Anglo American Shooting Society

Some 25 years ago, Shooting Sportsman Magazine received an invitation from British gunmakers Atkin Grant & Lang to attend the Game Fair with them that summer in Yorkshire. AG&L’s owner was Ken Duglan, and the invitation included a couple of nights at his home at Broomhills Shooting Ground, north of London. I was the editor then, and naturally I accepted Ken’s offer. 

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We had a blast; Gunmakers’ Row at the Game Fair was a Mecca for people like us. The true value of that junket, though, turned out to be Ken himself, and our resultant friendship, which only grew until he died unexpectedly in late summer, scant weeks shy of his 78th birthday. He suffered a stroke and then sepsis, and went under on September 19. 

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When we met, I was putting together shooting trips while Ken had the shooting at a Scottish estate called Corsewall, so after that Game Fair I began bringing people over there; eventually this became the AASS, Anglo American Shooting Society. Each November I arrived on Ken’s doorstep and together we looked after our shooting teams. It was more pleasure than business, and there never was a better partner to work with. 

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Ken was warm and generous, kind, thoughtful, inventive, lightning-quick, witty and a natural raconteur and entrepreneur. After he sold AG&L and Broomhills, he helped his daughter Sian and her husband Carl create what’s now a thriving countryside business called Carl Russell & Company Gunmakers. Ken’s other daughter, Sarah, used to put on a chauffeur’s outfit, borrow his vintage Bentley and hire herself out for weddings. 

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When Sian and Carl presented him with grandson Billy, in 2016, Ken was beside himself with joy. Lately, he’d been taking Billy to football every Saturday morning. Now Billy and his Mum and Dad, and everyone who was so close to Ken—Sarah, Katherine, Sweeney, Dr. John, Rock and his team, Stephane & Annie, Terry, Peter . . . we are all bereft.

 

—Silvio Calabi