EP 552. Last of a Dying Breed: The Lost Art of Punt Gunning (Part 1)

Ramsey Russell: Ginger, tell me about this house. You’ve got a very interesting home that apparently has a lot of history. There’s a lot of artifacts, but the house itself is very interesting. How old is it?

Ginger: Probably about 500 years old.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. 500 years old?

Ginger: Yeah. And the site, I think, is probably even older than that because of its positioning. It’s long and narrow, so it probably started off as what they’d call a longhouse.

Ramsey Russell: Which is what? What is a longhouse?

Ginger: Well, it was almost going back to sort of Vikings and medieval. It was like a hall, a long hall. It was a longhouse. And this house, as you can see, again, is one room, but it’s long. It’s not a square block, and it’s on a hillside, but it’s on a flat area. Now that probably isn’t accidental. You don’t normally get a flat thing on a hill. And of course, it’s got the river right below it, which is a source of food in salmon.

Ramsey Russell: The salmon River.

Ginger: Yeah, it’s right below here. It’s obviously been used. It’s an area that’s been used. You can tell by the track that goes down. It’s worn right away, and it only goes down to the river, so something was doing that. Something was going there.

“I heard you say this morning, because as I look at some of these wooden structures here on the lower floor, you were saying they would actually keep livestock here.”

Ramsey Russell: Well, it made it very interesting. I heard you say this morning, because as I look at some of these wooden structures here on the lower floor, you were saying they would actually keep livestock here.

“Yeah, it’s quite likely. When you had a longhouse, basically everyone and everything, especially in the winter, lived in there on the floor, and they just had a fire in the middle of the floor.”

Ginger: Yeah, it’s quite likely. When you had a longhouse, basically everyone and everything, especially in the winter, lived in there on the floor, and they just had a fire in the middle of the floor. It was there, and everything down especially. Yeah. Everyone slept in there. Everyone slept on the floor, and some of the livestock would be in there as well.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me. The first thing I saw when I walked in is, above the old hearth, is an old punt gun. And as I look around, you’ve got several old punt guns in here. Tell me the history on some of these punt guns.

Ginger: Well, I got fascinated as a boy and seen one in a gun shop where I lived, and we always looked at it on the wall. I’m gonna have one of those one day. And I never found one down there, but eventually I did find one and wanted to use it. We used punts, but as boys we didn’t use punt guns. I suppose they were probably a bit big for us, but I was fascinated by it and the history that goes with it.

Ramsey Russell: So you got fascinated with these guns and eventually you started getting some.

Ginger: Yeah, I found one. And of all things, having lived on the coast where you would expect to find them, I never come, none of my friends said, oh, my dad’s got one of those or my uncle’s got one. So I never came across one. And then, blow me, in Cheltenham of all places, probably about the farthest you can get from the sea in Britain, I was walking out one day and there was one in a shop, an antique shop window was a punt gun.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Ginger: And there. And I thought, I can’t believe it. And I won’t say a long story because I went to buy it, and the bloke told me it was sold. And I couldn’t believe it. So I’d finally found a punt gun, and someone had sold it. And cutting a story short a little bit, my partner at the time, she’d actually gone in and bought it while I was away as a present but didn’t tell me. And there was me sulking and kicking and spitting nails. I’d lost this punt gun after all this time. And then I walked in her house at Christmas, and there, as I walked in through the door, there, lying across the sofa, was a brown Christmas paper-wrapped punt gun. She got for me.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, what a great story.

Ginger: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, welcome to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. I am in the UK. I’m on the banks of the Severn River. I have been introduced formally to punt gunning in the UK with my friend Ginger and my friend James. This is going to be a very interesting discussion today. Ginger here has got lots of great stories. Ginger, I want to ask you this question. Where did you grow up? Did you grow up right here in this little hamlet?

Ginger: No. I grew up on the east coast of England, right on the cliff top. So it was all to do, really. Everyone there was really involved with boats. A lot of people in some way. It was a coastal town, coastal place. So people were fishing and fowling. They were after the ducks. And that’s what the people did. A lot of fishing, a lot of fishermen on the beaches and more on the marshes around, in the low-lying areas, for the ducks. People hunted ducks. We hunted fish, we hunted crabs, we hunted ducks as boys. And a lot of time, if you didn’t move away from there, that’s what you did. As a man, there wasn’t a lot of occupation. There’s no industry there. So to get a living, you either had to move away or become a fisherman.

Ramsey Russell: As a young man, what did you do for fun? I’m thinking as a little boy growing up in the United Kingdom, what did a young Ginger do for entertainment?

Ginger: Well, mainly out in the marshes, out on the sea hunting. We were either fishing, shrimping. We would go out at low tide and get whelks and cockles and sell them. Crabs, lobsters, if we could find them, we’d get them. We used to eat the crabs ourselves but sell the lobsters to tourists because we got good money for a lobster for a young lad. But really, for fun, we just played in boats in the marshes. That was what we did all the time. We were out there, camped out on the beaches. At times there was a place called Stone Point. We used to camp there. In fact, I did my revising for my school exams. I was in a tent down the middle of the marshes revising for my exams down there.

Ramsey Russell: Well, spending so much time in the marsh, is that how you got interested, introduced to duck hunting? Did your dad, did your granddad, did a family member take you hunting?

Ginger: No, no one. Just for some reason, as boys, we used to shoot air rifles a lot down there, and we used to shoot crabs a bit in the marshes for fun as well going along. And I guess that developed into duck hunting. A lot of the other men, my family didn’t, but other men did go hunting there. So as boys, of course, we went hunting as young lads. We liked guns. Not in a big way, but we liked hunting. That’s what young lads. There wasn’t much else to do. You either went fishing or hunting for your fun. That’s what you did.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Ginger: And had boats. We used to sail boats and dinghies, race them together and things like that. But yeah, duck hunting was really a big part of it. There were ducks there.

“What was your formal introduction when you said, “Aha, I’m a duck hunter”?”

Ramsey Russell: What was your formal introduction when you said, “Aha, I’m a duck hunter”? Because you are a duck hunter.

Ginger: Oh yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How did you become a duck hunter? How and when did you become a duck hunter?

Ginger: The minute I was 17. That was the first age you could actually buy a gun. And to this day, I don’t know how I did it, but there was a shop in Colchester where I went to school, and I think it was Metcalfe’s. I can’t quite, it was either Ratcliffe’s or Metcalfe’s, I get the names muddled up, but somehow I walked in the shop and bought a gun. And I don’t remember having a license or anything, and I don’t even know, I would have been in my school uniform.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah? And they let you just buy one?

Ginger: Yeah. It was legal. I was old enough to do it, and I must have gone home. I must have had it across my shoulder in my school uniform. And I had to go to school by train because the school was about 17 miles away from where I lived. So we had to go by train every morning, back and forth. So I must have walked along in my school uniform with a shotgun strapped over my shoulder.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. And you bought that gun to become a duck hunter?

Ginger: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Just your boyhood and being out on that marsh and being out on that water catching crabs and lobsters and shrimp and whelks and all this good stuff, you saw these ducks and said, man, I need to take advantage of that.
Ginger: As soon as I was old enough to have one, which was 17, I think, at the time, I had one probably almost on my birthday, and went and got one.
Ramsey Russell: How old are you now, if I can ask?
Ginger: I keep forgetting, but I think I’m 76 in about two weeks.
Ramsey Russell: 76, as best you can remember.
Ginger: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Now, look, I’ve always heard you called Ginger. I’ve heard your name for a few weeks. I got to meet you today. I spent all day on the water with you and learned so much about this. But, number one, why is your name Ginger? And then, number two, what is your real name?
Ginger: Real name is Nigel. I’m Nigel Christopher Blaney, really. But I always had long hair, and it was always bright ginger red, you call it in America, Red. Over here, it’s ginger. So I had long ginger hair always. Even before it was fashionable. And I was lucky because the schools didn’t like it, but as it happened, my mother was a headmistress, so they knew I was not an idiot.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Ginger: So I got away with a fair bit by having long. And I was always a bit of a rebel, so I could get away with having long ginger hair and always had it.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You told me a story about your mom today. You were raised by your mother?
Ginger: Yeah. My father left. He got divorced. I used to see him still a bit, but it was my mother who was there. My other two brothers had left home. They were older than me, so it was only me. And she didn’t really understand. She’d always wanted a daughter.
Ramsey Russell: Most moms do.
Ginger: Yeah. And she didn’t really understand young boys. So I more or less just grew up myself. I would leave the home in the morning. Bye, Mum. And come back when I was hungry. And in the meantime roamed around, whatever.
Ramsey Russell: That was a good old days, Ginger, when little boys could leave the house in the morning and not come back till dinner time.
Ginger: Absolutely.
Ramsey Russell: And nobody worried about them?
Ginger: No, not at all. There’s plenty of little boy things to do.
Ramsey Russell: I really think a lot of the world problems today are the fact that little boys just can’t be little boys anymore.
Ginger: I don’t know why I did. I just did. I went out and did my own thing, did where I want. Didn’t really get into any trouble, didn’t really get into any accidents. I could have done easily, but I didn’t. That was it. That’s what I did.
Ramsey Russell: What are some of your fondest memories growing up? And some of your earliest memories of duck hunting with that new shotgun you bought?
Ginger: Oh, One of the memories, I remember, I didn’t have a dog. Well, we did. We had a dachshund, but not much good for duck hunting. So I remember us shooting duck, and it dropped out in the creek with the tide flowing. So I stripped off and jumped in. I couldn’t swim either. So I wasn’t going to lose that duck lying down there. So I waded out and managed to just about almost neck deep, just about enough that I could grab it and bring it back and got it. I can remember other times. I’ve still got the gun there. It was a Cooey, I think, a Canadian. And I remember being out there. My hands were so cold trying to shoot, I had to palm the hammer back because my fingers wouldn’t pull the hammer back.
Ramsey Russell: What kind of gun was it?
Ginger: Just a single-barreled shotgun. I mean, we basically out there, you couldn’t afford to miss. When you had cartridges, if you raised your gun, you wanted to hit it. And if you missed, you were desolate because you just wasted a cartridge.
Ramsey Russell: Right.

Ginger: So you went out there and you made sure you shot them.
Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. Well, talking about dogs, you didn’t have a duck dog on that goo story, but you got a hell of a duck dog now.
Ginger: Oh, yeah. As I grew up, I couldn’t live without a duck dog now.
Ramsey Russell: You got a big black Lab right here. What’d you tell me his name was?
Ginger: Thorn. His kennel name is Blackthorn, but his working name is Thorn.
Ramsey Russell: And what is Blackthorn?
Ginger: Blackthorn is where the sloe gin comes from. The fruit of the blackthorn is the sloe. And sloe gin gets drunk on shooting parties. It’s the shooter’s drink, really. Homemade.
Ramsey Russell: Homemade sloe gin. How come we didn’t drink some out there on the water today?
Ginger: Well, we haven’t. We’ve only just come back. Give it time.
Ramsey Russell: Give it time. I will give you time. That’s a heck of a dog though. I was telling you about my little black Lab. She’s 45 pounds, fast as a bullet. But this is a big. He’s got a water dog coat. He’s a big burly animal
Ginger: But he’s not fat.
Ramsey Russell: No, he’s not fat.
Ginger: He’s a big powerful dog. I reckon for my dogs, I want to see my dogs clear a five-bar gate when they jump over it. They can clear a five. Bugger, I know they’re good.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Ginger: Yeah. If I have a dog, I tend to breed my own. I want a dog that’s intelligent, and they do have differences. I want a dog that’s fit and powerful.
Ramsey Russell: There he goes, right now somebody’s coming back.
Ginger: He’s just heard someone coming in.
Ramsey Russell: He’s a watchdog too, isn’t he?
Ginger: Yeah, and when you get all those three, if you’ve got those three things, you’ve got everything you need in a dog.
Ramsey Russell: I know the purpose of today’s visit was an introduction to punt gunning, but you’re also obviously a shoulder gunner. There’s a painting, a drawing over my shoulder that took place in Orkney. You said that was you?
Ginger: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: There’s a flock of geese coming in, and two of the tallest geese, which must be 50 or 60 meters, are falling. Tell me about these shotguns, your favorite shotguns over here.
Ginger: I use an 8-bore at times, especially up in Orkney for geese. I had a 4-bore. 4-bore is just a single-barrel gun, and they’re not as useful. It’s fun to have them, and they’re great, but a double 8-bore is better still because you’ve got two cartridges.
Ramsey Russell: That’s okay, we can hear him. But look, man, these are all duck hunters listening. So a big black Lab being a good watchdog, he’s just doing his job.
Ginger: I think, it’s James coming back.
Ramsey Russell: It probably is.
Ginger: An 8-bore, In Scotland, up in Orkney where we’re shooting mainly geese.
Ramsey Russell: And do you wing shoot with the 4-bore, or is that just for shooting on the wall?
Ginger: No, no. Wing shoot with a 4-bore as well.
Ramsey Russell: Tell me about the recoil of these guns.
Ginger: You don’t notice. They’re heavy, like the 8-bores are heavy guns, and therefore the weight of the gun absorbs the shot. I don’t notice any difference shooting an 8-bore than a 4-bore or a 12-bore.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Ginger: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It’s hard to believe.

Ginger: They’re heavier to use, but a little bit if you’re shooting high. Normally, so it’s like a pendulum on your shoulder. As it comes up, it’s swinging, and you can’t stop it swinging because of its mass. Therefore, it actually pulls through the bird. You can’t shoot at a 45-degree angle very well because the weight of the gun tends to try to go down. But on your shoulder at high birds overhead, the weight of the gun actually helps you get the increase.

Ramsey Russell: Sounds like its pretty good for pass shooting, like past shooting high incoming shots.
Ginger: High is there for high birds. Yeah. Really, it’s patterned for 65 yards.
Ramsey Russell: So you’re shooting patterned for 65 yards?
Ginger: So you’re shooting birds at generally 60, 55 to 65 yards up, and you can’t shoot them really down at 40 yards because you’d smash them. So you have to have birds flying high. But it’s one of the most exciting shots. Not exciting, that’s perhaps not the right word. But the satisfying shots. To see a fast flying goose, a high bird, he’s 60 yards up, and you fire an eight bore at him and he looks like he’s run into a brick wall. He’s dead in the air. And it is an absolute clean kill, 60 yards up, and they fall and fall and fall before they hit the ground. And it is the most satisfying shot, I think, to know you can shoot that and you’ve killed it outright. You haven’t wounded it. It’s whap. And it just looks like it’s run into a brick wall.
Ramsey Russell: Do you also shoot, or do you own a 12 gauge or a 10 gauge or sub gauge, like a 20 or a 28?
Ginger: If I was decoying on the floods there at night with birds coming in out of the darkness, then I’d use a 12 bore because you want something that reacts very fast, and those ducks might be coming in and whipping away. Now, with an eight bore, you’re lugging a big lump of iron. You wouldn’t be able to swing it well, so that’s not the gun for that situation. But there you want a lightish 12 bore. I would say you want something that moves quick because those birds are coming in quick and they’re going out as they come into the decoys and then whipping away in the darkness. You want a lighter gun for there.
Ramsey Russell: How often do you hunt? You talk about hunting at night. We’re going to talk extensively about punt gun hunting, but tell me about how you hunt. Like, what would be a typical Ginger setup for shooting ducks if you weren’t punt gunning? Like, are you going out and pass shooting or are you decoying them?
Ginger: No.
Ramsey Russell: But you might be hunting at night?
Ginger: Oh yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So you all can hunt over here 24 hours?
Ginger: Yes.
Ramsey Russell: You can shoot guns bigger than, you can shoot up to a four gauge. Matter of fact, you can shoot up to anything with a 2-inch diameter or less, it’s considered a shotgun. And you can hunt 24 hours.
Ginger: Yeah. So I’ve punt gunned at night as well. And we often shoot at night under the moon if there’s light to do it, because ducks tend to move at night. So that’s when you want to go shoot them.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Ginger: But you’ve got to have enough sight. And I do find now, as I’m getting older, I don’t hear the wings so well. But I have to say, even in the past with my dogs, because in the darkness they’re whipping in and you’re whipping through and pulling the trigger, you quite often don’t know whether you’ve hit it or not unless you hear the splash. But with my dogs, if the dog doesn’t move, I missed it. If the dog’s gone, I hit it. And then they’ll almost certainly come back with it. They hear either the change of the wing beat with all the pellets striking them or whatever. But if my dog, whatever I think, if he doesn’t go, I didn’t hit it.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. Would you rather hunt at night than in the daytime? Like, we went out today to the river that had flooded up over those pastures, and there were a lot of hedgerows around and there were ducks galore. And we were out there pushing around in the punts, trying to get into position.
Ginger: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And I was thinking, in fact, I told James, I said, man, you pull a boat right up in here and throw some decoys out, maybe put a mojo, and we would get these birds just decoying. And I wouldn’t even try to set up there till maybe 9 or 10 in the morning. I figured they’re going to go out like this evening, right at sunset. All the ducks and geese started leaving to go feed, and they’re going to come back. I just know they’re going to come back midday in the sunshine and come right in. Would that be a setup you would consider over here?
Ginger: Not so much. Because when they come in, they’re not daft. They don’t land near the edges. They land way out in the middle. And then what they do a lot down here as well, they will paddle into the shore. They won’t fly into the shore. They’ll land out where it’s safe. And then, rather than flying, they will paddle in and feed on the shoreline or rest up somewhere out in the middle. They’re not wild ducks for nothing. They’re very, they know exactly what they’re doing, where to go to not get shot.

Ramsey Russell: I saw some decoys hanging out in your garage. When you hunt at night, do you put them on the water?
Ginger: Yeah, we put those out as it gets dark. Last thing until you really can’t. If it’s light enough or you’ve got light of the sky, you’ll hunt till you can. Of course, they tend to go off. Really, you want the sort of witching hour between dusk as its getting dark and before it’s really dark. That’s when the ducks come in to feed. So that’s the time you shoot them. If you’ve got light in the sky by moonlit night or the background of a city somewhere else, you can shoot reasonably late at night. But once it’s really dark, you can’t see well enough to shoot them.

“When you’re hunting in a situation like that. Are you picking a nice location based on the wind or some habitat feature, or are you hunting an area that you place corn?”

Ramsey Russell: When you’re hunting in a situation like that. Are you picking a nice location based on the wind or some habitat feature, or are you hunting an area that you place corn?
Ginger: No, most of the time it’s observation. You know where the birds want to be, and that’s where you want to be as well. And you notice it down here. We notice if it’s flooded on the meadows. If you’ve got a flooded meadow, if it’s still got grass or reeds showing up through the water, the ducks know that meadow is shallow. Therefore, they can feed it. If it’s a sheet of water solid, they don’t know if that’s one foot deep or ten foot deep. So you have to, a little bit. I know it’s an odd phrase, but you have to think like a duck.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Ginger: Where does the duck want to be? And with experience and field craft, you know where those ducks are likely to be. I often go and walk down for the geese here. I walk the dog most nights. I don’t take the gun with me, but I’m watching that all the time. Where are the geese coming? Where are they flying into? So at the weekend, when I want to bring a few friends down, I say, right, I know just where we’re going tonight, boys. We’re going to go there. You’ve got geese out here. We’ve probably got, I bet out there, there’s four or five miles of water edge out there at the moment. You’ve got to get those geese to fly over the top of you and perhaps 20 yards either side of you, and they’ve got five miles. So you’ve got to have some idea where they’re coming in. And they are creatures of habit to some degree. If you go down there and you notice for three days they’re flying in roughly from there, because they’ve probably been feeding in a potato field or a cornfield over there, then you think, right, Friday night we’re down there, because they’re likely to fly over there again, and now you’ve got a chance of shooting them.
Ramsey Russell: Baiting is legal in the UK. Placing corn or wheat or whatever to draw duck. Do you ever practice that?
Ginger: Not very often. I prefer wild duck shooting, so I use my skill to be there. And if I get it wrong, so I get it wrong. We do have a flight pond, and I have got other friends who have flight ponds where they actually feed the birds into a flight pond. I don’t mind, it’s great people doing it, but it’s not. So I prefer outwitting the ducks in their own element, a bit like punt gunning, rather than luring them in. We do use decoys, having said that, and use widgeon whistles and calls. But again, they’re coming in often out of the darkness there, so you’re up against it by the light a bit. You’re trying to get them into your area. We don’t feed them up.
Ramsey Russell: Generally, you talk about using the calls and hunting in the dark, and last night, yeah, last night, was my introduction to duck hunting in the UK. We went to a small pond, there had been some feed placed, the ducks were coming in, and they didn’t come in till late. I mean late, late. We were shooting. The first duck I shot, I knew he was a greenhead, but it was silhouetted. And what was so interesting is, if they were breaking down and coming in, I could hear them. But I just found myself calling because I couldn’t see anything further than nearby. But I would call, and within a minute something would respond and would give us a little shooting. So they do respond to the calling, but they were coming terribly late.
Ginger: Yes, especially widgeon. Always over here. You have widgeon?
Ramsey Russell: We do. American wigeons.
Ginger: We have here. And with all birds, the widgeon always come in when it’s nearly pitch dark. And I suffer a little bit now, getting older, I don’t hear the wing beats nearly as well as I used to. So you lose that fraction of a second. If you can hear them coming from your left, at least you know which way to point the gun. If you don’t hear them coming, you’re looking left, right, center, every which way. But again, I will use widgeon whistles and call them to get them coming in.
Ramsey Russell: As we get older, my hearing is greatly diminished also, mostly from shooting with unprotected hearing. You may have noticed I put that here. You notice I had those little earbuds in?
Ginger: No, I didn’t.
Ramsey Russell: You didn’t notice that? As we were fixing to climb into the boat this morning, I was putting in those little earbuds, and they’re electronic Tetra Hearing devices. And it’s done two things for me. At a loud noise, it attenuates to a non-damaging level. But at the same time, with the volume turned up, they function somewhat as a hearing aid to where I can now hear high-pitched bird vocalizations and things that I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to hear if I was running with my naked ear. Thirty-something years of unprotected hearing shooting had just, I mean, my ears ring all the time. I don’t hear as well. It’s why it sounds like I learned to whisper in a sawmill.
Ginger: You must tell me the make because I keep meaning to get a pair of those.
Ramsey Russell: Tetra Hearing, and I swear by them. I’ve tried them all, and they work good. But what they do is, you actually take a hearing test from an audiologist and they gauge your hearing. And when I took mine, last year, two years ago, actually, it’s like, from high pitch to bass, if you go across the scale of the hearing range, it runs about halfway, which would be the bass, and then it falls off drastically. And what he told me is like, half of the scale of hearing range, the sound has to be as loud or louder than a shotgun going off for me to hear it. So they do this. They test both ears, and when Tetra calibrates those devices, they tune it to each ear of your hearing spectrum. So it’s just a crutch of sorts. I can hear better, but it protects my hearing. I don’t want to be deaf, because so much of my enjoyment in duck hunting is hearing them.
Ginger: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And I mean, so much of my success as a predator, let’s call it, relies on my ability to not only hear, but know they’re coming off my left shoulder, my right shoulder.
Ginger: One of my frustrations. I often sit with a colleague, and he will tell me which way they’re coming in, because I can’t hear them, which is very annoying.
Ramsey Russell: Exactly.
Ginger: I bought a pair years ago that worked, because I work beating metal. I’m a goldsmith. But annoyingly, I must have dropped them on the stairs and the cleaner must have hoovered them up. Quite expensive. Bought them, paid for them, and lost them almost immediately, and was so annoyed with myself, I never bought another pair.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Ginger: Yeah, I really keep wanting to have exactly what you’ve got, and I really must get some.
Ramsey Russell: I’ll break them out and show them to you before I leave. Speaking of working as a goldsmith, I asked you today over tea what you did for a living, and you had a very, may still have, a very interesting career. What did you do for a profession?

Ginger: Oh, I was a jeweler, a goldsmith, a silversmith and goldsmith. I wasn’t trained at it. I was trained to be a lecturer. I was actually a PE teacher. Then I did a degree in history, of all things.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Ginger: But I was also a motorcyclist and a racing motorcyclist, and I used to go into the college metalwork.
Ramsey Russell: Like a professional motorcycle?
Ginger: No, not completely professional. I was quite a high level. I did the Anglo-American support to the Anglo-American match races, so I was probably in the top hundred of the country. I had an international license, so I was fairly good. But we weren’t sponsored in those days. You built your own bikes in those days, or, as it developed, if you had a very rich father, he bought you the bike. And we always looked down on those guys because you admired a guy who not only could race his bike well, but he built his own bike. So he was twice up there. Not only was he a good rider, he was a good mechanic, and you admired those guys and wanted to be like that. So I would sit in metal workshops, and I’ve got a picture somewhere of sitting in bed polishing a conrod and a girlfriend behind me about to beat me over the head with another one because I’m sat in bed polishing conrods. But then, I actually got knocked off a motorbike. I was down in Italy on a motorbike, and an ambulance, of all things, hit me off the bike. I woke up in hospital and met a stunningly beautiful Italian girl, Gabriella. I went back to her house, and, yeah, lots of things went on there. Then when I got home, they had to fly me back, I didn’t break anything, luckily. I got a few scars, banged the bike up. They had to fly me back. And then she said, I thought it was a great holiday romance and gone, and drastic, I’d like to have stayed there. But then she said, “I’m coming to visit you in England.” I thought, wow, she’s keen. But I didn’t, I was a racing motorcyclist. I didn’t really have a job at that time. I thought, I’ve got no money. Well, women like things. So in the metal workshop where I was doing the engine, some guys were doing a jewelry course, and I actually begged some silver. I bought 15 shillings’ worth, which is about, these days, probably not even $2 maybe it wasn’t a pound. It was 15 shillings’ worth of silver. I made it, because I could work with my hands, I just knotted it and twisted it and plaited it and made her some jewelry. And she, well, she was very impressed.
Ramsey Russell: Was she thankful?
Ginger: Oh, my word, yes. Well, women love jewelry. Come on, let’s face it. I mean, what woman doesn’t love jewelry? And when you’ve made it for them yourself, you really go up a notch or two. And no one else made it, In those days, jewelry was very staid. It was just mass-produced old-fashioned stuff. And this was in the late 1960s.
Ramsey Russell: You were kind of like an artisanal jeweler.
Ginger: Yeah, I just did it. And it was what the young people wanted of my age. At that stage, I was probably 21, 22. But there were lots of other friends around 19, 20, and this was the 1960s. They wanted different things. They didn’t want the old-fashioned things. And it just happened that I was making them because I was the same age, the same group. So what I thought was good, they also thought was good. So I started making jewelry and it became quite a big business. And it’s done me for 60 years on there.
Ramsey Russell: You told me today maybe. Did I hear you say you’re, like, international?
Ginger: Oh yeah, we send it all over the world now. We got into mining, gold mining. We had a gold mine in Wales, so we work a lot in Welsh gold, which is used by the royal family. All our royal family’s wedding rings are made of Welsh gold.
Ramsey Russell: Okay, now wait a minute. I thought gold was gold. What is Welsh gold?

“Welsh gold is still just gold, but it’s mined in Wales.”

Ginger: Welsh gold is still just gold, but it’s mined in Wales. It would be like, let’s say, I can’t think of anything in America very quickly,
Ramsey Russell: Kentucky bourbon.
Ginger: Kentucky, exactly. It’s still bourbon, there’s bourbon everywhere, but this is Kentucky bourbon.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Ginger: Welsh gold is gold that was mined in Wales. It’s still just gold at the end of the day, but now it’s Welsh gold. And that has been in the regalia of the royal family in England going back hundreds of years. They’ve always had Welsh gold. So the wedding rings of our royal family are made of Welsh gold. And we are the only firm in the world, we went mining for it. We bought up, when one mine closed, we bought all the stuff from there. So we’re the only firm in the world that I know of for sure that can actually make pure Welsh gold wedding rings.
Ramsey Russell: Did you tell me that you invented green gold?
Ginger: Green gold. Well, there was another firm I’d heard of in America that had used it, but I think it was the Black Hills Gold. But they’d only used it as little berries or something. And I found we could actually make green gold into wedding rings. So we made, and we did it for the Irish market, really, because some of my ancestors are Irish. So we did Irish green gold wedding rings. And we got the gold from Ireland as well. One of the guys that worked with me was the world champion gold panner, and he could go to Ireland and pan gold in Ireland from the streams. So you could get gold out of Ireland. You’d say it was mining because it was only like, you know, the 49ers did in America. You had sluice boxes in streams. The Welsh gold was often underground mines going down tunnels. But a lot of the American gold wasn’t underground, they did washing in rivers and springs. And we did that in Ireland and got gold in Ireland. But we struggled selling it in America. I think you have to go to America very big if you’re going to do it and invest a lot of money. I worked long enough. I didn’t need the money, and I didn’t want to have a lot more work. I was getting to the age where I thought, I’m comfortable. I’ve got it here. I’m enjoying my life. Do I want more stress, more strain, really doing something. And the figures would have been tremendous. When you see how many Irish descendants, Irish Americans, you look how many get married every year just in Boston, you’d be talking of several hundred thousand people. Well, I ought to be able to sell several hundred thousand people an Irish green gold wedding ring.
Ramsey Russell: Wow, that’s a big deal.
Ginger: It would have been a big deal. You would have been talking telephone number figures if you could really get it going. And I didn’t want my life to be absorbed. I don’t want my life to be absorbed in just one thing. I like to do what I want to do.
Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. So how did you get into punt gunning? You’re a hunter, you’re a shoulder gunner.
Ginger: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: How did you get into punt gunning?
Ginger: Well, we used punts as boys out on the marshes.
Ramsey Russell: Punt being the boat?
Ginger: Punt being the boat.
Ramsey Russell: Is it a specific type of boat?
Ginger: Yes, it’s actually called a gunning punt. That’s the name for it because you have different sorts of punts. But what we use is a gunning,
Ramsey Russell: And what characteristics would characterize it as a gunning punt?
Ginger: Well, really, to say properly, it has a punt gun on it.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Ginger: But they were also of a specific design. They’re used in coastal waters a lot, but they’re very, very low in the water.

Ramsey Russell: Very low-profile.

Ginger: They’re painted battleship gray, so they blend in just like the battleships. They’re low in the water, but they’re designed to be very seaworthy. You can use them in coastal waters. You wouldn’t want to go out in white horses. But again, you can’t shoot ducks with a punt if it’s very windy, so you wouldn’t go there. But they are very seaworthy, and they have no keel on them. So they will float in just a few inches of water, and you can slide them over the mud as well. So if you want to go from one channel to another or push one down the bank to get into the water, they’ll zip over the mud, and they’ll also go in very shallow if you’re hugging the shoreline of a muddy shore to get near the ducks. They’re not going to run aground.
Ramsey Russell: And as a young man, when you were catching lobsters and crabs and shrimp and all that good stuff, spending your time on the marsh, that’s the type of boat you used?
Ginger: No, we’d use bigger. We’d normally walk out for crabs and lobsters. I’d use a bigger boat. If you had lobster pots or crab pots, you wouldn’t get them on a punt. They’re for one man or two men and not much else. So we used boats for that, and fishing boats, that’d be more fishing, if you’re with me. But if we were duck hunting, yeah, we generally used a punt to get around because they’ll go in shallow creeks and they’re quite narrow.
Ramsey Russell: It made a good duck boat for the habitat.
Ginger: It was a good duck boat, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And what compelled you to actually become a punt gunner, one of the last remaining on Earth?
Ginger: Well, it’s when I got, I’d always wanted a punt gun. We’re going back to the beginning. And when I got one, therefore I needed, now I was in Gloucestershire, Cheltenham.
Ramsey Russell: What, did the Italian girlfriend that bought you the punt gun, did she swap you that for jewellery?
Ginger: No, a different girlfriend.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. A different girlfriend.
Ginger: There’s been a few. No, I’ve lost my track now with that one. You’re back on the women again. Don’t go there, don’t go there. But yeah, I found this punt gun, so I knew I had a punt gun. So now I wanted a punt. And by luck, back in my old hometown on the coast, I knew a guy who used to make the punts there. And as it happened, he’d made a punt for someone, a single punt. He’d made it and had it, and the guy never paid for it. He’d paid a deposit and never come back for it. So it was up in his roof spare. So he was quite ready to sell it to me at quite a good price.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Ginger: So I went down there, and he’d got one, and I bought it.
Ramsey Russell: I learned a lot today. But as we got out, we began to set up James’s punt gun rig that he bought from an associate of yours, now deceased. Yeah, I realized that there’s quite a bit to just putting it together. Who taught you? How did you go from a punt gun laying on a chair as a gift to putting it in a punt safely and efficiently? Because, I mean, we’re not talking a shoulder gun. We’re talking a cannon. It is functionally a cannon.
Ginger: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And it’s a lot that goes into the rigging, and the roping, and the cinching down. It’s got to have recoil, and it’s got to be safe. I mean, who taught you the ropes of that?
Ginger: No one.
Ramsey Russell: Come on, man.
Ginger: No one.
Ramsey Russell: And you’ve still got all your teeth?
Ginger: Yeah. No, I didn’t know anyone at that stage for a while who went punt gunning. I just bought the punt and got the gun and went out. I did it by ear. I don’t even, you know, it’s a long time ago, but I can hardly imagine how or why I did it. But I had no one to help me at all. And it was quite a lot of time to actually get used to doing it. Took me probably two or three years before I was even really reasonably experienced. Which is why, a bit like there, why I like bringing on younger people now, because I can tell them what to do now. No one was there to tell me what to do. I did it. No one punt gunned in those days. Certainly at Walton, there were punt gunners, but there were no active punt gunners there at all anymore. So there was no one out there doing it. It had sort of died out, more or less, or gone very low. And for me, I still wanted to do it, but I didn’t really know much about it at all.
Ramsey Russell: Why do you punt gun hunt?
Ginger: Excitement.
Ramsey Russell: Excitement.
Ginger: I think if you like the thrill of the chase, it is, you are hunting. And it’s more like, it’s not so much a shooting sport, it’s more of a stalking sport. You have to get in range of wild ducks in their own environment, and you’ve got to get within about 80 yards of them. You’re in their element. Everything is in their favour. You’ve got to get within range of them by your own skill. So you have to outwit a wild duck, and that takes some doing.

Ramsey Russell: I heard you say today that, it was a form of tribute to some of the old guys that practiced it to feed their families.
Ginger: Yeah, that’s how it started. It probably started out of Nelson’s Navy. They were probably naval gunners who began this. They used to work with what was called a poop gun.
Ramsey Russell: Well, the British Navy was a power to reckon with back in the day, were they not?
Ginger: Very much so. And you had naval deck gunners, you had cannons below deck. But they also used small cannonades, smaller guns on the top deck, on the poop deck, which they fired musket balls at the enemy marines.
Ramsey Russell: Like a cannon, like a shotgun. A cannon function at a shotgun.
Ginger: Basically a cannon shotgun.
Ramsey Russell: To spray down buckshot on to the marines on the other boat.
Ginger: Because when you get close, when these vessels were fighting, they were probably only 50 yards apart, and they were going to try and board each other possibly. So you could actually, they said they would rake the enemy’s decks with this, with the gun. But of course, when the war stopped, when you’re not fighting anyone, you don’t have much use for a naval gunner, so he has to do something else. So they more or less seem to turn from shooting at Spaniards or Frenchmen to shooting ducks and geese.
Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. And they did that to pay the bills, to feed the market.

“So to get a living, you either had to move away or become a fisherman.”

Ginger: A lot of them were going down on fishing boats. They were fishermen on the coast. But while they were going out to sea, going down the channel to go out to sea, if as they’re going along there’s a whole pile of ducks or geese or waders, whatever, if they could shoot them on the way out, that might be their wages for the day. The fishing is free, so they’ve made that. And it seems most of the big areas for punt gunning seem to be around the naval dockyards. Because you’ve got to think immediately, you need rope, you need paint, you need wood, and you need ammunition.

Ramsey Russell: You need gunpowder.

Ginger: And you need gunpowder. Where are you going to find those in a naval dockyard? You’re not going to find them in the cow shed down the road. This is military stuff.
Ramsey Russell: I never thought about that.
Ginger: So there’s a genuine, and battleship gray. They’re all painted battleship gray. Where are you going to find gray paint as a farm laborer? No, naval dockyard.
Ramsey Russell: And I would guess some of those naval dockyards would be in close proximity to a bigger city. Therefore, more people, a bigger market to buy.
Ginger: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.
Ginger: And then you want somewhere where you can sell your ducks as well. So you’ve got to do through there. But it seems to have started, no one knows for sure, that’s the proof, but it just seems so obvious that punt gunning starts in naval areas, and you think you must put two and two together. I mean, they would have needed rope for sure. You have to breach the things with rope. You need gunpowder. That just doesn’t exist in most places. You’re farm laboring around this, that’s not available.
Ramsey Russell: I mean, it wasn’t like you could run down to Walmart.
Ginger: No.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Ginger: But quite likely, if you’d just been a naval gunner and your old shipmate is still in the Navy and he’s working in the dockyard, you know damn well that a little bit of that’s going to come over the counter, isn’t it? And maybe a few ducks go back in exchange for it.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. What would you say this transition, from a British Royal Navy war gun pointing down at the other troop 50, 60 yards away to the duck hunting, what time period would this have likely taken? What are some of the earliest punt gunning you recall?
Ginger: I would say you’re looking around about somewhere about 1800.
Ramsey Russell: Early 1800s, mid-1800s?
Ginger: No, no, early 1800s.

Ramsey Russell: Late 1700s maybe.

Ginger: Possibly. One of the old guys I knew on the Blackwater there, who’s since died unfortunately, he had a flintlock punt gun. So you’re going back there.

Ramsey Russell: Now, 1700.

Ginger: To late 1700s, I think. So it obviously was there, but I would have thought when it developed, it was probably more coming to about 1800, 1820 somewhere, developing, going through there. I think that first one of mine, I would reckon that’s probably about 1820, 1830.
Ramsey Russell: Okay, when do you think it transitioned? Because this is what I find so interesting. Of course, a lot of the American listeners are aware of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Punt gunning was banned and a whole lot of other laws. The shooting time in America is 30 minutes before sunrise until sunset. Ping. Stop. We can shoot semi-automatic guns with three shells, not two, but only three. We have finite limits. You all don’t have bag limits. We don’t bait. And it all kind of goes around the narrative, Chesapeake Bay, the market hunters, the punt guns, that’s the bad, that’s the devil, that’s the one that did it all, and that’s who we had to save the ducks from. You all still do all these practices and still have plenty of ducks. But I’m getting at is, when did it transition? Would it have been around the same time, the early 1900s that in the United Kingdom it transitioned from market hunting to recreational pursuit?

Ginger: No, much later. Muchlater. Much later.

Ramsey Russell: How long did, well, heck, you all still do sell ducks if you want.
Ginger: Yeah, you can still. Till quite recently, people would punt. Gunners would still go out and sell the ducks they shot. I mean, people shoot pheasants and sell the pheasants. You might shoot rabbits and sell the rabbits.

Ramsey Russell: To this day?

Ginger: Yeah, to this day. What happens? Why not shoot ducks and sell ducks? As long as there’s enough of them. Not many people do it now, but that’s more eating habits. People don’t like wild game, especially ducks that they might want to pluck, or they might taste a bit salty or a bit muddy or whatever. So I think a lot of that is not so much that you can’t sell them, but that there isn’t a market for them anymore.
Ramsey Russell: The palate of the modern here in Europe and also, or here in England, let’s say, and also over in the United States, people love duck, but a lot of people do not. But back in the market hunting days, I mean, some of the most expensive menu items were waterfowl.
Ginger: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I wonder why that changed. Have you ever given it thought, like why? Why did they lose a taste? Why did we lose a taste collectively for waterfowl?
Ginger: I guess. I mean, certainly they must have had over here for the Second World War, people shot a lot of rabbits. And they would have shot a lot of ducks. But of course, a lot of men would have been away in the Army and Navy, so there weren’t so many doing it. But there would have been good old boys out there still. And of course, I’m sure people in the war, when there was rationing, would have been overjoyed to have ducks. So it really probably comes down to post–Second World War, 1950 somewhere, where it is getting regulated more and stopped more a little bit. There were more conservative things coming in, Brent geese and some of the geese in particular. But a lot of them had been scared away by the war because you had on the Wash, which was a famous area for duck shooting and wildfowling and punt gunning, of course, that was a bombing range in the Second World War. So, I mean, there were massive explosions just there, and that’s going on for four or five years. All the geese left. But they were massive numbers of wildfowl. It was a main place for the geese, the Wash. And that just about vanished with the Second World War because they were scared witless.

Ramsey Russell: I see. Wow, very interesting.
Ginger: And they’ve only come back over the years as well. Habits have changed and they’re only coming back more and more now. But a little bit you’re getting climate change as well because it used to be a different climate. So when Europe got very cold, ducks and geese would come to England. And that’s stopped more now because it’s warming up, so they don’t cross. So they’ve got far too many with the white-fronted geese, which used to be famous in this area. Now there’s none. I’m probably the last guy who shot one on the Severn Estuary because you see very many. But they’re now turning up on the east coast a bit more where they never were. When I was younger, they were never on the east coast. Never ever saw, very rarely saw a goose when I was a young boy, only something from the farmyard. So geese numbers have now really come back and they’re spreading out quite a lot.
Ramsey Russell: Who would have been some of the famous personalities that have pursued punt gunning as a recreation?
Ginger: I mean, the most famous one you’d have to say was Peter Scott.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Ginger: I mean, he was there. He’s not my favorite guy, I would say, because he had too much of an opportunity. His family were famous. It was Scott of the Army.
Ramsey Russell: Were they royal?
Ginger: No, but they were very high. Yeah, they were very high up in society and he was there. So he would get invites to Lord somebody else’s place. “Oh, come and shoot my ducks if you like, young man.” He had guys who would pour the things out there with the horse and cart, put them in there, and he could shoot as many as he wanted and it was almost too easy. I can’t blame him because I think everyone of the same age, when you’re young, you might overdo it. You’re so keen to do it, you shoot perhaps too many because you want to prove you can do it. So as you get a bit older, you think, I don’t need to shoot that many. I want a good day out. I don’t want to overkill. So I think he had almost too much opportunity, and he turned. He didn’t, he turned away from shooting, but he was still supportive of it for a long time.
Ramsey Russell: Well, I’ve heard that he was an avid hunter, he shot a lot. But that on one particular hunt or one particular season or at some point in time he had so overindulged in harvest that he felt bad about it. And that’s why he formed this sanctuary.
Ginger: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. He had the opportunity, but he overdid it. That was the problem. He was given the opportunity so easy. It was too easy, and therefore he overdid it. You’re exactly right. Then I think he regretted it, as he got a little bit older. He thought, why was I slaughtering all those birds? I mean, but it’s the young. You do these mad things when you’re young. Everyone, when they’re young, overdoes things whichever way you looked at it. So I think there. But there was a big thing in 1954 when they were trying to ban punt gunning in Parliament.
Ramsey Russell: hat precipitated Wthat?
Ginger: I think a lot was the fallback of geese after the war. The Brent geese, which were popular, had disappeared a lot.
Ramsey Russell: A lot of Brent had disappeared.
Ginger: And the Brent goose was the favorite of the punt gunner.
Ramsey Russell: I guess it was.
Ginger: This was the sea goose that the punt gunners mainly shot, and the numbers had gone down and they wanted to ban shooting. And they did actually ban the Brent, but they wanted to ban punt gunning. And Peter Scott stood up in Parliament and fought for punt gunning to continue.
Ramsey Russell: He did.
Ginger: So fair play to him. I owe him a debt of gratitude.
Ramsey Russell: Okay, that’s starting to make sense now. Do you think that his fight, he was influential because he was prominent?
Ginger: Yes.
Ramsey Russell: He was wealthy, he was affluent. Do you think that his fight in Parliament is what popularized modern-day punt gunning?
Ginger: No, I don’t think so.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. Because you told me a story today about some of the royal family hired punt guys to go out and just say, “I did it.”
Ginger: But that wasn’t. It was punt gunning, but it was more the experience of rich gentlemen. It was a little bit like safaris in Africa, hunting lions, hunting elephants. You got that period probably from the 1930s, 1940s up into the 1950s, when rich gentlemen wanted excitement. They wanted to go out and do something, and danger even, I would say, because they were rich and didn’t know what else to do. African safaris was one thing, but punt gunning came in there. So you had people like the Duke of Edinburgh and James Robertson Justice was another one, and quite a lot of famous people. I’m trying to think, one of the famous American guys used to be big game fishing for Americans.
Ramsey Russell: Hemingway was it.
Ginger: Hemingway.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Ginger: Exactly the same thing. They wanted this challenge. They wanted this danger that they saw almost normal men doing so, it changed from being a local guy hunting for the market to feed his family and get some money for baccy and beer, and that was his living, to turning more into guides. Like even today, you can take a guy out hunting and he may shoot a lot, he may shoot nothing at all, but the guide still gets paid. And if you’re working and you haven’t got much money on the coast, you take it with open arms. So this change from being solely hunting the ducks and selling them to a little bit of a, more of a sport of punt gunning, where people took an interest in it more for the excitement and the danger and the challenge of doing it, rather than shooting as many ducks as they can. It was there. And then, so it’s like now, I have turned down quite a few big shots because I didn’t want to shoot that many. And I knew if I did, I’m gonna have to take them back, pluck them, this, that and the other. I don’t want to do that. I want to shoot a fair proportion, but I don’t like coming home particularly empty-handed. But I don’t want to shoot too much or too many. I don’t want to sell them. I might give some away. I’ll eat what I shoot. But I don’t have a limit, really.
Ramsey Russell: There are no daily bag limits in the UK.
Ginger: No.
Ramsey Russell: What is a ginger limit or a ginger goal?
Ginger: I would normally say just like a 12-bore shotgun, a bird per ounce.
Ramsey Russell: A bird per ounce.
Ginger: If I went out and had an ounce cartridge in my 12-bore and shot five cartridges and shot five ducks, I think I’d done bloody well. So if I go out in a punt and fire 10 ounces of shot and come back with 10 ducks, equally the same, I’ve done well. I wouldn’t complain at 7, I wouldn’t mind 15, but that’s my general limit. A bird per ounce.
Ramsey Russell: Hang on, Ginger. That’s all we’re going to have time for this episode. Folks thank you all for listening this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Do not miss part two of this series. We’re going to do a deep dive into the lost art of punt gunning. You do not want to miss part two of this episode. See you next.