In 1986 I joined Spalding and District Wildfowlers Association, initially to provide a legitimate purpose for me obtaining a shot gun certificate by having a place to shoot legally. Over the next few years, despite not being the most avid of wildfowlers I became more involved with the club, especially Public Relations and conservation activities. In this time I was lucky enough to spend substantial time with the club president Tony Creasey (pictured on the right in the picture below):
Tony often invited me to go with him doing goose counts early morning sat in his car on private farm roads and banks that he had permission to use. In this time together he taught me where the planets are in the early morning sky, the wingbeats and calls of different birds, how to call hares and foxes. He also told me tales about his life and early wildfowling adventures.
During the War Tony was a projectionist at the cinema which, in a time with no television, was a reserved occupation. It was in this period, from what he told me, that he shot his first duck on the tidal part of the River Welland just outside Spalding. It was a duck he had never seen before and took it along to the local taxidermist who identified it as a mallard. This is hard to imagine today when the mallard is the most common of British ducks, in Spalding thanks to the rearing and release into the wild by wildfowlers.
Tony’s first duck was eaten. After the War, Tony married his wife Dorothy and they moved into their first home, a double decker bus, such was the housing shortage at the time. Tony became a painter and decorator, employed by the local brewery, Soames, later to be taken over by Manns. In the time that I knew him he lived in a house in Spalding. Much of Tony’s early wildfowling experience was not on the foreshore of The Wash, but inland of Spalding on Cowbit Wash, a flood plain to the west of Spalding, subject to frequent winter flooding up to the 1950’s when a flood relief Channel called the Coronation Channel by-passed water around Spalding and reduced the need for Cowbit Wash to be flooded. This meant wildfowling opportunity was greater to the East of Spalding where the Welland met the sea in the Wash. Wildfowling was predominantly a local activity. However, as transport improved and became cheaper local shore gunners were joined by an increasing number of visiting guns on the marshes and muds of The Wash. This interest in wildfowling was fuelled by books and articles published from the 1930’s not least those by the artist Sir Peter Scott.
It needs to be understood that coastal wildfowling takes advantage of birds “flighting” to or from roosting and feeding grounds, mainly at dawn and dusk, but also at other times dependant upon the tide and weather. High tides provide additional “flights” of ducks and geese. The most successful wildfowler is the one that understands the marsh intimately. However, many did not understand this, and with shore wildfowling being free and uncontrolled there were times when too many wildfowlers were on the marshes, indeed some were treating it like walked up game shooting, rather than the sport of skill, patience and cunning that it is. Indeed one morning in the early 1950’s saw over one hundred cars parked at Shep Whites on the marshes near Holbeach. With this influx of guns also came the “marsh cowboy” that also shot farmer’s land behind the sea wall illegally.
Local wildfowlers recognised that this disturbance and behaviour was unsustainable and would result in an outright ban of wildfowling and they started to form Wildfowling clubs at Boston, Spalding, Holbeach, Gedney Drove End and ultimately throughout the Wash from Heacham to Skegness. These clubs obtained formal legal shooting rights over the foreshore and began to regulate and limit the activity.
Tony Creasey was a founder member of Spalding and District Wildfowler’s Association. The kernel of this organisation was born in The Barge pub in Commercial Road Spalding.
Whilst we might call The Barge a pub today it was in fact a Beer House. It had no draft beer and was stocked with bottled beer by the land lady. In the front room a small group of young men gathered together to tie flies and to tell tales of, amongst other things, wildfowling. It was five regulars from The Barge that were to form what eventually became Spalding and District Wildfowlers Association. The way was led in 1954 by the formation of Holbeach and District Wildfowlers Association and a grim warning was given to local wildfowlers by the closure of much of the Norfolk coast to wildfowling about 1955.
Spalding Wildfowlers became a formal organisation at its inaugural meeting in May 1957 at the Punch Bowl, Spalding (later meetings were at The Ship Albion). The Chairman was Tony Creasey, Secretary Ray Shearer and Treasurer Bob Wilson.
In the early days Spalding and District Wildfowlers Association was a club without a marsh. The early correspondence of the club reveals a struggle for recognition by the national body the Wildfowling Association for Great Britain and Ireland, later to become The British Association for Shooting and Conservation. John Anderton, of W.A.G.B.I was initially against the formation of the S.D.W.A. fearing it would split the efforts of wildfowlers, preferring instead the established Holbeach club. It was a letter from the then Holbeach Club secretary, Stan Pywell, stating that the Holbeach Club had no objections to the formation of the Spalding club that enabled it to obtain recognition from and affiliation to W.A.G.B.I. Thus a partnership with the Holbeach club developed that was to hold local wildfowlers in good stead.
The committee of Spalding and District Wildfowlers Association quickly set about attempting to obtain leases and licences to shoot the foreshore. Not least, one of the first problems was to find out who owned what. Friends in the local Drainage Board helped. As with all shooting rights the club had to obtain people’s trust and confidence in order to receive assistance, advice and ultimately a lease or licence from a landlord. The following story illustrates this:
Some time before the formation of Spalding Wildfowlers Tony and a friend were returning from the marsh along a footpath across Joe Ward’s land when they could see that the local keeper was having a heated exchange with some poachers. They offered their assistance to the keeper, but fortunately this was not required. In 1957, when Tony represented the S.D.W.A. at Roythornes' solicitors offices in Spalding Joe Ward turned to his game keeper, Bill Sentence, and asked if he had any objections to a proposed licence to shoot over the foreshore being given to the club. Tony felt it was his former encounter with the gamekeeper that helped obtain a positive response. Whilst in the solicitor’s office Tony was asked what wildfowling meant to him by Joe Ward. Whilst it would be impossible to recall his reply Tony’s feelings about wildfowling were later described to me in these words he wrote for me:
“Stand on the great sea bank just after dawn looking to the East, on the horizon the sun is just rising like a flaming red ball casting its rays of orange on the bottom of the wind swept clouds. To the South the browns and greys of the flat fen farmlands stretch as far as the eye can see. A field away, pheasants call to one another. A hare lopes across the winter sown wheat. To the North East the vast marsh with its miles of mud flats, the distant sound of the incoming tide sending water snaking along the hundreds of creeks that criss-cross through the green and yellow saltings. Great clouds of waders twist and turn. In the distance the sight of flying battalions of Brent Geese on the tide line.
But to my ears there is no sound half as sweet as the call of the redshank, or the lonely cry of the curlew, the laughing call of the shelduck or the whee-oo of the drake wigeon. But of all, the sight and sound that gives me the greatest delight is the wonderful chorus of pinkfoot geese, to hear it in the evening as the skeins come back to roost having spent the day feeding inland. Faint in the distance, the nearer it comes, the louder it gets until the air vibrates to a crescendo finally to die away into the darkness, just the odd call of an old gander. They are home safely on the high sands. A quietness then descends on the great marsh as though it is at peace. To stand there on such a night is like hearing the last note of an organ in a great cathedral. All that is left is the memory of that wonderful sight and sound.
To me these are the pleasures of wildfowling.” - Tony Creasey
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