Anecdotes.....
As you might imagine, nearly everyone involved with the Randle has their own tale to tell, and it's not always about the shooting ! If you have any of your own to add, we'd love to include them.
- Mog Thomson: when I was Captain for the first time back in the 1980s, there was one Randle morning when the team was well into their shoot... and out of the corner of my eye I could see a man with a dog emerge from the woods on the right hand side and start to walk along the top of the butts, well outside the cone of fire at that point but seemingly unaware of ten shooters firing into the butts! The range officer and I were reluctant to disturb the rhythm of our shooters by stopping the detail, so we took the decision to watch him closely; fortunately the detail finished before he came too close! Apparently, he walks his dog along the butts every day at 7 a.m. - and this was the only day in the year when there was any shooting at that time. I had a few more grey hairs at the end of that shoot !!
- Liz Devine: my husband Jim was a serving officer in the Royal Navy stationed in Washington DC, and while there we always attended the National Championships at Camp Perry. Imagine the consternation one year when I qualified to shoot in the American Randle Team! Fortunately, the NRA Competitions Manager, George Harris, stepped in before an international incident could occur !!
- Viv Blow: I have acted as wind coach several times, and it's interesting to see how different shooters deal with the occasion - Ida wanted me to lie there and say nothing, and Chris asked me to talk all the way through but not about shooting !
Trawling through the team photos over the years, one can see variety in the Union Flag we used... sometimes it has been a tea-towel version of the flag, sometimes it was forgotten altogether... and in 2017 with no flag available Zara Roberts produced a scarf she was wearing which fitted the bill nicely. In 2019 we decided that it would be fitting to have a permanent board to use in the photos, so this was donated by the Captain and Adjutant for future use... and at least it will always be the correct way up!
Once, in pre-computer days, when we were checking all the scores on the Tuesday evening ready to announce the team the next day, we narrowly avoided an embarrassing situation; just before publishing the team names, we realised that one of them was actually a South African shooter, but this hadn't been recorded on the results sheet - oops!