The Baron's Tale: Painting, poetry, and clay pigeon with St Andrews’ Renaissance man

Outside St Michaels Inn in Leuchars, a Zippo lighter snaps shut, and a man puffs his pipe. Blue smoke wafts across the car park  — Condor Original, “dark, aromatic.” “Go against the grain, go against the grain”; his parting words hang in the air before his next draw disperses them into the March wind. 

“My full name is Baron Charlie Lush, all right?” says the man, more commonly known as ‘the Baron.’ He’s sat at the corner table, leaned over a Coke and a patchwork of dusty photo albums. “They also call me the Red Baron, though the police know me as the Perthshire Baron [...] It's nice and easy that way. Everyone knows who I am and what I'm about.” 

His business card, grass-stained, reads, “Artist, Writer, and Field Instructor.” Daily, the Baron occupies his hours coaching University of St Andrews clay shooters at the Scottish Clay Shooting Centre in Leuchars. Indoors, however, the Baron indulges in the former two of these professions. It was during his many years at school — as a student, teacher, then graduand — that the Baron commenced his varied and multitudinous careers. 

Leaving Naworth Castle, the Baron found himself at Bramcote, located on the Yorkshire coast. “The school was still very Victorian in those days,” he explained. “You used to break the ice first thing in the morning to get into the bath, and there would be a foghorn blaring all night.” 

It was here at prep school that Lush found the opportune scene to cultivate his creative mind. “A couple of friends of mine, in our last year, we decided to put the first school magazine together. And we printed, and it was all done illegally — the headmaster didn’t know,” he recalled. The magazine, Bits and Pieces, later to become The Bramcotian, featured the Baron’s first works: “I’ve still got a copy, it’s got one of my poems [...] That was sort of my introduction to the literary world, I suppose.” 

Following his instructorship in Sussex, Berkshire, and Perthshire, during which the Baron taught prep school students fishing, shooting, fly tying, photography, and music, he found himself drawn to academics again. “Just before St Andrews, I was getting back into writing. I'd always been interested in history. I’d written a novel, I'd written that poetry book [...] but I wanted to go into historical fiction,” he explained. “So I thought, [...]  how about going to uni and brushing up on my English history?”

In 2000, the Baron matriculated into the University of St Andrews as a mature student at 42 years old. Here, he studied English, History, and Art History. “[Studying History and Art History] was just wonderful, because I got the best of both worlds,” he said. “I could bring the two together, you know? That was just heaven.” 

“[Prince] William was there. When he started, he was doing Art History. [...] it was rumoured that when he heard I was there studying Art History, he switched to Geography,” joked Lush. 

Drawing upon his previous education at the London College of Music, the Baron initially applied his artistic energy in St Andrews most intently to chamber orchestra and choir, but this was to quickly change. 

“I met a young guy, Steve [...] I managed to persuade him to paint a portrait of me, which he did [...] though it was slightly raunchy,” said the Baron with a smirk. “I said, I can write books, I can write music. The one main art I cannot handle is painting.” Inspired, the Baron bought a watercolour palette from the St Andrews art shop. “[My first painting] wasn't good, but it was good enough to make me do another.”

It was not long before his works were being displayed around town. “I started exhibiting at the student exhibitions in the Preservation Trust Museum. Just one painting the first time, two or three the next, and the next time I managed to hold my own solo exhibition, which was the first in St Andrews for a student,” he explained.“[There was] lots of media coverage. [The] University went wild. Lush does it again sort of thing,” he added dryly. 

When asked how he would describe his style, the Baron likened his works to those of the German expressionists and English impressionists of the late-nineteenth century. Lush credits Edward Munch as his primary influence. The Baron’s works vary from landscapes to still life to self-portraits — his Fishing and Women series, however, remains his favourite. 

“When I left [St Andrews], I took part in the Channel 5 art competition over in Glasgow. I got through a couple of rounds of that,” he said. “Then, I exhibited at Edinburgh Airport, London, various places around, then off to New York for an all-British exhibition in Manhattan. I was selling paintings at the time, doing commissions.” It was during this time that the Baron also made his short stint on reality TV, making guest appearances on Ladette To Lady and Big Brother — accomplishments he regards proudly. 

The Baron still paints, though he finds it more demanding than his writing: “Everything has to be right to do it proper[ly]. It’s not something you can really dip in and out of. You can a bit with writing.” 

While at University, the Baron kept practice with his country sporting as well: “I was still teaching as a shooting instructor at Gleneagles. So, with the clay club, I became one of the main student instructors, and I sort of collected a band of girls — newbie girls who wanted to shoot — and they came to me every week,” he explained. “They became known as Charlie's Angels.” 

This is a love Lush has maintained since, and he now teaches St Andrews students the art of the trap. “I've now been doing that 26 years,” the Baron said. The shooting club was short-staffed at the time, he explained. “These guys were looking for someone to look out for students on Wednesday afternoon. And I thought, well, I think that would suit me fine [...] I quite enjoy it, it gets me out, it gets [my] dogs out.”

For the Baron, clay pigeon is not just sport, but an ancestral affair. “I shot a lot as a boy. It was a family tradition,” he said. “My father was a very good shot [...] and he was a little bit of a lad at Winchester. He actually held an illegal shooting range in someone’s garage, a pistol range [...] He did that to turn a few extra bucks.”

This connection to family heritage, Lush shared, is an integral part of how he understands himself. “Our ancestry is Norman, and that can be proved [...] [I’m] proud of it,” he said. His name, Lush, translates from the French l'huissier, meaning “usher” — a probable reference to the court of William the Conqueror, the Baron explained. 

For the Baron, personal history remains an ardent passion. “I’ve kept diaries for a long time [...] I've got cupboards full of diaries,” he said. This routine inspired his biographical and autobiographical works. By putting these life stories down on paper, “[these peoples’ memor[ies] will never be forgotten,” he explained.

The Baron has endeavoured to write his own history, recounting his 68 years of life. “It's called The Baron's Tale, you know, after Chaucer,” he explained. Lush has presently self-published five volumes of his autobiography, and he intends to write two more. “So far, it goes from birth to 2013 [...] the most interesting will be the next one. I get to work backwards, [...] from Covid-19 to the present day. That'll be one novel, and then the next one will cover from ‘13 to ‘20.”

Propped against his station wagon in the Fife car park, the Baron takes another puff of his pipe. “[A friend once told me], ‘You have made such a varied life; there's nothing you haven't done’ [...] I wouldn't have changed that. You know, doing the nine-to-five job for 40 years just was never going to be me [...] you have so many different routes around life [...] you just don’t know which route that’s going to be.”

Photos courtesy of Baron Lush