Taken from The Field, November 22, 1956

By MARK BEAUFOY

The celebrated lines "Never, never let your gun pointed be at anyone" have been quoted by sportsmen wherever English is spoken. They have been reprinted many times and are usually acknowledged to Commander Mark Beaufoy. But who he was and how he came to write the verses must be known to few.

His full name was Mark Hanbury Beaufoy and he was not a commander, although his father had been a captain in the Royal Navy. The verses were written for his eldest son, Henry Mark, when he was given his first gun, a 28-bore, as a Christmas present in 1902. Henry Mark Beaufoy was then 15 years old. He is now 69 and lives at Steeple Aston in Oxfordshire, where he treasures the gun, and still has the first bird he shot with it, a dabchick, preserved in a glass case.

The verses were intended to serve as a constant reminder of the rules of shooting, but the rules were not new to him, for he had been initiated before then, as his game books show. He shot his first partridge when he was 13, in September 1900, and his first pheasant on January 3rd, 1901, following it up with 10 two days later. The next September, he had a good day rabbit shooting with another gun, getting 33 out of a total of 59.

There were two other Beaufoy boys, George and Robert, who were likewise take in hand by their father. George's first shots are also recorded. He was killed when a bomb fell on the family distillery in London during the last war. Robert, the youngest son, lost his left arm in the 1914-18 war. But this did not stop him shooting, for he became a very good one-armed shot, at first using a pistol grip, but later discarding it.

Mr Henry Mark Beaufoy has vivid memories of his father's shoot which was on the estate adjoining Coombe House, near Shaftesbury, close to the Wiltshire and Dorset border. There were some 1,500 acres and another 500 were rented. The country was ideal for pheasant shooting, with long valleys and trees that made for really high birds. One of these valleys, nearly a mile long, ad a bridge over it. On this, Henry and his brother George would be stationed with their 28-bores to act as "elevators". Their father, who started shooting when he was 20, preferred quality to quantity and disliked low shots. An enthusiast, he not only had Coombe but ran another shoot at Ashmore, in Dorset. Such was the background from which the verses grew.

Mark Beaufoy's business interests were concerned with the Beaufoy vinegar firm in Lambeth established by an ancestor in the eighteenth century. He was a Liberal M.P. for Kennington from1889 to 1895 and High Sheriff for Wiltshire. In his younger days he kept mastiffs and bloodhounds and from 1920 to 1922 he was chairman of the Kennel Club. He died in 1922.

It is sometimes thought that a seventh verse was added to the shooting injunctions, but this was not so. The author had the intention of writing one on the danger of resting guns against a wall, when they could be knocked down by a dog, with disastrous consequences. However, he never did so. But when his "advice" was posted in the butts at Glenkirk, Inverness-shire, someone added another piece "After Mark Beaufoy" which reads:

Some verses in the same vein applying to grouse driving were suggested by an unnamed correspondent in The Field in 1927. They hardly have the same ring and are as follows:

When Beaufoy wrote his Father's Advice a hundred copies were printed and given to friends. The verses rapidly became popular, but the author did not always get the credit for them.

It was said that they had been found among the effects of an officer killed in the South African war, a gamekeeper had tem published in a Sussex magazine as his own, gun-makers sent them out with their cartridges, and they were printed in various publications - sometimes with permission, but more often without. A correspondent to The Sporting Times ascribed the lines to the Rev. J. L. Browne, headmaster of St. Andrew's School, Eastbourne. Mr Browne denied the authorship, and in November 1910 Mr Beaufoy wrote to say they were his, adding : "Perhaps they have not been wholly useless - if so I am amply rewarded".

He certainly has had that reward for their merits were appreciated at Sandringham and they even served as a scholarly exercise for Mr A. S. Gaye, a former pupil of the headmaster of St. Andrew's School, who put them into Latin.

Mark Hanbury Beaufoy's name will always be associated with his occupation of a spare moment, though he has far greater claims to recognition. He was born in 1854 and educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In order to give a chance in life to poor children, he founded the Beaufoy Institute (now taken over by the London County Council) to succeed the "ragged school" which his family had established before the Education Act of 1870. He also carried on the family benefactions to the City Of London School.