10 Village Voice March 2016
Your local butchers at Melbourne Hall Craft Centre. Local produce and excellent customer service. With a full range of Beef, Lamb, Pork and Chicken. Supplying easy pre pared meals and bundle packs to suit all your needs or cut to your exact requirements. Pre order and collect or just pop in. All our beef and lamb is grass fed and reared at Park Farm on the Melbourne Estate. We believe that the animals’ lifestyle has an important effect on the quality. We are farmers first and foremost, passionate about producing livestock resulting in flavoursome meats for you. Pop in to our new butchery, meet our team and see for yourself. Open in the Melbourne Hall Craft Centre Tue - Sat 8.30am - 4.30pm, closed Sun | Local delivery available* Call 01332 585575 | Email orders@toriandbensfarm.co.uk @toriandbensfarm | toriandbensfarm.com | Tori and Ben’s Farm * Must be within a 5 mile radius of Melbourne. Minimum order £40.
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ONE MAN AN
Ex-pit man dreaming of being a cham judge at Sandringham in front of the
JACK Iliffe may only be 65, but he has already managed to fit more careers in his life than most. As a young man working down the Leicestershire mines, to professional dog trainer, to game-keeper on the Melbourne Hall Estate where he spent 15 years helping entertain the hall’s illustrious visitors – among them Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes – you might say he has never experienced that most modern ennui: the career rut. Even his hobbies are legion, from motorcycling to flying planes, although the latter pastime was sadly taken away last year after a road accident in Matlock Bath. But if there is one thing that Jack is really passionate about, it is his gun dogs. As a young man, an afternoon outdoors with one of his prize-winning spaniels provided a welcome relief from a hard shift as a deputy at the coalface. “It used to be a nice change from working underground in the dark, to come out in the middle of the afternoon and spend the rest of the day in the open air with the dog,” he says. Then, when the mines shut in 1992, it was to his dogs he turned again for a new career that was to prove as lifechanging as the transition from working beneath the ground to on top of it. “I don’t think there’s anything finer than two spaniels working side by side,” he says, and, with hundreds of dogs having passed through his care since setting up as a professional trainer, he is certainly in a position to know.
FROM a childhood on the Queen’s Balmoral Estate, to an early career down the mines followed by more than two decades of training hundreds of gun dogs to the highest international level, LUCY STEPHENS finds out why Melbourne’s Jack Iliffe really is a man of many parts.
As with the start of any new business, Jack faced an initial struggle to get his name known as a top-flight trainer. But, with an increasing number of competition wins to his name as he entered gun dog championships and a growing reputation as a member of the English gun dog team for 15 years, the clients soon came in. And, although he is semi-retired now, he is still in demand as a national and international gun dog championship judge, having travelled to Sweden with his wife Linda to preside over competitions there (where, in an interesting contrast to the UK, the main participants are women) as well as being selected to judge the British Championships in 2017. He still has a couple of dogs at home, along with two birds of prey, but says: “When I’m training a spaniel and chasing them about everywhere – I just can’t catch them
anymore!” While many people for Jack – while he ad very much “a working He says: “I always get a puppy, that’s lik away at this little pup icent shooting dog. “Whatever I ask the another youngster. “I do enjoy competit am going to win. I’ll p just not quite right.” Jack, who has two c his favourite dogs ar breeds such as Labra “In a 10-acre field a sp never even miss a mou He may have more big ambition. After a spent on the royal Bal uncle was a senior me a gun dog championsh of the Queen. As to that, he will h
Jack at work and play
LEFT: Jack Iliffe with one of his birds of prey, Toot. RIGHT: Days down the pit for Jack and a colleague. FAR RIGHT: Jack with one of his beloved spaniels, Skeet.
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