Page 65 - Bespoke Issue

I got my gun license and returned to Jericho farm to get kitted out. Gun tting was the rst order of the day, not that I was ordering a bespoke gun, but it still has to t. Shirley Florent says it should be rst consideration when buying a gun, t should come before price, style and brand. Shirley and Doug have been in shooting since the ‘70s, they opened their London store in 1982 before moving the company to Jericho Farm in 1989 where they opened the new shop and shooting ground that is the Oxford Gun Company. I started my day in the shop with a few basics of how to stand and mount the gun, correct mounting is easy once you have the right sized gun. . The stock needs to t nicely into your shoulder allowing your cheek to rest on it, whilst you line up the sighting pips, both eyes open. If you’re not mounted properly the recoil will give you sharp dig in the shoulder and cheek, you don’t want to go home looking like you’ve been in the boxing gym. Everyone is sent home with ‘Shirley’s
homework’, which is to practise your mount in front of a mirror, this should be muscle memory. If you mount correctly, you sight correctly and you’re well on your way to killing some clay.
Then there is the clothing, a good shooting vest gives you a comfortable mount on the shoulders and has big pockets to empty boxes of cartridges into. Decent boots are a must, as it usually gets a bit muddy so you don’t want it in your car (that’s what the tailgate of the Range Rover is for)... Then there is ear protection, an absolute necessity, any good pair of ear defenders will do, but I opted to buy myself a pair of noise cancelling ones, exactly the same as we see used on the pit wall, so I can hear everything, but the sound of the shot is muted. So I was all kitted out with very nice Grade II Browning with a beautiful wood on the stock and intricate engraving on the gun. By the end of the day I was hitting plenty of clays and loaded my
new gun and accessories behind the seats of the car. Back then I used my Ferrari 360 to commute, which stood out amongst the various 4x4s at the club, so David used to remember me as ‘Ferrari man’. He had just started a completion called the schools challenge after his close collaboration with Bredon School, to get youngsters into the sport and we supported the events wherever possible and my eldest son went on one of the rst ‘young shots’ game days and thoroughly enjoyed it bagging a brace of Pheasants with his 20 bore.
When we visited the club recently for this feature I hadn’t pulled a trigger in two years. So David and new head coach Dan were to take Jenny and I out for the afternoon and give her a bit of a lesson. Jenny started with the standard Florent stance and mounting lesson in the shop, as she’d never been clay shooting. Then with a club gun that tted her we made our rounds of the different and varied
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