Shooting Times & Country Magazine 2nd November 2016 Back Issue

THE NEXT GENERATION
Crack your flags on the right, boys, push on twenty yards, stand still, flags up on the left.” Familiar words to the ears of beaters on shoots throughout the land, but it is not often they are uttered by a gamekeeper who is only eighteen years old. Hartpury College in Gloucestershire runs courses in gamekeeping and associated subject matter, but also has its own shoot around the campus. Former student Cormac Thompson is now gamekeeper on the shoot, having recently won the NGO’s Frank Jenkins Memorial Trophy for most promising student keeper (News, 28 September). The shoot has fourteen let days and on the day Shooting Times visited, the Guns were all ex-students, the shoot becoming a way of keeping in touch after they have left the college.