The recent strong performance of the Bradfield Shooting Team makes the rediscovery of a shooting trophy, won by one of its greatest competitors, Reginald Wall, a very timely story.  Wall studied at Bradfield from 1883 to 1889 and enjoyed a very rewarding career as a pupil and athlete.  He won prizes for Classics and Maths when in the Fourth Form, prizes for English Essay and Applied Mathematics in 1887, a prize for delivering an English Speech in 1888, and the Stevens Scholarship Prize (Books) in his final year.  Wall was also very active in College societies, serving as Vice President of the Debating Society and as a member of the Shakespeare Society.  Wall was a Senior Prefect in 1889 and a leading member of the Rifle Corps, being promoted to lieutenant before leaving the school.

Wall excelled in Shooting, in 1886 winning the College’s Gosset Cup and the first Nursery Prize at the Berkshire Rifle Association Prize Meeting.  He also won the Robin Hood competition.  In 1888, Wall captained the Shooting VIII which lost the Ashburton Shield by only 1 point but distinguished himself individually by winning the Spencer Cup.  As reported in the Bradfield College Chronicle, the entire school and village celebrated the team's great effort:

This year R. Wall has won us the Spencer with the best score on record for it (32 out of a possible 35).  This total performance of Bradfield is the best among all the Schools.  We question whether it has ever been equalled since the Public Schools’ Competition was started.  Wall has more than fulfilled the hopes formed of him; he has done honour to himself and to the School, alike by his own excellent shooting and by his management of the team. To the coach and the whole team, who shot with singularly uniform steadiness, to Sergt.-Major Belton, as Wall’s able coadjutor, and to the Corps in general, we offer our most hearty congratulations.  The team on reaching home met with a glorious, we might add riotous, welcome of a mile and over an hour in length from the whole population of school and village…

Wall went on to a very successful career as a physician, working at the London and Brompton Hospitals.  He was active in the Apothecaries’ Society, becoming master, and published a history of it in 1932.  Wall’s obituarist, writing in The Lancet following his death in 1947, suggested that his training in shooting was reflected in his medical work, ‘His practice and his teaching were distinguished by a conscientious thoroughness and by a power of acute observation that sprang, perhaps, from his prowess as a marksman.’

Wall presented the Spencer Cup to Bradfield in 1938.  He is second from the left in the middle row of the Shooting Team photograph reproduced below.