GAMEKEEPING AT HAMERTON: THE CHANGING TIMES. By Albert Spring.

(1993) 1994 reprint. 8vo (134 x 222mm). Pp120. B/w photographs. Dark blue boards, spine titled in gilt.

"...a year by year account of [the author's] life as a gamekeeper...Situated in that part of the English Midlands, where Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire meet, and which used to be called Huntingdonshire, the Hamerton estate was very run down when Albert Spring was first employed there in 1955. His account of how he built up the numbers of pheasant, partridge and hare and reduced the numbers of weasels, stoats, feral cats and foxes, during a period in which there were dramatic changes in the way land was owned and managed, is a unique picture of a disappearing aspect of country life. The changes in farming methods, which Mr Spring deplores, and their effects, subtle as with chemicals or direct as with stubble burning, on wild life, are particularly well mapped. Not only wild life, but also the family that owned the estate, the sporting gentlemen who rented it and the villagers who acted as beaters, all feature in A E Spring's memories of the English rural scene."