The Sandringham Country Show and Driving Trials is a two-day event and last year, the King's Lynn Fur & Feather Society was invited to stage a pigeon show, but we had to be there for both days.
Sadly, today's pigeon exhibitor baulks at the thought of having pigeons away from home for more than one day - with the exception of a couple of major championship shows.
I have used the word 'sadly' advisedly as this has resulted in the loss of many opportunities of displaying our hobby to the general public. I can think of Lincolnshire, Newark, the Royal and Royal Norfolk Agricultural Shows as examples. We cannot dictate to these Agricultural Societies, we are only small fry in their eyes nowadays. Now we have lost Peterborough Summer Show too.
We overcame this at Sandringham last year by staging a competitive show on the Saturday and mounting a Pigeon Display on the Sunday, which turned out to be immensely popular with the visiting public, greatly assisted by our friends from the Cambridge Columbarian Society with their renowned Aviary.
However, we found that re-arranging everything early on the Sunday morning was harder work than the previous days show!
This year, at home on the Saturday evening, we realised that our exhibitors had left some fifty or so birds in the pens overnight to help with Sunday's display. 'Enough for a show in itself' suggested someone. 'Why not?' And so more prize cards and rosettes went into my brief case for Sunday.
We sorted out six classes, some very mixed but numerically worthwhile. Entry fee? But they were all willing to leave their birds for the display so, no entry fee. Hence, 'buy one, get one free'.
A judge? A stroke of good fortune. Who should stick his head into the marquee but one of the old East Anglian stalwarts, Rodney Platt. I suggested to his wife Sheila, that she should take Rodney for a short walk and return in half-an-hour. When he showed up again, I handed him his judging sheet.
