing methods such as gassing.’ But while he is a keen deer-stalker, Pullen is opposed to the concept of what is known as ‘canned game’ — animals bred for shooting. His enthusiasm for his new sport even extends to butchery, and he has learned to ‘grallock’ a dead deer on the hill, i.e., remove its insides — a vital skill if the weather is warm and the corpse is not to go off.
Nor does his hobby affect the renewal of the various species, as the dates of the hunting seasons are carefully calibrated so as not to interfere with breeding programmes. The grouse shooting starts on the Glorious Twelfth (12 August) and ends in December, the roe deer season starts on 1 April and continues well into October, but remember not to jump the buck: the hunting season for the does begins at the end of the buck-shooting season in October and continues into the New Year.
Hand in hand with this City-led hunting boom has come a revival in the fortunes of the Highland estates. Once dismissed as draughty castles surrounded by terrible weather, they are increasingly becoming goldmines as free-spending City types sign up for Highland shooting sprees.
There are obvious parallels for today’s City gents between their day jobs and this newly popular leisure pursuit. Much of the financial world’s vocabulary is borrowed from the hunting field — words and phrases such as stalking, setting your sights, going in for the kill, and the like. Hunting seems to suit the City slickers’ go-getting, if not aggressive, approach to life. And for the really intrepid hunter, who reckons firing off a shot from some distant vantage point is a little too tame, a new challenge is available: boar-hunting with knives. Yes, some people are mad enough to believe that the ultimate thrill involves jumping on the back of a retreating boar and stabbing it to death.
Dominic Midgley is associate editor (features) of thelondonpaper.
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