Colonel Hawker's Shooting Diaries - Edited with an Introduction

For half a century Colonel Peter Hawker set down every day's sport - birds, weather, tides, and the punt gun on the Solent. Eric Parker selects the best of it here.

Hawker (1786-1853) was a cavalry officer invalided out of the Peninsular War by a thigh wound at Talavera, and afterwards one of the most celebrated shots in England. From his house at Longparish in Hampshire and his cottage at Keyhaven on the Solent shore he pursued partridge, pheasant, snipe, and above all wildfowl, and he wrote it all down: bags, misses, frosts, thaws, and the long nights afloat behind his punt gun. Instructions to Young Sportsmen made him famous in 1814; the diaries, kept from 1802 until weeks before his death, show the man behind the manual.

Colonel Hawker's Shooting Diaries was edited by Eric Parker (1870-1955), then editor of The Field and among the finest writers on English country sport of his day. Parker reduces something over a quarter of a million words to a readable narrative and adds an introduction placing Hawker among the great sporting diarists. What survives is not only a record of shooting but a picture of Georgian and early Victorian England seen from a Hampshire parish, and of a restless man who pursued music, invention, and his own health with the same appetite he brought to a winter morning on the water.

This edition features:

• The 1931 selection edited by Eric Parker, drawn from more than a quarter of a million words of diary
• Fifty years of English game shooting and wildfowling, recorded day by day between 1802 and 1853
• Punt-gunning on the Solent, described by the sportsman who did more than anyone to popularise it
• A full introduction placing Hawker in the tradition of English sporting and country writing