There seems little likelihood that Ian Bell, who will be installed as head honcho at the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) in early 2018, will go the way of his predecessor. This does not come about because of the assurance from BASC Chairman, Peter Glenser, that Bell’s incumbency is the result of a “rigorous recruitment process”. After all, BASC members were told exactly the same when the last chief, Richard Ali, was appointed in 2013; giving many of them cause to wonder at BASC’s idea of what comprises rigour, when just three years later Ali was dismissed and escorted from the building shouting that he had been victim of a conspiracy. No, the reason members may believe that the scandal of recent times is behind them is that Bell is cut from an entirely different cloth to the other man. And that cloth is khaki, for Bell will arrive at BASC’s north Wales HQ fresh from heading up British Forces in Germany. Of course as a result of cuts, those forces now comprise of just half a dozen Land Rovers and perhaps an armoured bicycle brigade, so Bell will have to square up to the challenge of handling a much larger force in the shape of BASC’s 140,000 plus roster.
The appointment of the soon-to-be ex-Brigadier to the most important job in shooting may be viewed by some as a backward step, echoing as it does the degree to which superannuated army officers, used to be common in shooting sports bodies and businesses. The mutual attraction was easy to understand. Forces personnel fitted in easily in those places where good organisational skills were paramount and the main focus was on things that go bang. This was especially true of the CLA Game Fair, which provides a splendid example of why having once been such a shoo-in, the recruitment of former soldiers fell from favour. For the first thirty or so years of its existence the Game Fair jogged along run by an ex-Major and managed on site by dozen or so former denizens of the less fancied regiments. Thus it was that the car parks were a vision of serried ranks straighter than ploughed furrows marching over the horizon, whilst exhibitors who deviated by a foot from their show plots were barked at with parade ground brutality. Things went in and went out with clockwork efficiency. And all the while the Game Fair lost money, for over those years the shooting business had moved from a world of comfortable if monotonous reliability to a much more uncertain one, where marketing and sound business skills became of greater use than a clipped accent and an upright bearing.
The armed services have changed and officers – especially those in senior command – now have to deploy similar skills to those demanded by business. Still and all Ian Bell is likely to find himself tested in the years ahead in ways very different to those he experienced when attempting to make a fist of Britain’s depleted presence on the Rhine.