Shooting Times and Sporting Gun

[Blackpowder]

A surprising change in ownership for Shooting Times and Sporting Gun both titles seemingly purchased by Edinburgh based Fieldsports Press.   Recently this firm also bought Trout and Salmon considered by many game fishermen to be the leading magazine in fly fishing .

 

Blackpowder

[Stonepark]

Simon Barr and Selena Barr....

[wisdom]

It would be a real bonus if they could get supermarkets to stock them now most of the newsagents have gone.

I know subscriptions are popular but I just like to pick up a copy now and again.

[ditchman]

48 minutes ago, Stonepark said:

Simon Barr and Selena Barr....

any relation to the family who own Iron brew ?

[Stonepark]

1 hour ago, ditchman said:

any relation to the family who own Iron brew ?

No ...

 

https://thegamefair.org/husband-and-wife-team-have-a-handle-on-fieldsports-media/

[Fargo]

They have fieldsports journal which is a nice mag but every two months and £12.95

[TIGHTCHOKE]

Like all of the printed media about Fieldsports, they can only rehash all the same stuff with different pictures.

 

I used to read Sporting Gun years ago and would bump in to Robin regularly, but you can only rewrite the articles so many times.

[London Best]

22 minutes ago, TIGHTCHOKE said:

Like all of the printed media about Fieldsports, they can only rehash all the same stuff with different pictures.

Exactly!

Great for beginners who have never seen it before and probably want to soak up as much information as possible, but the older hands tend to stop reading them after a while.

[Westley]

I wondered how I came to get an email from Sporting Gun, offering me the opportunity to purchase tickets for the Shooting Times Woodcock Club dinner ?

It is in London, tickets are £175 each ! With the cost of overnight stays, fuel or travel, no change from £1000  ?  Makes me wish I had missed that second Woodcock   !   😁

Mind you, I could get the chance to meet Vinnie Jones  🤔

[Bigbob]

Cant hurt a new brush sweeps clean and all that , i stopped getting the shooting mags as they are so repitive 

[wisdom]

26 minutes ago, Bigbob said:

Cant hurt a new brush sweeps clean and all that , i stopped getting the shooting mags as they are so repitive 

That is why I don't get them on subscription just pick one up now and again.

[Fargo]

3 hours ago, Westley said:

I wondered how I came to get an email from Sporting Gun, offering me the opportunity to purchase tickets for the Shooting Times Woodcock Club dinner ?

It is in London, tickets are £175 each ! With the cost of overnight stays, fuel or travel, no change from £1000  ?  Makes me wish I had missed that second Woodcock   !   😁

Mind you, I could get the chance to meet Vinnie Jones  🤔

£75 I think tickets are and isn’t so bad for entry to the Saville club and a meal.

 

Just now, Fargo said:

£75 I think tickets are and isn’t so bad for entry to the Saville club and a meal.

 

 

[JDog]

Good post Blackpowder.

I used to write occasional articles for the Shooting Gazette. 

My topics were game and pigeon shooting. I found it difficult not to be repetitive and when I was asked to contribute monthly I declined.

[Minky]

3 hours ago, TIGHTCHOKE said:

Like all of the printed media about Fieldsports, they can only rehash all the same stuff with different pictures.

 

I used to read Sporting Gun years ago and would bump in to Robin regularly, but you can only rewrite the articles so many times.

The shooting mags mirrored Jack Hargreaves's out of town.  Jack used to go pigeon decoying and rabbit shooting but suddenly that wasn't acceptable.  The program decended to tying flys or making a wicker basket or out in the garden.  Simarly the mags used to cover stuff like making a duck pond blasting out a hole pond using sacks of nitrogen fertiliser until the use of fertiliser bombs by the ira and health & safety stopped all that sort of thing.  The mags went into fairy story mode about having a lovely day watching the sun go down and  friends.   The prices went through the roof and they were adverts for upper market tat with the stereotype  range rover with Barbours and hunter wellies brigade. It was just a one way ticket.  Eley cartridges weren't Eley anymore,  they were made in  France and its just gotten worse. And as for the beginner learning much from the mags, the odd articles that are written are generally rehashes of old articles which were fairy stories in the first plalce. The blind leading the blind. I haven't bought a shooting mag for years. A friend sometimes hands Me a pile and it's just a flp through. A minute or two and then either in the bin or left in random waiting rooms to spread the word. 

[Westley]

Sorry, misread the dinner ticket cost, but I will still be giving it a miss I'm afraid. 

1 hour ago, Minky said:

The shooting mags mirrored Jack Hargreaves's out of town.  Jack used to go pigeon decoying and rabbit shooting but suddenly that wasn't acceptable.  The program decended to tying flys or making a wicker basket or out in the garden.  Simarly the mags used to cover stuff like making a duck pond blasting out a hole pond using sacks of nitrogen fertiliser until the use of fertiliser bombs by the ira and health & safety stopped all that sort of thing.  The mags went into fairy story mode about having a lovely day watching the sun go down and  friends.   The prices went through the roof and they were adverts for upper market tat with the stereotype  range rover with Barbours and hunter wellies brigade. It was just a one way ticket.  Eley cartridges weren't Eley anymore,  they were made in  France and its just gotten worse. And as for the beginner learning much from the mags, the odd articles that are written are generally rehashes of old articles which were fairy stories in the first plalce. The blind leading the blind. I haven't bought a shooting mag for years. A friend sometimes hands Me a pile and it's just a flp through. A minute or two and then either in the bin or left in random waiting rooms to spread the word. 

I make a point of making sure I take a shooting magazine to leave in the Doctors waiting room, on the rare occasions I go there. They are 'anti gun' and refused to sign my Certificate renewal paperwork.   🙂

[TIGHTCHOKE]

6 hours ago, Westley said:

I make a point of making sure I take a shooting magazine to leave in the Doctors waiting room, on the rare occasions I go there. They are 'anti gun' and refused to sign my Certificate renewal paperwork.   🙂

No magazines in our surgery these days!

[Westley]

None at ours either, until I have been in  !  😄

[TIGHTCHOKE]

And they will be thrown away as the policy now is not to have magazines that many people touch. 

[Bigbob]

I got a warning i was going to be banned off a site for slagging the country mans weekly , i had been getting it since the 70s they changed the name and the format and i could hardly read it so stopped my subscription but every week they posted about it on a site and a few ripped into it LOL . We got a message to stop it from the mods but i see now its no a weekly mag its a fortnightly one the start of the end no got enough materail to fill it and half of its show results   

[marsh man]

8 hours ago, Minky said:

The shooting mags mirrored Jack Hargreaves's out of town.  Jack used to go pigeon decoying and rabbit shooting but suddenly that wasn't acceptable.  The program decended to tying flys or making a wicker basket or out in the garden.  Simarly the mags used to cover stuff like making a duck pond blasting out a hole pond using sacks of nitrogen fertiliser until the use of fertiliser bombs by the ira and health & safety stopped all that sort of thing.  The mags went into fairy story mode about having a lovely day watching the sun go down and  friends.   The prices went through the roof and they were adverts for upper market tat with the stereotype  range rover with Barbours and hunter wellies brigade. It was just a one way ticket.  Eley cartridges weren't Eley anymore,  they were made in  France and its just gotten worse. And as for the beginner learning much from the mags, the odd articles that are written are generally rehashes of old articles which were fairy stories in the first plalce. The blind leading the blind. I haven't bought a shooting mag for years. A friend sometimes hands Me a pile and it's just a flp through. A minute or two and then either in the bin or left in random waiting rooms to spread the word. 

I am exactly the same , I first started to buy the S Ts in 63 when I left school and had to work to be fed and watered , it was then 1s/6d and I looked forward to it every week , then when I got married and left home my mother carried on buying it weekly as I popped round every Friday night when I left off , this carried on till she passed away and I carried on buying the odd copy until I retired then believe it or not one of the guns in the shoot who I used to take duck shooting on the estates flight ponds bought me a years subcription as a leaving present , this was just over 15 years ago and I haven't bought one since , I flick through the pages in Tesco's and very rarely I spend more than a few minutes reading it , another thing I find is nearly every other week there is a special edition number like Deer stalking , Dog training or anything else they can think of , all for a higher price than the normal weekly edition may I add 

[Bigbob]

5 minutes ago, marsh man said:

I am exactly the same , I first started to buy the S Ts in 63 when I left school and had to work to be fed and watered , it was then 1s/6d and I looked forward to it every week , then when I got married and left home my mother carried on buying it weekly as I popped round every Friday night when I left off , this carried on till she passed away and I carried on buying the odd copy until I retired then believe it or not one of the guns in the shoot who I used to take duck shooting on the estates flight ponds bought me a years subcription as a leaving present , this was just over 15 years ago and I haven't bought one since , I flick through the pages in Tesco's and very rarely I spend more than a few minutes reading it , another thing I find is nearly every other week there is a special edition number like Deer stalking , Dog training or anything else they can think of , all for a higher price than the normal weekly edition may I add 

The corner shop used to get it  in for and i had to ask them to stop it when there was 5 or 6 copies laying on the table unread . it was mounting up to a fair bit every month with all the diffrent mags 

[Minky]

16 minutes ago, marsh man said:

I am exactly the same , I first started to buy the S Ts in 63 when I left school and had to work to be fed and watered , it was then 1s/6d and I looked forward to it every week , then when I got married and left home my mother carried on buying it weekly as I popped round every Friday night when I left off , this carried on till she passed away and I carried on buying the odd copy until I retired then believe it or not one of the guns in the shoot who I used to take duck shooting on the estates flight ponds bought me a years subcription as a leaving present , this was just over 15 years ago and I haven't bought one since , I flick through the pages in Tesco's and very rarely I spend more than a few minutes reading it , another thing I find is nearly every other week there is a special edition number like Deer stalking , Dog training or anything else they can think of , all for a higher price than the normal weekly edition may I add 

We do seem to mirror each other.  I used to task mother to get me a copy of ST when she went to the  market on Thursday for 2/6 ..... l  think and I was very disappointed if she came home without the copy because they had either sold out or the mags hadn't been delivered to the shops.  BUT the articles became more like fairy stories rather than actual reports of days in the field.

[marsh man]

11 hours ago, Minky said:

We do seem to mirror each other.  I used to task mother to get me a copy of ST when she went to the  market on Thursday for 2/6 ..... l  think and I was very disappointed if she came home without the copy because they had either sold out or the mags hadn't been delivered to the shops.  BUT the articles became more like fairy stories rather than actual reports of days in the field.

For a good many years when I was younger I was interested in all forms of shooting and field sports in general , we often held a Hare coursing day and I would look forward with being part of the beating team , the same with field trials , I would often compare my untrained dogs to some of the next to useless ones that had never retrieved anything without being directed , or tried to be directed onto a retrieve , then on the other hand we had dogs that to me were brilliant retrievers , same with clay shooting , we were lucky we had big compertitions on our door step like the British Sporting , watching some of the best shots in the country made you realise how far behind we were , so when getting the S Ts each week I found just about every page full of interest ,in the early days they even had a weekly page , or half a page on the W A G B I clubs which were and still is my first passion , then over the years you start losing interest on certain parts of field sports and shooting in general .

Hare coursing was banned , along with hunting on the horses , clay shooting never held much interest , rifle shooting , fox shooting and so on , so the S Ts became less and less interesting and then some of the old hands started to pass away and the new ones were not on the same planet as those who we were brought up with , now I am well into my 70s the interest in the S Ts is around 10% , the rest have got no interest what so ever , so like a lot of the field sports we had in the early days , buying the S Ts is now well and truly over .   MM