Radical Conservatives: Middle-Class Masculinity, the Shikar Club and Big-Game Hunting

In Britain during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, a number of essentially middle-class organizations were marshalled to protect, encourage or celebrate the killing of wildlife for sport. ¹ One such organization, the Shikar Club, symbolized 'the virility' of British imperial big-game hunting, a recreation which was increasingly contrasted with 'the emasculated sport' to be had either in the battue ² or by fox-hunting in Britain, sports which, in the view of Shikar Club purists, were suffering from varying degrees of plutocratic excess, urban decadence, industrial encroachment and, for some, the debilitating presence of women.