Features
Gamekeeper Charlotte breaks the Mellors mould
What on earth would Mellors have made of it? One of the countryside’s last fortresses of masculinity is being invaded by women. Female gamekeepers were pretty rare when Lady Chatterley’s Lover—D.H. Lawrence’s explicit novel about Mellors’s love affair with his employer’s wife—scandalised polite society in 1928. Now, they are joining the profession in ever-increasing numbers. The latest female recruit to the University of Cumbria’s teenage army of apprentice gamekeepers is farmer’s daughter 19-year-old Charlotte Gilhespy.
Having studied an A Level in drama at school she decided she preferred treading the grouse moors near her home to the boards of theatre-land.
“I’ve been a beater since I was 13,” she explained, working both pheasant and grouse shoots near her Northumbria home. “One of the local gamekeepers who knew my dad said he needed help and that was how I got into it.” Whilst the increasing concentration on conservation in gamekeeping partly explains its growing attraction to women, Charlotte has never been shy of the shoot. “That side of things has never ever bothered me or the vermin control aspect of gamekeeping,” she said.
As an apprentice gamekeeper on the Allendale Stublick Estate near Hexham, Charlotte attends the Newton Rigg Campus for blocks of academic study towards her NVQ Level 2. She could choose to eventually progress into further and higher education courses in gamekeeping and other related landbased subjects.
Newton Rigg lecturer Steve Bragg said “Charlotte is treated no differently to the young men who fill the remaining places on the popular work-based learning course. She is already working as a keeper so she has a good working knowledge of the business and the lads accept her as one of their own. She can do most of the things—apart from perhaps some really heavy manual work—that the lads can do. In some areas, she can even be better.”
For Charlotte, the gamekeeping lifestyle suits her down to the ground. “Working in an office is not for me. I love the freedom of the open air and no-one breathing down my neck and my long-term ambition is to become a head gamekeeper.”
Of her male apprentice colleagues Charlotte is quite complimentary. “The only thing they have ever teased me about is saying that I lay down pinkcoloured traps, which isn’t even very funny! But on the whole I get along with them pretty well. My advice to any girls thinking of gamekeeping as a career is just go for it. Don’t let anyone tell you it is not for you.”