Much is made of Lord Ripon’s game books, and his meticulous documentation of birds and animals killed over more than half a century. The accepted total is 557,688 all told, from rhinoceros to snipe. The books were sold at Sotheby’s to an anonymous bidder in Switzerland in 1986, but Godfrey was given access to them—it’s difficult to see how he could have written his book otherwise—but the numbers do not tell the whole story. Far from it.
In The Shooting Party, Isabel Colegate’s novel that was later made into a very good movie, Sir Randolph Nettleby explains writing in his game book to his tiny grand-daughter: “It allows one to express one’s thoughts without burdening others with them.” In his game books, Lord Ripon made sketches of birds, animals, and even his future wife, Gladys. These, together with notes and terse comments in the margins, show him to have been both an accomplished artist and a very thoughtful man.
Godfrey cites two other books, The Big Shots (Jonathan Ruffer, 1997) and The Great Shoots (Brian Martin, 1987) as the two best on the subject to be published in the 20th century, and from a purely factual standpoint, I think he’s right. To really understand the mentality, however, I would add two novels: Colegate’s The Shooting Party (1980) and The Twelfth and After (J.K. Stanford, 1944).
In The Shooting Party, the character of Gilbert Hartlip is generally considered to be Lord Ripon, and his wife, Aline, to be Gladys. If so, they are both unflattering and, largely, inaccurate, but to the best of my knowledge Colegate herself never made the claim. Rather, I think, they were representative of certain types within their class. Sir Randolph Nettleby, on the other hand, is an admirable portrait of the landed shooting man, pre-1914.
Most articles about Ripon ignore non-shooting topics, such as his love for, and fascination with, fine porcelain, or the fact that he and Gladys together were responsible for the rescue of what was the moribund Royal Italian Opera and turning it into the Royal Opera (Covent Garden) that is world renowned to this day.
Unfortunately, Olly was published in England as a limited edition of 1,500, in 2012, and if a trade edition has ever appeared, I can find no record of it. Still, a few are available and, if you are interested in that era and one of its greatest characters, it’s a hundred bucks well spent.
Gray’s shooting editor aspires to—but rarely reaches—Ripon’s level of gentlemanly conduct, far less his prowess with a shotgun. He does, however, share Lady Ripon’s love of Richard Wagner.
