Joe Wheater

Joe Wheater had been shooting for much of his life while working as a Yorkshire gamekeeper, but did not take up competitive shooting until 1947, when he was aged 29. The year after taking up the sport, he made his début at Bisley, and in 1949 won the Silver Pheasant Challenge Trophy at the annual Gamekeeper’s Clay Pigeon Tournament. He made his England début that same year, and also won his first major championship, the English Open Skeet Championship. Over the next six years he won more than 60 titles, and was the first shooter in England to score 100 straight hits with a single barrel.

Wheater was runner-up in the English Open Skeet Championship in 1950, and was the English Open Clay Pigeon Champion in 1951, 1955, and 1956. Having appeared in the first of three Olympics in 1956, he set a world record the following year breaking 1,308 clays in an hour, beating the old record set by J. H. Crang of Toronto. Wheater was the individual European trap champion in 1959, when he also won a team bronze. By the time of the 1960 Olympics, Wheater had moved from being a gamekeeper to working for a Hull gunmaker, and it was a memorable year for him. He was runner-up in both the British Skeet Championship and the Grand Prix of Great Britain at Chester, which was won by three-time Formula One World Champion Jackie Stewart. That year, 1960, Wheater also won an individual trap bronze, and team silver, at the European Championships, and became the first English All-Round Champion, making him one of the favourites for a medal at the Rome Olympics. He was lying joint third after the first round of the final, but was not feeling at his best and was suffering from a severe lack of sleep in the Olympic Village, which he blamed on: “The equestrian people clattering down the hall, ‘horses and all’, at five and six in the morning” – that was typical of Wheater, a straight-talking Yorkshireman who was not one of the traditional “shooting set” of that era. He eventually finished in sixth place in the Roma final. Wheater won a fifth European medal in 1961, a team silver, and in 1964 won his sixth British Open Clay Pigeon Championship. He was honoured with the captaincy of the British clay pigeon team at his third Olympics, in Tokyo. In 1968, he was the coach of the Irish Olympic shooting team in Mexico City. He went on to win two more British Open titles, in 1971–72. A gunsmith by profession, he owned a shop and shooting range at Cherry Burton, Beverley and later retired to Laughton, Gainsborough where he resided until his death in 2011.