For the Love of Shooting

Had Christopher James Batha come into this world in Eastern Europe he might have been born a vampire; in Portugal a werewolf.
The seventh son of a seventh son, Batha was instead born to a poor family of seven brothers and five sisters in Marcher country, just the English side of the Welsh border. By talent and drive that seem by birth-right providentially accorded, he has transcended the privation of his youth to become one of wingshooting’s bona fide celebrities: world-renowned shooting instructor and gunfitter; television-show and DVD host; author, writer and newsletter publisher; globetrotting outfitter; and owner of not one but two British gunmakers. Along the way he’s competed successfully on Britain’s clay-shooting circuit, garnered a bevy of coaching certificates and awards, and sold millions of dollars’ worth of fine guns as salesman-for-hire for some of England’s and Italy’s most famous gunmakers. In a trade dominated by small businesses, Batha has made himself virtually a one-man industry.
Supernatural powers associated with seventh sons aside, Batha has more earthly explanations for his success. “It’s all because of an accident really,” Batha said. “In 1983 a burning building crashed down on me.”
The course of his life hasn’t been the same since.

I met Batha for the first time in autumn 1997 in rural Massachusetts. Then a director of English gunmaker Atkin Grant & Lang, he was visiting the US for a weekend of brainstorming, shooting and drinking (not necessarily in that order) with Ray Poudrier, The Vintagers and the editorial staff of Shooting Sportsman. Poudrier was pulling together the concept of the first Vintage Cup, and both SSM and AG&L were being courted as inaugural sponsors.
To your reticent introverted correspondent, Batha initially appeared larger than life—overwhelmingly so. Six-foot-three and cut like a rugby player, Batha had a hand that swallowed mine when he shook it, and he exuded extroverted energy as bracing as an electric current. Ideas for the Cup crackled forth, so quickly sometimes that Batha’s mouth seemed to struggle to keep up with his thoughts —rapid-fire proposals linked by a staccato “and, and, and, and... ” A natural storyteller, he proved friendly to a fault, was madly keen about fine guns and wingshooting, and wielded powers of salesmanship and marketing with formidable effect.
That fall a decade ago Batha’s name was barely known in the US; at wingshooting shows today he is sometimes barely visible for the crowd of clients and friends surrounding him. Last spring I visited him and his partner, Sara Gump, at their Low Country base in coastal South Carolina to learn more about the man behind the business that is Chris Batha.
Batha was born in 1955 in Oswestry, a market town dating from the Middle Ages in rural Shropshire, the son of a merchant who supported his teeming family by selling antiques and flea-market goods. His love of shooting and guns came early. “Everyone I knew shot—my father, my brothers and most everybody at school,” he told me as we sat on the pollen-dusted porch of a secluded fishing camp on a quiet stretch of South Carolina’s Combahee River. Before he was allowed to own even a BB gun, Batha was making his own bows & arrows. He soon joined the line of beaters at some of the local estates. “I’d get a brace of pheasants at the end of the shoot,” Batha said. “My family lived on a tight budget, so those birds were always a welcome addition to our table.”
His first firearm was a 9mm bolt-action garden gun. (“You’d have thought I’d inherited a pair of Purdeys”), succeeded in time by a single-shot 12-bore. As a boy, Batha was too strapped for cash to buy shotshells, but in the ’60s vermin control was still the order of the day in Britain’s agricultural communities. “You’d go see a farmer, and he’d dole out a couple-three cartridges to shoot crop pests,” Batha said. “If you came back and gave him a rabbit, or a magpie, or couple pigeon, he might give you a handful more.”
He also took up a paper route before school on the weekdays and helped herd pigs and other livestock to market on weekends. “I’d take the money I’d made —only a few shillings—and go see Mr. Lewis at the local sport shop,” Batha said. “I couldn’t afford an entire box, but he’d sell me loose cartridges three or five at a time.
“Cartridges were so precious I learned to never waste a shot.” Batha credits this paucity of shells with helping instill patience—as well as smoothness and accuracy—in his shooting technique. “I’d look at a pigeon coming in and wait until it got very close, thinking, Yeah, that will be a definite kill, and if I make that, I can get a couple more cartridges off the farmer.”
Boys must eventually become men, and for Batha that meant leaving Shropshire at age 16 and setting his sails for larger horizons—literally, in his case, by joining Britain’s merchant navy. “All of a sudden I had a little bit of money,” Batha said. “When I’d get back to port, I’d go buy cartridges—as many as I could—and I began to shoot a hell of a lot.” He also purchased his first “nice gun”—a Webley & Scott-branded Beretta over/under from Cogswell & Harrison. “It cost £350, and I had to finance it for a year before I could say I owned it.”
Four years afloat also gave Batha the opportunity to consider his future. “Back then if you stayed on a ship past about the age of 20,” Batha said, “you were literally unemployable elsewhere. I looked at all these sailors who’d spent their lives at sea, and they were all drunken sods or divorced and miserable and essentially trapped on these ships for life. I thought, Hell, if I don’t do something now, I’ll end up like this. So I decided to become a fireman.”
The London Fire Brigade was recruiting at the time. “They liked people who could climb heights, tie knots and were used to discipline,” Batha said. “An ex-sailor was perfect.” After a rigorous selection process, Batha made the muster and found himself posted in central London at the Westminster Fire Station—serendipitously sited near most of the great London gunmakers. “When I arrived in 1974, there was not only Pur-dey’s, Boss and Holland’s but also Rigby’s, William Evans, Cogs-well & Harrison, Thomas Bland and Churchill Atkin Grant & Lang all within a short walk of Westminster.”
As a boy, Batha had spent hours at the local library reading books on firearms and London’s storied gunmakers. Now their premises were barely farther than the squirt of a fire hose. During his off-duty hours, he now could spend hours wandering through them. “It was fantastic,” Batha said. “Can you imagine this bumbling country ‘oik’ just out of the merchant navy hanging about places like that?”
To the manor born Batha may not have been, but his passion eventually impressed even some of the Old Boys in the trade. One day Churchill’s Don Masters asked Batha if he would deliver a parcel to William Evans. “The shift system of the fire brigade gave me plenty of time off,” Batha said, “so I started shooting as much as possible, both live and inanimate birds, and, eventually, loading in the field and guiding wood pigeon hunts. I slowly progressed to become somewhat of an errand boy for some of the shops and outworkers to the trade. I’d deliver guns to shops and components to outworkers, and take guns to the proof house or barrels out to be blacked and what not.”
He also had joined the London All Gun Club and had begun to shoot clays competitively. “I got pretty good at it,” Batha said, “but I wanted to be better. I saved up my pennies and began to take lessons.” Batha was taught by the likes of Alan & Michael Rose at West London Shooting School, Ken Davies and Andrew Perkins at Holland & Holland, and other noted instructors like Rex Gage, Jack Mitchell, David Olive and J.M Ruffer.
By the late ’70 and ’80s clay shooting in Britain was surging in popularity, and as Batha’s skills improved, wins followed on the local tournament circuit. Shooting grounds began to ask him to freelance coach on corporate-entertainment days when they needed spare instructors for “beginners and have-a-go types.” Batha was a talented shot, but his coaching skills of the time, he admits, had not yet reached parity with his prowess behind the trigger. “I’d try to teach someone to shoot better and then realize I hadn’t a clue how I’d done it myself,” Batha said. “I had none of the ‘fault-cause-correction’ training that professional coaches used.”
Subsequently, he enrolled in both CPSA (Clay Pigeon Shooting Association) and BASC (British Association for Shooting & Conservation) coaching classes. Since then he has gone on to not only graduate from the most advanced course in each organization but also to teach them.
“During the ’80s I began to build a reputation as a reasonably good shot with reasonably good coaching skills,” Batha said, “and also by then I knew a good number of outworkers and makers in the gun trade because I had knocked on their doors at one time or another running errands.”
Whether by fate or fortune, Batha’s growing stature shortly would become the fulcrum upon which his future would hinge. In 1983 Batha and a squad of firefighters were battling a blaze when the ceiling of the building collapsed about them. “Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt,” Batha said, “but I got a bad crack on the head. Afterward, I suffered from slight blurriness and double vision. At the time you couldn’t wear eyeglasses in the fire brigade because of the breathing apparatus we wore—so they retired me.”
Batha was at first despondent. “I thought, My life is finished,” he said. “What the hell am I going to do... ?”
Within a week of his “retirement,” however, offers of work were forthcoming from the trade. Because his first work for the trade was part time, in the mid-’80s Batha also “took the knowledge of a London Hackney Carriage License”—or in plainer English he became a certified London cab driver (a license he maintains to this day and remains proud of). “It was no small feat earning that,” he said. “It took two years to learn every street, road and lane, monument and major building within the six-mile circumference of Charing Cross Station. The ability to travel in and out of London without restriction of bus lanes and parking greatly improved my ability to deliver guns around the trade—and also to earn a decent living during one of the worst recessions ever in the UK.”
At the beginning of this part-time, independent, indentured apprenticeship, “I literally started off painting pattern plates, trapping and carrying cartridge bags and the like,” Batha said. “I also quickly found out that the clients I got for instruction were clients who showed their appreciation with a kind word rather than hard cash. If someone was a good tipper, the senior instructors looked after him... ”
Batha’s subsequent ascent through the ranks of the wingshooting industry on both sides of the Atlantic has been little short of meteoric—particularly in the past 10 years. After tenures as an instructor at several UK shooting schools in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he joined gunmaker Charles Hellis in 1994 and soon moved to Atkin Grant & Lang, where he served as a director for nearly five years. In 2000 he took a position at E.J. Churchill, Ltd., as senior instructor and gunfitter, ultimately leaving to set up on his own after purchasing the name, records and goodwill of Charles Boswell Gunmakers (see “Charles Boswell,” Jan/Feb ’06)—although he remains a sales representative for Italy’s renowned Abbiatico & Salvinelli. He also has had an ownership position in Scottish gunmaker Joseph Harkom since 1998, and although the Harkom business remains dormant, Batha has enjoyed great success with Charles Boswell, taking orders for 30-plus guns and rifles since reviving the business.
In the past five years Batha has assiduously cultivated his growing public profile. In 2003 he starred in his first wingshooting DVD, “Mastering the Double Gun” (with two more on the way); that same year he launched the Chris Batha Gazette newsletter; in ’05 he published his first book, Breaking Clays (with a bird hunting book planned for this year); in ’05 and ’06 he hosted the “Wingshooting the World” television series, aired on the Outdoor Channel. (Editor’s Note: This issue also marks his inaugural as SSM’s Sporting Clays columnist, see p. 56.)
Last year as an outfitter, Batha guided groups to three continents and 10 countries, pursuing everything from mixed-bag shooting in Africa to driven pheasants in Ireland to pigeons in Paraguay. On top of all of this he remains active with the Chris Batha Shooting School, offering lessons, clinics and gunfittings in the US and UK—in ’07 he estimates he conducted more than 700(!) lessons and gunfittings. Last, he recently designed the shooting grounds at Wingfield (see “Wingfield: A Wingshooter’s Dream, May/June), a new luxury community in South Carolina built around the plantation sporting lifestyle.
At 53, Batha has come a long way, literally and figuratively, from his humble upbringing in rural Shropshire. “It stuns me sometimes when I think about it,” Batha reflected. “If there hadn’t been an accident in the fire brigade, I’d just be coming up for retirement in the next three years. I never would have left. Had you told me back when I was 20 or so that in my 50s I’d be swanning around the world making and shooting fine guns, I’d have laughed at you.”
Like many who have had to struggle in life, Batha is as quick as a hare to recognize opportunities and as bold as Caesar to seize them. Much of his success is due to his undeniable skills as a salesman, but there are real gifts behind his gift for gab.
As a wingshooting instructor, for example, Batha is utterly non-dogmatic when it comes to technique, and he has extensive experience across the gamut of shotgunning—from competitive clays to formal (driven) shooting to American-style upland hunting. Such broad perspectives are often lacking in otherwise excellent instructors, and Batha’s possession of it makes him appealing to a wide variety of clients. In addition to his BASC and CPSA coaching accreditations, Batha is also a Fellow of the Institute of Clay Shooting Instructors, a member of the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers, and a Freeman of the City of London.
In the Anglophile world of upscale American wingshooting it is indisputable that a British accent can serve as a springboard for success. Yet I have watched the ambitions and aspirations of more than a few Britons founder in this country because their expertise could not be delivered without traces of condescension or arrogance—traits that do not play well to an American psyche steeped in cultural egalitarianism. Batha, by contrast, has never lost his common touch. “I genuinely like people,” he said. “Ken Davies once said that to succeed in this business you must treat the bin man and a king the same.”
Batha also adores what he does. “Coaching and gunfitting are therapeutic,” he said. “It’s almost like you’re an artist and your student is a blank canvas. There’s nothing nicer than teaching someone to shoot, starting them with a first gun and watching them progress. Next thing you know you’re standing in Ireland on a big windswept hill and a big towering cock pheasant comes off and you think, Wow, that one’s too high for the Guns, and you see it get clattered and come crashing down, and at the end of the drive you go over to congratulate who-ever pulled off this great shot and it turns out it’s Wanda, and she’s only had her first lesson with you two years ago. There’s a real glow that comes from that.”
Batha remains unspoiled by his success, and he retains a sense of wonder and glee that is refreshing in its boyish delight. “Even now I can’t believe it sometimes, that I can actually afford to buy an entire flat of shells,” he said. “If I go into my storeroom and see that there are a couple cases lying around, you’d think I’d discovered the treasures of Aladdin’s Cave.”
It would be easy to state that Batha grew up poor and didn’t like it and his ambition to succeed stems from a yearning to defy his humble beginnings. “I don’t think of myself as ambitious,” he said, reflecting on inner motivations. “However, I relish a challenge.
“But... ” he continued. “I’ll be honest with you. The only—the first and only—reason, ever, to do anything around the gun trade was to be able to shoot more. Everything I’ve ever done is from wanting to shoot more. I couldn’t afford to do it early on. So the opportunity for all of this to happen originated from the thought: If I work at a shooting grounds, I can get hold of more cartridges and shoot as much as I like...
“And I had a similar thought: If I work in the gun trade, I could get a better gun. It’s basically all been about my passion to shoot. People are addicted to all sorts of things—mine is pulling the trigger. And everything has evolved from that.”
The intensity of Batha’s passion is the only supernatural thing about this seventh son.

Author’s Note: For more information on shooting lessons, gunfittings, shooting trips, Charles Boswell and FAMARS shotguns & rifles, and Wingfield, contact Chris Batha, 866-254-2406; www.chris batha.com.

Vic Venters is Shooting Sportsman’s Senior Editor.