The Poacher

For about ten years, between the ages of nine and nineteen, my father was a poacher. He was an honest man who did dishonest things. He had a dog, a lurcher, Our Mick, a cross between a Whippet and a Lakeland Terrier and he had a poacher’s coat with a deep and hidden pocket. He was often absent from school and failed to turn up at Boys Brigade band practices. He often stayed out all night, sleeping in barns or hedges.  

He learned to move quickly and quietly and how to be still.  Coming home he would stand for an hour watching the house, invisible against the tree line, like a man on the run, or a spy whose cover is blown. He waited to see if anyone was waiting for him. Going out poaching was going out thieving, it meant stepping out of society and it was advisable to wait and watch before stepping back in. He was not afraid of the police. Many of them were poachers themselves and they would only come for him if forced to. If, for example, some landowner pressed them to catch whoever it was helping themselves to the birds, animals and fish on his estate. The gamekeepers, on the other hand, would need no prompting to seek him out and my father knew it. If they found him they would catch him by the heel, thrash him and threaten worse, then take Our Mick away and put him to bed with a spade. 

His mother, who  colluded in his poaching and who was grateful for the food, nevertheless beat him with a stick. She needed to beat someone. She had four children to care for and worry about and the other three were too young to beat so she beat my father for all of them.

At home he hung the paunched* rabbits and hares with the Pigeons and the Pheasants in his mother’s coal shed. On Saturdays he took his handcart ~ which he had purchased with money provided by the Bishop of Carlisle ~ and spent the early morning carrying loads of fresh vegetables from the market gardens north of Carlisle to the stall holders in the Covered Market. It was two miles there and two miles back. He would start at four in the morning and do two or three return trips depending on the time of year. It was a mighty struggle to stop the loaded cart running away down Stanwix Bank to the bridge over the River Eden. Then it was a mighty pull from the river, up Scotch Street to the market hall that stood high on the bluff above the river, shoulder to shoulder with the Castle and the Cathedral. 

After he had delivered the carrots and potatoes, the turnips and the leaks, the cabbages, sprouts and beetroot,  he sold the birds, and the rabbits and the hares he had taken in the week ~ all fair game ~ to one of the butchers with a stall in the covered market. His reward was, in one hand a few pennies and in the other a bloody parcel of bones and scraps, wrapped in a page of the Cumberland News, for Our Mick to feast on. 

Owning a poacher’s dog, a longdog or a lurcher, was a clear and reckless signal of your intention to commit a crime. With such a dog by your side the charge, if a charge were ever laid, would be the equivalent of “going equipped”. The dog was a tool as useful in the committing of a crime as a crowbar or a set of skeleton keys or a hand of brass knuckles. To the constables and magistrates “going equipped” to commit an offence, constituted an offence in itself.

Here and now, in the 21st Century, poachers are people who kill Rhinos for their horns, in the great savannas south of the Sahara or Tigers for their bones in the jungles of South East Asia. But in England and elsewhere for more than a thousand years poachers were folk-heroes celebrated in song and story. Robin Hood and his Merry Men were poachers. As was Geordie, who according to legend was hanged in a golden chain. Gold because of his noble lineage, but hanged all the same because he

Stole sixteen of the king's royal deer, 
And sold them in Bohenny.

The Roud Folk Song Index, which traces Geordie back to the 16th century, lists more than a hundred different versions of the song, forty from England, twenty-seven from Scotland, two from Ireland, fifty-two from the United States of America and eight from Canada.

The Lincolnshire Poacher, perhaps the most famous of them all, celebrated in a song first published in 1775 seems to have started poaching as a result of the grinding boredom, poverty and lack of autonomy that ~ we understand from other sources ~ characterised a seven year apprenticeship. He starts his tale with

When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire
Full well I served my master for nigh on seven years
Till I took up to poaching as you shall quickly hear
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shining night in the season of the year.

and finishes with 

Bad luck to every magistrate that lives in Lincolnshire
Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare
Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shining night in the season of the year.

Poaching provided relief from a life of servitude, drudgery and exploitation. It brought greater rewards than simply providing food or, from time to time, a tiny amount of cash. Poaching provided a rare opportunity for a working man to choose his own path. Not every night was a shining night, however, and the pleasures of being out and about in the countryside were tempered by long hours of being freezing cold and soaking wet. 

There was nothing romantic or heroic about my father’s poaching. Poaching was work, hard work, and it was brutal. To be a poacher you needed to be both quick and “fly” and if you weren’t a hard man when you started poaching you either became one or you gave up the life. Poaching was a criminal act. Poachers like my father killed animals and birds to eat and to escape the oppression of the life they were born into

I don’t believe that my father was born to be a hard man. He was a kind man who rarely allowed his kindness to show. A proud and loving father who never told his children that he loved them or that he was proud of them. A man much loved by other men, the men who worked for him and with him and above all by the men who managed him. His handlers. The captains of industry and the guardians of the realm, the “gentlemen” poachers who used him, who saw clearly how useful an ungentlemanly poacher like him might be.

For nearly ninety years my father lived the life he lived because he needed to. Opportunities come to many men and most take advantage of their opportunities if they can. But a poacher doesn’t wait for a rabbit or a pheasant to cross his path. He moves quietly and  purposefully to position himself where all game is fair game and where he has a greater than fair chance of success

My father hoped that I would have a different life to his, a better life than his, but helping me to a better life was not his purpose in living. He shaped his life to stay alive and that meant staying one step ahead of the gamekeeper. He looked at me and my life with barely concealed astonishment. On two occasions he was called upon to help me stay ahead of the gamekeeper. Even now I can hear his quiet laughter as he opened a door and let me in.

My father’s life as a poacher lasted less than a decade but the skills and character he developed in those years; secrecy, a hard hearted pragmatism, watchfulness, circumspection, keeping his cards close to his chest, prepared him for what was to come. His secret life. His double life. Far from home.

At the end of his life the poacher, the watcher in the tree-line, the Boy on the Train, was silent and withdrawn. His grandchildren found little love in him and so assumed there was little in him to love. They were wrong, there was much to love in him and a lifetime’s accumulated love that he never found a way to let out. 

* The first known use of the word paunch meaning to clean the guts from a dead animal is in Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe a verse satire lambasting the Catholic Church and particularly Cardinal Wolsey. It was written by William Roy and Jerome Barlow published in 1528 and suppressed by Royal Proclamation in 1529 by King Henry VIII who soon enough would start his own campaign against Wolsey and the Church of Rome.

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