HEREFORD & WORCESTER Website : Obituary

Gerald Kings

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Gerald Kings, a long standing member of our shooting community.  Friends are invited to attend the funeral at Redditch Crematorium on Tuesday 16th May at 11am.  He will be greatly missed and we pass our condolences on to his family and friends.

John Boraston
The first time John held a shotgun was when he was a lad of about 10 years of age (country boy that he was) - that would have been around 1940 (during the war and rationing) - his dad said “Jackie (that’s what he was called by his dad) get down to the orchard and make sure the pigeons don’t eat the cherries”.
Proud as punch off wee John went, gun in hand with a pocketful of cartridges with his mum telling him to be careful and hearing her in the background saying to his dad “are you sure? He’ll shoot himself” .....
Nothing had changed much in over 80 years.
3-4 times a week you’d still find John (Jackie) with a pocketful of cartridges and shotgun shooting pigeons - this time though they were made of clay. And we didn’t call him Jackie - to us lot that shot with him John was the elder statesman and was fondly known as “Grandpa”. And he still hadn’t shot himself - that he’d admitted anyway.
Anyway, 1948 came around and (at around 18) John joined the army. They saw the potential in his shooting and trained him in rifles and how to use them. Then they sent him off to Korea. During that conflict John was part of one of the bloodiest battles of the war but he survived and came back unscathed.
After he came back, and in 1955, he joined the police - those were the days before West Mercia police even existed as a force.
In 1962 he came to Worcester from Stourbridge to join traffic - first bikes and then cars. He spent time driving the chief constable around. Not a bad number if you can get it...beats working for a living anyhow.
Anyway, in 1965 John submitted a report to HQ a “Yellow Form” which was the precursor to Force Orders asking if anyone was interested in representing the force at clay pigeon shooting. He was contacted by a few officers ....... and the West Mercia Clay Pigeon Shooting club was born.
John and his team then represented the force all over the UK - There was a notable shooting trip to Ulster that he told me about with a laugh in his voice - but that’s for another day.
In 1985 John realised he had been in the Job for 6 months beyond the 30 years so he put in his ticket, took the money and ran...... straight back to the country with his 5 gun dogs - where he spent years “picking up” on partridge and pheasant shoots through the winter and shooting through the summer.
That’s nearly 40 years ago and he’d been collecting his police pension by then longer than he ever collected a wage from the force - hope I can do similar.
In 2008, a group of us in West Mercia got together to resurrect the club and there was ‘Grandpa’ John, ready and willing to join up and take part.
His experience and advice has been a great help to me (Paddy) and others over the years and he was a firm favourite with all of us.
He celebrated his 80th birthday representing West Mercia at the National Championships in Hull. He opened the competition on his 90th birthday and he was in the ‘A’ team for both the DTL and Skeet.

 He was the oldest competitor at Hull - something he was rightly proud of.
So, he was still representing West Mercia police some 57 years after setting the club up and 80 years after first picking up a shotgun on the farm to keep the pigeons off his dad’s cherries.
More recently he’d been using an air rifle keep the rats, rabbits and Magpies out of his vegetable patch, his compost bucket and off his lawn - he could still out shoot a lot of us on his day.
Finally, John represented the county on numerous occasions since starting out - having shot in North Wales for Hereford and Worcester as recently as 2020. That stands testament to how well John was thought of and his ability despite being nearly 90 at the time.
John ‘Grandpa’ Boraston, a country boy through and through. Born and bred in the country, lived in the country and never left the country - we salute you.