A Sporting Century by Graham Downing

The History of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation

When the Wildfowlers Association of Great Britain and Ireland was formed in the back streets of Hull in 1908 by Stanley Duncan, none of those present could have imagined that their small organisation would go on to become an internationally respected shooting organisation with 124,000 members, offices in every part of the UK, a major national headquarters and dozens of full time staff.

But the road along which the infant WAGBI travelled in order to become today's British Association for Shooting and Conservation was a hard and rocky one. During the difficult inter-war years the small association nearly expired, and had it not been for a group of dedicated enthusiasts who revived it in the late 1940s, its life would have been snuffed out. But WAGBI survived and went from strength to strength. This book is the story of how it did so, from those early days of Stanley Duncan and his black hut, through the battle over the 1954 Protection of Birds Act - dubbed 'the Wildfowler's Charter' as a result of WAGBI's remarkable success - then on through the long and illustrious stewardship of John Anderton.

It is a tale of tough political fights, of triumphs and more than a few disasters, but most of all it is about the people and the clubs which made BASC what it is today. The author has recorded the memories of some of WAGBI's surviving stalwarts and gained unrivalled access to the surviving records and minute books to tell a no-holds-barred story about the background to Britain's premier shooting association.