Punt gunning was originally the preserve of the working man but in the 19th century it became a popular pastime among sporting gentlemen, writes Ian Saberton
Throughout the history of firearms the big gun has exercised a fascination among various shooters but it was not until the 19th century that its use on land began to catch on in the British Isles, though to a limited degree. (Read more on antique guns here.)
One of the greatest exponents of the big gun on land was the Englishman Colonel Peter Hawker, a renowned shot of his day, who in his Instructions to Young Sportsmen in All That Relates to Guns and Shooting (ninth edition, 1844) includes a whole chapter on ‘Wildfowl Artillery’. A particular contrivance of his is a wheeled carriage for a stanchion gun with a seat on which the sportsman is required to sit ‘so as to go back with it’ on recoil, so great is the force of the charge. In front of the wheels is a horizontal splinter bar to carry a hurdle or bushes to mask the gun’s approach.
For what Hawker describes as the ‘invisible approach’ he puts forward a design for a contraption like a punt on wheels, one in which the sportsman lies with a hinged cover on top to hide him, the whole disguised by sacking and shrubbery. He goes on to provide a handsome drawing of it.
The problem that severely limited the use of Hawker’s inventions was of course their great weight and the difficulty in transporting them. As he puts it: ‘Let me see the man who will invent anything to work a stanchion gun over bad ground.’
Although the big gun suffered from its lack of mobility on land, on water it was another matter. All round the coasts of Britain and Ireland, notably where there were tidal estuaries or low-lying land honeycombed with muddy creeks, large flocks of wildfowl bunched together on the water and were a tempting proposition to those who could get within range of them. From as early as the 17th century wildfowlers had begun to assail their prey from small sailing or rowing boats, punts and canoes, but it was not until 200 years later that sportsmen turned their particular attention to the punt gun, being seven to 10 feet long in the barrel and weighing anything up to 200 pounds.
A main problem with such guns was control of the recoil. At the beginning of the 19th century it was usually absorbed by roping the butt to the bow of the punt, but otherwise by the bootjack, a padded board bolted to the butt that was able to slide smoothly on the floor. As sportsmen increased the powder charge to two pounds in their desire for longer ranges, the recoil presented a much greater problem. This was resolved in 1824 when Hawker, who was also a keen punt gunner, invented a swivel attachment in which most of the recoil was absorbed by a spiral spring. It was to become a standard fitting.
In his Instructions Hawker describes the types of boat that were used, being one- or two-man punts or canoes ranging from 15 to 25 feet in length, the two-man affair being more popular. In it the front gunner manipulated the gun while his companion kept the boat steady and on target. In the one-man punt, where the gun was usually lashed firm, it naturally fell to the gunner to take aim by moving the boat himself.
When Hawker began publishing his Instructions in 1814 the punt gun was a muzzleloader, which was a great inconvenience, for a scoop containing the powder on the end of a pole had to be thrust down the long barrel to load it. Making certain that the powder and the charge that followed were seated in the chamber was no easy matter, it being almost impossible in a rough sea. The flintlock action was much less of a problem, and gunners were so wedded to it that at first the various types of detonating locks were not well received. Nor, until the advent of the breechloader and cartridge, was the gunners’ conservative liking for the muzzleloader overcome. Punt guns were then made with many types of breeches such as the Snider, the screwed plug and the break-action ejector. They could kill at 200 yards, and Hawker undertook experimental shots at 350, but the range that gave the best results was 100.
The great weight and pattern of shot delivered by the punt gun was capable of producing wholesale slaughter, with the sea being littered with dead and wounded birds, the latter being finished off at close range with a ‘cripple stopper’. Yet HC Folkard in his The Wild-Fowler (1859) describes punt gunning as the crême de la crême of wildfowl shooting, joyously exclaiming that 60 to 100 wigeon had often been stopped with one shot. Of course the gunner did not have it all his own way. He faced the hazards of the climate and sea in a cockleshell boat; he often returned from an arduous trip emptyhanded; and it was not unheard of for his gun to blow up in his face. In his published diaries Hawker records on 19 February 1818 how his 96-pound gun blew to pieces and he was set on fire with a pound of gunpowder in his pocket.
The gunners’ appetites were nonetheless insatiable and both Hawker and Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey, another keen punt gunner, had double-barrelled punt guns, much to the envy of their contemporaries. Hawker’s gun had one barrel fired by a flintlock and the other by percussion, the idea being that the flintlock, being slower to ignite, would set off its charge a fraction later than the other lock. As a result one barrel would catch some birds on the water and the other the rest as they rose. A gun made specially to remove all possibility of missing long-range shots was a seven-barrelled swivel gun, which, as Howard Blackmore remarks, was as near to a piece of naval armament as any self-respecting sportsman would care to go. It was the big brother of Pieper’s Mitrailleuse goose gun, which fired seven .22 long cartridges simultaneously and covered a three-foot target at 125 yards.
In the British Isles interest in punt gunning overlapped into the early 20th century but by the Great Depression of the 1930s it had almost entirely lapsed among gentlemen, becoming again the preserve of the working man, for many of whom it was indeed a necessity. There remained, however, the odd gentleman gunner, for example the actor James Robertson Justice, who in the 1950s hunted with the Duke of Edinburgh on the Wash. Today punt gunning has become almost a lost art, being now limited to only a handful of enthusiasts who practise it, for instance, on the Solway Firth, one of the most dangerous stretches of tidal water in Europe. With something not far short of artillery being brought into action, it is not surprising that section 5(1) of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 re-enacts an Act of 1954 by effectively prohibiting the use of any punt gun in Britain with a barrel having an internal diameter at the muzzle of more than 1¾ inches.
