Great guns

This year’s Friends of the Chelsea & Westminster Clay Pigeon Shoot is in aid of the hospital’s Mental Health Centre. Amanda Constance talked to Sarah Heseltine to find out more about this worthy cause

Above: ortia Baker and Vickie Chadwick at the 2006 fundraising shoot

Sarah Heseltine is a busy woman. She is the chair of the fundraising committee for this year’s Friends of the Chelsea & Westminster Clay Pigeon Shoot which takes place in early October in High Wycombe. No mean task when the target is to raise £30,000 for the hospital’s Mental Health Centre. Oh, and she’s a mother of three young children to boot.

She laughs. ‘It has been very time consuming but it is quite nice to put something back’. Heseltine, the daughter-in-law of Michael Heseltine, has gathered together a committee of friends and friends of friends who have set about putting on the very best day’s shooting and lunch. Between them, the committee has amassed an amazing roster of prizes and lots for the charity auction. Rocco Forte has offered two nights at one of his hotels, Bernie Ecclestone has donated VIP passes to next year’s Grand Prix, Quentin Blake will paint a bespoke commission for the winning bidder and David Linley and Theo Fennell have both offered prizes.

‘It’s been amazing’, says Heseltine. ‘None of us are celebrities but it’s great what we’ve achieved. We are mums, we’re not out on the social scene but we’ve come together to help each other out and we all know somebody who knows somebody.’

The event is taking place two years after the last successful fundraising shoot organised by the Friends which raised £25,000, but Heseltine admits that she’d like to beat that. The idea is that people enter in teams of four, but Heseltine says they are more than happy to match pairs into teams. The day will start with breakfast at the EJ Churchill Shooting Ground before the teams head off into drives for a morning’s shooting. Heseltine says the school has been brilliant, there will be no queues for any guns and if you are unsure of yourself, tuition is on hand. The tickets are a reasonable £185 per gun. It’s then back for a slap-up lunch and charity auction with Humphrey Butler. This year, the event organisers are offering lunch tickets for non-guns for £85 for the first time so less trigger-happy partners can join in.

And it’s all for a very, very good cause. The proceeds of the shoot will go towards upgrading facilities at the health centre, specifically kitting out a gym with new equipment and refurbishing the centre’s two gardens, as well as brightening up the in-patient’s sitting room. The centre has three wards, two acute adult wards with a total of 30 beds and one acute older adult ward with 19 beds. The most common illness in the adult wards is schizophrenia but there are also patients suffering from bipolar affective disorder (manic depression) and severe depression. Many of the older in-patients at the centre (over 65s) are suffering from dementia.

There is a strong preference at the unit for treating people at home where possible and minibuses ferry patients to and from their homes. The unit, says Heseltine, ‘is for people who can’t cope or whose family’s can’t cope’. The gym at the centre was closed due to cuts and the committee are keen to get it up and running; physical exercise can have a positive impact on patient’s recovery. There are also two gardens at the centre, one for more elderly patients and one for younger ones where they can see their families and have a cigarette. The committee wants to completely refurbish the gardens and are to approach the RHS or the BBC’s Ground Force for a complete makeover.

Heseltine says it’s been amazing how ‘the community has come together’ in aid of the fundraising shoot. But when one in four of us will experience a problem with mental health, ‘it’s something for all of us to think about’.

The Chelsea & Westminster Clay Pigeon Shoot, 2 October 2008, EJ Churchill ground, High Wycombe. Tickets per gun are £185 or £85 for lunch only and can be bought via the Friends office on 020 8746 8825 or friends.office@chelwest.nhs.uk