Fine sporting shotguns often have a history of interest attached to them. Mine did.
James Purdey, the peak creator of the gunsmith’s art, made such beautiful guns that one being offered today I see is priced at £165,000.- yes, just for one second-hand Purdey having passed through the hands of William Evans in St James’s.
It so happened that William Evans, born into a long line of gunsmiths, worked for James Purdey before leaving them in 1883 to set up on his own, engraving on each of his guns “late of Purdey”.
The Chairman of Purdey at a shoot I was on, noticed my gun and asked to see it. “It’s the worst thing that ever happened to Purdey”, he said, “leaving us to set up on his own like that.”
Guns, gunsmiths and provenance mean a huge amount to this high level of sporting society.
My father may have bought our gun in the early 1900s and had the stock altered to fit him. He left it behind with his family at Stratfieldsaye Rectory when having been at Marlborough College, at Wye Agricultural College, and was working in Egypt, our then Protectorate. As the sand grouse shooting was good there, he wired his family to send his gun out to him. George V stamps were affixed to its leather case and just posted - like any other parcel of the day.
The gun came to me eventually and, as we were gearing up for an invasion by Hitler, I loaned it to the Home Guard before leaving for America as a refugee. But before crossing the Atlantic, I, like many of us, extracted the shot from cartridges and replaced them with the shot mixed with melted candle wax. I never tested the results of this home-made transformation, but they must have been pretty unpleasant for an invading Nazi.
The Home Guard allowed the barrels to rust. The gun was returned to me but failed the proof tests for its barrels.
Short of cash, I could not afford new ones from William Evans. Then, hearing that all barrels were made at the same Midlands factory in England, I settled for the Gamages Department Store estimate - the cheapest by far.
The new barrels were perfect but not adorned by William Evans’s or any other provenance.
I now had very little use for a gun, and regulations for their safekeeping had become strict and tiresome. So I gave the gun to a son, who also had no use for it and sold it at Sotheby’s or Christie’s Auction Rooms. It was a lovely gun - an object of craftmanship and beauty, though not all orginial.
