The Scottish Smallbore Rifle Association 1966 - 2017
There has been a paper archive of the SSRA lurking in various locations for a long time. It came to us in 1998 when my wife Shirley became the association secretary and was in our garage when we lived near Falkirk for years, and then latterly it was stored in the rafters of the club in Larbert.
In the summer of 2022, it ended up once more in our garage, and I decided that it was time to try to do something constructive with it - and so started two years of work that has largely come to an end in the last few days.
One might wonder why anyone would take this on, and whether there are any benefits in looking back. While I’ve always been interested in the history of the sport, and have undertaken other substantial pieces of work, such as the history of those hundreds of people who have represented Scotland in our sport, I’m not sure if I could have articulated particularly coherently the reasons why it had meaning. What has been interesting in recent years is to see other, much larger and higher profile organisations, engaging more fully and explicitly with their history. Team GB – the British Olympic team – is one that has, and talks about the unbreakable chain of athletes who have represented the United Kingdom at Olympic Games since the inception of the modern Olympics in 1896. As new athletes join the tiny group of approximately 6,000 people to have ever earned that singular honour, their part in this chain is explicitly talked about, the chain that includes former Olympians, current Olympians and will include future Olympians. A chain that will not be broken while the Games exist. Similar principles have also been employed by the New Zealand ‘All Blacks’ rugby union team – another team with a long history and high profile across the decades. And all of this can help shape the culture of sports and teams going forward. The purpose is not to pretend that everything was always perfect in the past, but to reflect some of what did happen, yes celebrate the successes, but also recognise and acknowledge the challenges and perhaps try to learn from how they were tackled, and try to build a strong, positive and enduring culture throughout the organisations – helping generations of athletes more explicitly contribute to a legacy for future generations, and leaving the ‘jersey’ in a better place than when they received it.
So, how do these ideas apply to our sport? Shooting has a long history, and our Fullbore cousins have a solid claim to being one of the earliest sports to engage in international competition in the ‘modern’ world - with the Elcho Match between Scotland and England starting in 1862, pre-dating both Football and Rugby Union. Shooting was included in the 1896 Olympic Games, but we have to wait until 1908 until smallbore events were included in the London Games. 1906 was the date of the first smallbore rifle Home Countries International match – for teams of ten prone shooters – and there are trophies contested as recently as three months ago that contain the names of winning clubs and individuals going back, for example, to 1908 (The Pullar Targe), 1924 (The Scottish Cup), 1926 (The Daily Record) and 1929 (The Haig). We have a list of 576 people who have represented Scotland in international competition in our various Prone, 3P and Air Rifle events between 1908 and 2024. We have a small group of athletes who made to Commonwealth Games, a smaller group who won medals while there – and beyond Scotland our very, very best who made it as far as the World Championships and Olympic Games.
In a sense, everyone who participates in our sport – be they novices in a club, right through to our multiple Olympians – are part of the unbreakable chain that runs through our past, present and future. I guess I was fumbling my way towards this – somewhat shambolically and incoherently – with the previous projects like the register of Scottish caps, and there was other great work going on elsewhere, such as the SSRA Hall of Fame that Bill Hamilton created. There was a photo board that we had at Meadowbank in Edinburgh when the training centre was open between 2013 and 2018, covered in dozens of photos of Scottish athletes on international podiums – from Alister Allan’s early Commonwealth Games medals in the 1970s right through to the major championships and Games of the 2010s, and after much effort I was able to produce a full set of photographs of all Scotland’s Commonwealth Games medallists across all the Shooting disciplines.
So, with all that in mind, I really felt that it was important that we did not lose the history of the SSRA – which did nearly happen – and the part it has played in this unbreakable chain that runs through the sport.
My initial thought was to simply scan the older results and find somewhere to put them online. The SSRA website, which I started in 2000 and ran for ten years, seemed like a good location. Since SSRA merged into STS in 2016 it had remained in place as an archive of seventeen years of results and news stories, so it was just a case of adding to that. Or so I thought at the time…
In terms of results, there was a pretty comprehensive archive – particularly the excellent records kept by both Bob Normand and Anne Hamilton in their respective lengthy periods at the helm of the association, augmented by personal archives from Robin Law, Shirley and I, and from the Edinburgh University and EU Alumni clubs in Edinburgh.
Scanning A4 results to PDF files was simple enough, but for those who have been around long enough to remember Bob’s time as Secretary may remember his penchant for brightly coloured paper – and it was all Foolscap, so much longer than A4 and too long for any domestic scanner to deal with – so for every page it meant scanning the top and bottom of the page separately as JPEG images, merging them in Photoshop before then converting them to PDFs. That really slowed me down! However the task has finally been completed.
If you go to the old SSRA website (http://www.ssra.co.uk.) and click on Domestic Results, you will then find links to a number of decades, with results available in much the same format as the 21st Century ones which have been accumulating there since 2000.
You will also see that more recent results are there as well. I was finding it quite challenging to seek out results on the current STS website, so I have taken the liberty to linking to those as well, so we have most of an archive in one place now covering 1974 to 2024.
Inevitably some results could not be found, and I would be really grateful if any individuals or clubs could please search their archives and please try to help fill any of the gaps identified below:
Mid 1960s – Mid 1970s
Although the association was initially formed in 1966, there was very little in the archive for these first eight years, and much effort seems to have been directed towards trying to get agreement from the NSRA for what the SSRA would be allowed to do, and not do. Similar ‘Unions’ had been created around the same time in England, Wales and perhaps Northern Ireland, and formally recognised by NSRA quite quickly. It would appear that our forebears here in Scotland had been less keen to agree with restrictions being imposed by NSRA, and in conjunction with the Scottish Pistol Association, the SSRA was not formally recognised until 1972!
I have found one set of trial results from 1967, and there are references to other trials and a late-season competition in some minutes, but otherwise there is really no information about this period. So, if anyone has anything – either in paper form, or even recollections of activity taking place during these years – please get in touch.
Mid 1970s – Mid 1980s
The arrival of Bob Normand as Secretary, and no doubt other willing hands, seems to have sparked the creation of several of the domestic competitions that are still run to this day – The Silver Medal and Freuchie in 1974, the CanDicap in 1975, the Speedway in 1976, the 10m Air Championships initially in 1976 and then annually from 1978, and the 50m Prone Grand Prix series from 1978 onwards.
Results in general are pretty much all in place, with a couple of exceptions:
1977 – The Speedway Final is missing.
1979 – The fifth Prone Grand Prix, branded as Inverness-shire, but probably shot close to Forres in Moray, is missing. This is the only Prone Grand Prix in 46 years for which we don’t know who took the points, so while we know who won the series, we don’t have a final points table.
Also, no records of the results of the Freuchie seem to have been kept in this period – we know who won, because it’s engraved on the trophy, but otherwise there’s no information that I have found.
Mid 1980s – Mid 1990s
A change of Secretary from Bob Normand to Anne Hamilton in the mid 1980s also marks the start of a substantial expansion of the competition programme. The Speedway and Freuchie both gained additional competitions for shooters in classes C & D. The 3P Championship makes a first appearance, as do the 3P and Air Rifle Grand Prix series. There are various forms of club competitions in matchplay format, to work around the restrictions agreed with the NSRA in the early ‘70s.
Again, the results archive is comprehensive and not too many gaps. Items I have identified as missing include:
The 1986 Speedway Final.
The 1986 3P Championship Final.
The results of the various Indoor and 50m Matchplay leagues are incomplete, completely missing in some years, other years I’ve only been able to find the specific divisions that my own club was entered in.
In the 50m Prone Grand Prix Series we have the points tables for every year, but detailed results for a few days are missing:
1986 – Perth
1987 – Gagie
1988 – Caithness
1989 – Northern
1990 – Caithness
1990 – Western
The 10m Air Rifle Championships had transferred to the newly formed Scottish Air Rifle and Pistol Association in the mid 1980s, and they continued to run these championships through the rest of the decade. There are names on the trophies for 1990, but I have been unable to find the results. There were no championships in 1991 and 1992, but SSRA restarted them in 1993 and we have a full set from that point onwards.
Mid 1990s – early 2000s
This is a bit of a challenging period, the association was struggling a bit for volunteers, and more results have gone missing in this period, including:
1997 – Medal, CanDicap and Speedway First Stage (we have some of them, but not a full set)
1996, 1997 & 1998 – C&D Speedway Finals. There is a name on the trophy for one of these years, but not the other two – but there were plenty of people in the postal first round, so it does suggest that the finals took place.
1997 & 1998 – Individual Prone, Air Rifle and 3P leagues. There’s nothing to confirm that these actually took place, other than that they did run in the years either side.
1998 – 3P Championship Final. The only time I actually won it, and there’s no results to be found!
1996 – Third Air Rifle Grand Prix, probably at Linwood.
1996 & 1997 – Caithness stage of the 50m Prone Grand Prix series.
1997 – Second and Fourth 3P Grand Prix events at Denwood.
1996 through 1999 – Long Range Inter-Region Match. This may not have run for some, or all, of these years, but there’s little information to be found.
Early 2000s – 2016
From 2000 onwards, the website was up and running and I was trying my hardest to get a full set of results from every competition, and there’s very little specifically missing that we know should be there. Freuchie results dried up from about 2007 onwards, although we know the competitions ran and there are names on both trophies. The missing results that have been identified are:
2012 – The Speedway Final(s)
2014 – The Speedway Final(s)
2017 onwards
During the early years of the STS merger, some results have disappeared. They don’t seem to be anywhere on the STS website, and it maybe that they were simply circulated by email to those participating, but never got copied to the new organisation. Missing results include:
2017 – Medal, CanDicap and Speedway First Stage
2018 – Speedway Final(s)
2020 – Medal and CanDicap Finals
2020 – Speedway Final(s)
It’s been tricky to find out which competitions were run to completion in 2020 as COVID locked us down, but I think the above probably all did come to a resolution.
International Results
The bulk of the work has been on the domestic results, but there have also been substantial additions to the International Results page, albeit there are still some gaps and it’s not always clear when matches against the Army and the Police have actually taken place. The same is true for the NSRA’s Inter-Region Matches. If anyone can help with these, it would be much appreciated.
NSRA Competitions
The website has also tried over the years to include the results of the NSRA’s Scottish competitions – primarily the Daily Record, Scottish Cup and Haig – but coverage is patchy, and dependent on being able to find a set of results – which can be a challenge! I may do some more searching for these in the future, but these aren’t SSRA competitions and haven’t been part of this archiving project.
The Wider Website
Having started down the process of trying to make the old website a longer-term archive, I also took time to remove some now redundant content, tidy some stuff up, and make the menus and the look & feel a bit more consistent.
There had been quite a lot of content relating to Scottish athletes and teams published in a variety of other sources, most of it no longer available, so I have added as much of that as I can to the website, integrated into the annual News pages. This includes reports from various CSF(ED) Championships, full Commonwealth Championships and Commonwealth Games which were on the old STSF site, all discarded when that site was replaced in about 2009. I also included a substantial amount of information that had been published in monthly reports from the Performance Programme right through until the creation of STS, covering primarily the international activities of Scottish athletes in both Scottish and British teams, all the way to the Olympic Games.
I was able to resurrect the Picture Galleries that existed on the site originally from 2000 – 2007, plus the 20th Century one of older images. I’ve also added lots of additional photos from domestic and international events – many of them had previously been published on social media – to provide a visual record to support the written words.
In the early years of the website, server space was at a premium, and downloads speeds were generally rather slow, so images sizes were kept very small. I’ve replaced as many of these little files as I can with much better versions, but there are inevitably plenty of photos where I don’t have access to the originals, and this becomes even more true from 2010 onwards and I wasn’t taking so many of the photographs that were published. So, if anyone can help with the original, or even just higher resolution, versions of any of the small and low-quality images we have, please get in touch.
There are then some events where we simply don’t have any photographs, or there are significant gaps. If extend backwards into the 1990s, these include:
The Scottish 10m Championships in 2012 and 2017.
The Scottish 50m Championships in 1999, 2007 (Day 1), 2011 (Day 1) and 2015.
The Haig winners in 1997 (Sinclair Bruce), 1998 (Jim Cole-Hamilton) and 2012 (Emma Cole-Hamilton).
The Freuchie winners in 2005 (Bill Copland and Kay Copland), 2012 (Bill Copland and Adam Dove) & 2016 (Graham Shedden and Ewen Scougall).
Scottish teams at the 1993, 1997, 1998, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015 Scottish Meetings.
Scottish teams at the 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2012 and 2013 National Meetings. Ladies teams are also missing from 1990 & 1991.
Scottish medal winners at the British 50m Championships in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2012, 2015 & 2016.
Some of the Scottish medal winners at the 2006 (Northern Ireland) and all of the medal winners at the 2004 (Isle of Man), 2008 (Gibraltar), 2009 (Isle of Man), 2011 (England) and 2013 (Isle of Man) CSF(ED) Championships.
Scottish shooters in the Pershing Match vs the USA in 2013.
I’m sure there are plenty more that could be added!
Of course, the further back we look, the fewer photographs we have. There are some of Scottish teams, Haig winners and so on from the 1980s, a few from the 1970s and even a couple from the 1960, but there must be plenty more out there in private collections that might usefully be shared?
I’m less clear what to do about photos from 2017 onwards – ideally they will be on the STS website and/or social media accounts, but that’s by no means guaranteed. What I have done is create a private group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/scottishsmallbore) which is really there to allow both older content and current content related to our sport to be shared. We currently have just over 150 members on there, it would be great to see that expand, perhaps tenfold or more, given the number of smallbore and air rifle shooters in Scotland. Please join if you haven’t already done so. I do put out requests for help with missing results and photos on there, but it has been disappointing to have had almost no response to the majority of these requests.
So, as I try to wrap this up, a lot has been done, but it would be wonderful if we could try to make the archive of our former association as complete as possible. I can’t finish this on my own, I need you all to help – please go hunt through your email, your old results, your photos, at home and in your clubs and help to make this an even better piece of history for future shooters to be able to look back on and feel that they are part of the unbroken chain going back to the earliest days of the 20th century.
It's probably easiest to contact me by email on webmaster@ssra.co.uk if you have anything that you can add to the archive.
Donald McIntosh, SBR AMG Committee Member (October 2024)