“If you wound the lion and he gets into cover it is even money that you will be mauled when you go in after him. A lion can still cover one hundred yards so fast toward you that there is barely time for two aimed shots before he is on you. After he has the first bullet, there is no nervous shock to further wounds, and you have to kill him stone dead or he will keep coming.”
- Ernest Hemingway, “Shootism versus Sport: The Second Tanganyika Letter,” Esquire, June 1934
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(Note: The U.S. edition of the book bears the subtitle, “Collecting, Restoring & Shooting Classic Firearms,” in place of, “For the Modern Shot.”)
I must begin this review with a disclaimer: I met the author and he is a thoroughly decent fellow. I had the pleasure of making Mr. Hadoke’s acquaintance at a gun auction in Columbia, South Carolina, and he was good enough to autograph a copy of the book to me. Don’t get any ideas; I gave the full ticket price for it. There’s no payola on this site, not that I haven’t tried at every opportunity to encourage it. “Dig,” as his friends call him, was even good enough to accompany Raimey and me to lunch with some other friends after the conclusion of the auction. It was therefore with some trepidation that I undertook to review the book. What if it were disappointing in some way? I could not break bread with a man and then savage his work, nor could I very well tout something as a good read that left me cold. As it turns out, I needn’t have worried.
Vintage Guns is a rare gem and a solid contribution to the sporting literature. Pedagogical without being pedantic, exhaustive without being exhausting, the book traces the development of British sporting shotguns and explains their form and function in meticulous detail. That said, it is no desiccated history lesson. The aim of all the data is to enable someone with no knowledge of these functional works of art to purchase one and actually take it out into the field and use it. The pages fairly reek of leather and gun-oil with a little wet dog thrown in, and if that doesn’t appeal to you, this is not your book.
The author’s own 1889 Purdey sidelock ejector graces the cover, and if these terms don’t mean anything to you, they will after you read the book. Bear in mind this is not a museum piece, it is the author’s preferred shotgun for hunting. Hadoke describes and exemplifies a personality type he calls the “practical eccentric.” A psychologist might say “obsessive compulsive,” but the classification as the author uses it is not pejorative. The notion is that one can take great pleasure from learning the history of these old firearms and by restoring them, using them, and caring for them, one can become in some measure a part of that history.
Diggory Hadoke certainly deserves his place in that rich history. Toward the end of the book, he lists his “top ten” volumes for a gun room library. Humility and modesty prevent him from adding his own work to that list. Let me do so now.
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“I like to park my old fish car by the camp perhaps an hour or so before sundown. Generally I enter the neglected old camp to look around and, over a devotional beer, sit and brood a little over the dear dead days of yesteryear, or perhaps morosely review the progressive decay of calendar art collected there during forty-odd years canadianviagras.com. And always I am amazed that the scampering field mice haven’t carried the old place away, calendars and all . . .”
- Robert Tarver, “Big Secret Trout,” from Trout Madness