Lock, Stock & Barrel

By Josh Sims. Photography by Purdeys, Lee Spinks

10 Months Ago

This is not craftsmen in protest, but in celebration. It used to be the case that whenever an apprentice completed his training, he would be ‘hammered out’ — welcomed to the fold with this cacophony, before then being welcomed at a local pub. These days, some 200 years on, it’s more typically done to mark retirement. That may be cause for celebration — but perhaps also for some concern. Gunmakers are, after all, few and far between. “Apprenticeship requires a certain kind of person — not just in being willing to commit five or more years of your life to training, but in attitude and temperament,” suggests Jonathan Irby, Managing Director of the Royal Berkshire Shooting School and former Head of Sales for Purdey. “That’s why we see a lot of nephews, grandsons and godsons come into the trade — it’s an easier sell when someone already connected to the gunmaking trade can explain it to them. It’s a risk for the gunmaker too — every apprentice you take on is taking time from the masters without making any contribution themselves.

But they’re essential for the business to be sustainable.” Indeed, if increased urbanisation might have put an end to widespread shotgun ownership — quite aside from the fact that it is hardly something the authorities support these days — in fact sales are, quite unlike many a partridge facing a crack shot, in good health. This is surely one reason why, back in 1994, the company was bought by a French luxury goods giant that in time would become the monolithic Richemont, the backing of which would not only see a Purdey in person return to the company — in the guise of Richard Purdey, the founder’s great great great grandson — but also allow Purdey to recently open an additional state-of-the-art facility in Hammersmith, west London. Shooting for sport — game or rough, for competition or leisure, with England scooping many a medal in the discipline, and the trend for corporate team-building both helping — has boosted both interest and demand. And yet, surely, for someone to spend perhaps £100,000 on a Purdey shotgun — when a £400 shotgun is perfectly serviceable — it takes something else.

The brand helps, naturally. Purdey may have made shotguns for the great and good since it was founded by James Purdey in 1814, just nine years after completing his own apprenticeship with another gunmaker on Oxford Street — and, under the leadership of his son, also James, it was soon scooping up royal warrants ever since the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and Queen Victoria first bestowed theirs, with the likes of Charles Darwin and India’s Maharajas also customers. By the Edwardian era — under James Purdey the first’s great grandson, and when hunting came into its exotic and quixotic own — a Purdey was the de facto gun of choice for anyone with the money and insight. But its rarity has also enhanced its reputation — with the less great and bad too. For all that there are many great gunmakers around the world, not for nothing did London’s post-war criminal underworld, in a kind of back-handed compliment, use Purdey’s name as slang for any shotgun.

And the resonance of the name no doubt also saw it chosen — by actress Joanna Lumley, it’s said — for the kick-ass spy she played in ‘The New Avengers’. “In fact, I am always humbled by how cherished the Purdey name is in the US, for example,” notes Irby, “and the US has its own tremendous gunmakers.” The living history too is alluring. The company has kept a written record of every gun made in what it calls the ‘dimension books,’ with only records for 1814-1816 missing; the ‘Black Book’ believed to been lost through bomb damage but, ever hopeful, perhaps yet to be uncovered behind a cupboard or at the bottom of a trunk. To own a Purdey is literally to be made part of those records. A visit to Audley House is to be bathed in some 130 years worth of memorabilia and momentous moments — such as when General Eisenhower and Churchill met in the building’s Long Room to draw up battle plans during World War Two.

A gunmakers seems more than an apt location for such planning, of course, even if rather larger bores than Purdey’s typically made would ultimately be required. Not that it was above trying: during both first and second world conflicts, Purdey, like so many other makers of elite products at the time, dutifully switched its production over to the mass-manufacture of gun parts for the war effort. But, deeper perhaps than becoming a small part of a great history, the purchase of a Purdey is also celebration of craft — yes, customers are buying a bespoke piece of engineering; but they’re also buying something engraved, sculptural and artistic, as one might well expect of an object requiring some 500 hours to construct and another 500 to engrave by copper wheel.

Small wonder only around 70 are made each year. Order one now and you can expect delivery in about two years. “All of the craftspeople at Purdey love seeing a gun come in showing signs of good use, though they know that sometimes they’re delivering breathtakingly beautiful guns that, like a watch, might only get used a few times a year — the guns just become part of a collection,” says Irby. “If anyone is kind enough to buy a Purdey, and you’re happy to just hang it on your wall, then great. But, well, staff at Purdey would really like to see it used.” It’s easy to get awed by the artistry — even if that entails having the opening bars to ‘White Christmas’ engraved on your gun, as Bing Crosby did — to the point of forgetting that a Purdey is, in fact, a weapon, with all of the complex construction implied by being able to accurately and repeatedly deliver an explosive projectile over distance. That has its own history, of course, something some clients appreciate. Most will likely order a ‘side by side;’ despite having been designed some 140 years ago, still the definitive Purdey shotgun, and best known for its so-called Beesley action — or Assisted Open Action Mechanism — patented in 1880 and, ingeniously, using the residual energy from the mainspring to open the gun and eject spent cartridges.

But other commissions are much trickier. One of the bigger challenges Purdey’s gunmakers have faced over recent years was a request for a single shot rifle with an octagonal barrel, a defunct, almost ancient design that meant reverse engineering an archive example in order to re-learn how it could be done, that resulting re-captured knowledge just about making the project commercially viable.

Another client, back in 2004, requested a hammer ejector gun — another period piece, requiring one or both hammers to be cocked before the gun can be fired, but this time keeping that cartridge ejection system. What was meant to be a one-off idea proved so appealing that Purdey has since made similar for many other shooters. Purdey has made other oddities too. One of the more complicated came to be known as ‘the ten bore paradox’ — the same gun was made so as to be able to fire both solid slug and shotgun cartridges. But innovation in gunmaking comes slowly, and with trepidation.

More recently, the company made its first 20 bore ‘over and under’ gun, a traditional style but here made using a world first in gunmaking, a special blend of two grades of light, strong, high tensile steel. It can’t be engraved, but by use of acid erosion it does reveal its own unique patterns. The result — dubbed the Damascus — has divided opinion. “In the late 1800s there were huge leaps in innovation in gunmaking, but since then it’s more or less been a matter of refinement, although gunmakers are always looking for any opportunity for advancing a design — in the mechanism, weight, materials,” says Irby. “That said, you have to accept that it’s really the aesthetic that people who buy a Purdey really want. And there’s a point in innovating where a Purdey isn’t a Purdey anymore. It’s like clothing — it could be much more scientifically advanced than it is, but then it loses some kind of authenticity.” Similarly, there’s a fine line between crafting and manufacturing. Some methods remain tried and tested: take smoke-blacking, for example. A paraffin flame is used to produce smoke, which is then used to give a gun part a fine layer of soot. Looking along the part, this layer allows the eye to more easily detect any bumps and imperfections that need attention, the removal of which gives the best fit of metal to metal and wood to metal.

It sounds antiquated — but no gadget has yet been invented that would allow the same precision of inspection over the variety of shapes, angles and surfaces that go to make a bespoke gun. And yet, when Purdey introduced the use of computer numerical control or CNC to its gunmaking — essentially using computers to control machine tools to make parts — one might perhaps have expected a backlash akin to discovering, for example, that many a Savile Row suit isn’t actually made on Savile Row (as, indeed, they aren’t). But, Irby well argues, craft cannot bloody-mindedly live in the past. “Gunmaking has always been about making marginal gains,” he says. “People want elegant, functional shotguns and the fact is that using CNC delivers to craftspeople parts that are much further evolved, which allows them more time to spend on the handwork — the shape of the stock, the rifling of the barrel — that makes a Purdey a Purdey. If you go to an artisan baker for his fantastic sourdough bread, do you expect him to have also ground the flour? If something can be made immeasurably better by machine, you have to take that fact seriously.

The fact is that gunmaking is a quirky mix of engineering and craft.” Quirky is the word. Take slacum oil, pronounced as in ‘slack’ rather than as in ‘snake.’ No snake oil this; it’s a mix of linseed and other oils that is repeatedly rubbed into Purdey gunstocks, cut back using a mild abrasive and then rubbed in again, day after day for six weeks, the result being a signature high-gloss waterproof finish. Just like Coca-Cola’s famed recipe, the exact ingredients and blend of slacum oil is also an in-house secret, known only to a couple of finishers, who mix it up, do the application, and, when the time is right, pass the knowledge on.

These men probably know where that Black Book is too. “I wouldn’t see the shotgun as an anachronism,” says Irby, countering the idea that such a thing belongs more to times passed. “But, even if it was, Purdey represents something more than that anyway. It’s an expression of an ultimate level of gunmaking today, of pure craftsmanship — one of the finest examples in any field that I think there is now. And that’s just the product of hundreds of years of doing it.”