Lindsay Waddell

County Durham-based and former headkeeper of the Raby estate in Upper Teesdale, Lindsay is a longstanding Shooting Times columnist on grouse and moorland matters. He spent much of his boyhood with his aunt and uncle, a shepherd, in the Angus Glens, attaching himself from the age of seven or eight to Dick Barrett, the grouse keeper on Glenprosen, and still owns and occasionally uses his uncle’s Belgian hammer gun, well over 100 years old. Lindsay joined Upper Teesdale as headkeeper in 1976 and managed 30,000 acres of grouse moor there for four decades, part of a National Nature Reserve carrying SSSI, SPA and SAC designations. He was chairman of the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation until his retirement from full-time keepering, when Liam Bell succeeded him, and became the organisation’s honorary vice-president.