Bisley is an institution. Brightly coloured colonial villas and pavilions are scattered about the site separated by lines of gently rotting caravans, mature trees and elderly barrack buildings. Together you get the impression of a refugee camp populated by people with what elsewhere would be deemed to be an unhealthy interest in firearms. But the similarity with parts of Merseyside ends there.
The club members are ‘passionate’ (as our Prime Minister likes to say) about their shooting and spend accordingly. This is an event for the specialist and not the faint-hearted:
Customer: I’m looking for an alum-tanned strap for a 1911 Belgian 4 bore elephant gun.
Trader (scratching): What?
Customer: It has to be the one with the pincer fittings not the buckle fittings at the end.
Trader (looks at label on open bottle of cider and then back to customer): You what?
Customer: I suppose I could accept a non alum tanned leather version if you have one.
Trader: Well why didn’t you say? That’ll be twenty-five of your English pounds please.
In the morning, the dining room serves the type of fried breakfast that made Britain great. Those wishing to see their sixth decade though can eat at some of the other clubhouses. I ate at the Sergeant’s Mess on the second evening and very good it was too. Although Hugh Massey Birch’s enthusiasm for the ‘lovely bit of cauliflower’ on his plate and his refusal to talk about anything else was worrying. In the evening, Dave’s bar acts as a meeting place for shooters and traders alike.
This year, I was set-up in record time and went to see how the other stall-holders were getting on. Sean from Kempsdale Outdoor offered me a rum and it seemed churlish not accept. Three glasses later and a suggestion from a man called Bob – who’s always hanging around behind the tents – that we might like to try some rum he’d bought in Fiji seemed a really good idea. After half a bottle of this, it seemed only natural to go and share the happiness with the German shooting team who were staying in one of clubhouses.
Full of 85% proof Fijian rum confidence, I set off having picked up a gallon of Grays cider that I was determined to share with our German visitors. My hat was the first victim. As I knelt down to find it, my hand met with something evil-smelling and slimy – just like Lord Faulkner. Then my eye came painfully into contact with a twig. Recoiling, my track suit bottoms became stuck on a branch. My efforts to free them resulted in a large tear down the right leg revealing too much thigh to be socially acceptable. My arrival on the footpath just outside the HAC clubhouse elicited a loud scream from a woman dressed in evening wear having a quiet fag.
Orientated at last, I staggered the remaining 100 yards to The Spot where I emerged into the light like some long-forgotten explorer with soiled hand outstretched, severely contused and swollen left eye a huge and unsightly hole in my trousers, and a missing shoe.
With surprise that God reserves exclusively for drunks, I looked at my shoeless foot with the big toe protruding through the sock. With surprise that usually greets a nasty dose of the clap, the Germans gawped at this apparition before them and gathered into a tight-knit defensive formation in the corner of the clubhouse awning.
I now admit that it would have been better to have withdrawn at this point but I was, apparently, most insistent that they should taste some real Devon cider. Though the tussle with the undergrowth had given the cider a good churning so that when poured it resembled frothy horse urine.
Our guests drank the cider with the same distaste usually reserved for historical discussions of the years 1933-1945. They drank it quickly, perhaps in the hope that once the cider was finished, I would leave. The abrupt shock of falling over backwards whilst seated indicated to even my anaesthetised senses that the time had come to depart.
Bisley organiser, Sean, has the right approach. Tell traders where they are and leave them to it. Traders see each other every weekend of the season and, despite appearances, rarely fall out.
I wish the same could be said for the county shows. Bath & West (which is Sioux for ‘two days business stretched like a buffalo’s foreskin over four days’) appears to be entering the trading dark ages. Not many traders I met were wowed by their takings this year. Several businesses were notable by their absence. Even Country Covers were elsewhere although a rumour was going around that owner and camo-fetishist, Hugh Massey Birch was away on a cauliflower appreciation course in Sweden.
The trade was dismal and we shut up early on the first day and went to the member’s reception. Takings at the gate were up (at around £750,000 a day). But at £20 per ticket, no wonder visitors had little to spend once through the turnstile.
No mention was made of the thousands of pounds paid months in advance by traders which probably funds the set-up of the show, or the fact that numbers would take a nose-dive if there were no trade stands. Nor was any mention made of the total turnover of the Bath & West, the remuneration of its officers or how much was given in charity for the year. These would make interesting reading.
Of course, there were the usual annoyances. I had a visit from the Health & Safety officer who wanted to clarify whether or not I was sleeping on my stand at night. Apparently, the local fire service has just been made aware of the time-honoured habit of sleeping ‘next to the stock’ and was worried about ‘the fire risk’. I am pleased to report that in the history of our great nation, there is not a single report of traders preternaturally and spontaneously combusting.
As we spoke, the Royal Signals Motorbike display team were doing their ‘Ring of Fire’. Unlike Johnny Cash, the local fire service don’t seem that bothered about traders’ tents and stock falling into ‘that burning ring of fire’. But preternatural spontaneous combustion? I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since for worrying.
