ian Guy Wallace

Guy Wallace, who has died aged 81, was a colourful character in the hunting world, a kennel-man, gundog trainer, big game hunter, mercenary and author.

In 2017 he became the subject of a documentary, The End of the Game, in which the film-maker David Graham Scott accompanied Wallace to South Africa, where, aged 73 and lame, he hunted down an old but still dangerous Cape buffalo. Graham Scott, a committed vegan, called his documentary a “poetic study of a relic from the colonial period”. A throwback to the age of Empire, Wallace could have walked out of a novel by G A Henty or H Rider Haggard. He usually sported a big moustache and whiskers (which, he was clear, were “buggers’ grips” rather than sideburns), a pipe and a blue-and-white spotted neckerchief. In
spite of his stabs at conformity he was, in the words of his favourite poet, Robert Service, one of “The Men That Don’t Fit In”. Between 2002 and 2017, he lived off-grid in a caravan and a fallen-down, two-room “but and ben” cottage on the Thrumster estate, just south of Wick in the far north of Scotland. He stalked deer for the pot and, for company, kept several pointers and a parrot called Jambo, with whom he conversed in Swahili learnt from his days in Africa. The parrot could also speak
English, “Guy Wallace speaking” being his most fluent sentence (mimicking his master on his mobile phone).

Ian Guy Hamilton Wallace was born at Epsom on September 8 1941, the second of five children in a Catholic military family. His father John had a dental practice off Sloane Square and was on the hunt committee of the Chiddingfold Farmers in Sussex; all the children were encouraged, and brought up, to hunt. Their mother Maureen, a nurse, was matron at Pony Club camps.

Wallace attended the Catholic Beaumont College in Old Windsor and rowed and played rugby to a decent standard. He kept hawks as a boy and in later life trained and flew a red-tailed buzzard. In 1961 he entered the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, where he was the cadet huntsman of the Sandhurst beagles, mentored by the legendary huntsman Roy Clinkard, who hunted the Aldershot beagles nearby. He played polo at Sandhurst and, later, in Rhodesia (as it then was) and Argentina. “They paid me to hunt all winter and play polo all summer,” he once said of his Army days. Commissioned into the Gordon Highlanders as a second lieutenant, Wallace was seconded to 2 PARA. While stationed at Fort George, near Inverness, he hunted for two seasons with the Linlithgow and Stirlingshire. He then saw service in Kenya and Borneo.

As a contract officer, he joined the Sultan of Oman’s Armed Forces as a captain, then the Abu Dhabi Defence Force. The adjutant, however, arranged for him to leave speedily when he started firing his pistol into his soldiers’ tents to get them out of bed. Wallace’s attention rarely stood still. Ignoring Robert Service’s advice about those who “chop and change, and each fresh move/ is only a fresh mistake”, he spent two years farming 40,000 head of cattle in Rhodesia, where he perfected his skills as a tracker, shooting buffalo that threatened the herd, and once even a leopard. He then headed to South America, where he broke in horses in Paraguay.

In the early 1970s he returned to England and set up a farming practice with an old army chum near Bodmin Moor and hunted with the East Cornwall foxhounds. Before this partnership failed, he flew sparrow hawks to catch magpies and met his future wife Marian, whom he married on the Glorious Twelfth in 1975.
For the next five seasons, Wallace’s peripatetic journey saw him as kennelman to three packs of foxhounds: the Croome & West Warwickshire (1975-77), the Flint and Denbigh (1977-79) and the South Hereford (1979-80). The role – looking after the hounds and running the fallen stock collection service – was an unusual one for a privately educated army officer. He occasionally whipped in and hunted the hounds when the professional huntsman was indisposed.

Wallace next turned his hand to becoming a shoot keeper and training gundogs. He was the author of several books, including The Versatile Gundog (1995), Training Dogs for Woodland Deer Stalking (1998) and The Specialist Gundog (2000). Wallace and his wife Marian set up the Warren Gundog Centre in Llandefalle, Brecon, which they ran for 15 years. At the same time, Wallace ran a shoot at Aramstone in Herefordshire for John Williams, father of the National Hunt trainer Venetia Williams.
On the move again, in 2002 Wallace moved alone into his caravan on the Thrumster estate, half an hour’s drive south of John O’Groats, where he farmed and culled deer. (By the end of his life, he estimated he had shot more than 1,000 deer.) He and Marian were divorced in 2007. It was at Thrumster that David Graham Scott first encountered Wallace. The End of the Game, punctuated with occasional expletives and sympathetic wisdoms from Wallace, throws the odd couple together on a game reserve in South Africa for 10 days. “He was certainly not politically correct,” Graham Scott said. On the first night, after too much brandy, Wallace lost his false
teeth.
By the end of filming, however, Graham Scott felt his own views on hunting soften: “He is hunting and stalking an animal that’s lived a life in the wild and doesn’t know what’s going on until a bullet obliterates it. That is better than some poor hen living in a battery cage or a pig in those horrible pens.”
The hunter, meanwhile, had a chance to articulate his misunderstood code of conduct: “The whole thing is about getting as close as you can to the quarry for a humane kill… For me, that’s the ethics of it, which seem to be going out of every bloody thing these days. Or perhaps I’m just an old fuddy-duddy.”
He would not shoot within 500 yards of his vehicle, or anywhere near a waterhole. “The animals need their water… so to ambush them at a waterhole absolutely stinks.”