Learning to shoot with the gun that takes two years to make, is loved by the Royals and costs £100,000
Firing your first ever shot with a Purdey, I am reliably informed, is up there with being taught to drive in a Rolls Royce, learning to tell the time with a Patek Philippe, and losing your virginity to Cara Delevingne. No pressure then, I thought, as I raised the weapon.
All very well. But will it shoot down a clay pigeon?
It’s a 20-bore over-and-under, meaning the barrels are fairly slim and one is stacked on the other. Its stock is made of glossy Turkish walnut wood, and on its sides are panels of intricately-engraved steel. Like all Purdeys, it is custom-made over anything up to two years of delicate craftsmanship.
In short, it’s a marvellous specimen, the sort you’d hang on the wall instead of the animal you shot with it, the sort you’d take to bed with you and tuck up under your finest bedding. It is the sort of gun that sells for as much as a house, and the sort favoured by the Royal family who, from the Queen and Prince Philip downwards, are well-documented fans of the doughty old James Purdey & Sons brand, founded in 1814 and an upper-class staple ever since.
All very well, but will it shoot down a clay pigeon? The West London Shooting School is a little inside the M25, but out here, in the damp grass and the grey air, we no longer seem to be in the city. Out here, I will be judged on my shooting prowess, which is unfortunate, because the most dangerous thing I’ve previously fired was a water pistol.
“Lean forward,” says Paul Gendall, the ruddy, soft-spoken instructor. I move my left hand up the barrel, which is cold and smooth to the touch; later, when I visit the Purdey workshop, a well-lit new-build in Hammersmith, I will see the creation of the next barrel off the production line.
Barrel-making is one of the seven discrete crafts within the making of a Purdey gun (only one man is said to have mastered them all – Nigel Beaumont, the firm’s former chair), and comes first in the process.
I’m borrowing a gun that’s approximately the right size, but usually the length and weight of a barrel depends on a customer’s measurements (arm, height) and preferences; some want a longer gun, while others, including “lady shooters” (women), prefer something lighter.
The making of a Purdey | The seven crafts
In any case, the “tubes”, as their makers call them, will be as straight as a laser beam. Tony Smith, a veteran barrel-maker who has spent most of his career with Purdey, is in the workshop today, finessing the barrel of a 12-gauge over-and-under. His obsession with straight tubes means that he, like other barrel-makers, can’t have his home plumbing fixed without automatically scrutinising the work. “We’ll be looking over the guy’s shoulder,” he says. “We’re all about the lines.”
So is Paul. I need to look right down the gun, he says, right down the thin ridge that runs from my end of the barrel to the end I’m pointing at the horizon. My right hand is supporting the stock, which is the gun’s wooden end. It is richly marbled, rippling between orange and brown, and the block of walnut wood from which it was hewn would once upon a time have been bought in person by a Purdey man in Turkey.
Stockmaking is another of the seven crafts, and, as with the rest of them, requires five years of apprenticeship. A stock often has to be hollowed to a precise degree for the gun to balance correctly, and is given its glossy coating with a bespoke oil whose base is linseed but whose other ingredients are kept secret.
Again: all very well. But will it shoot down a clay pigeon? Paul has arranged me as best he can – my feet, touching at the heels, are pointing at 12 o’clock and 3 o’clock, and I’m pushing my head as far down the barrel as possible, trying to ensure that when the clay pigeon comes – and Paul is about to press the button – I’ll have the clearest shot I can get.
Up close to the gun, I can see the intricacies of the rose and scroll design hand-carved into the steel. John Dowell is the lead engraver these days, a youthful-looking thirty-something with thick-lensed, black-rimmed glasses. Later, I will meet him in the workshop, bending over another tiny panel, straining his sight to its limit. “I like wearing glasses, so it’s okay,” he says cheerfully.
He has had to change glasses four times in little over a decade, in which time he has usually been carving the Purdey rose and scroll – his favourite – and occasionally more outlandish designs. Some customers ask for engravings of their family or a favourite dog – one asked for the face of Margaret Thatcher. “At that point we will make sure the customer is sure they want it,” the head of sales tells me.
From the shallow valley we’re looking down on, a disc emerges, rising lazily into the grey West London sky. 'Follow it…', mutters Paul
The gun can be as enamelled as you like – but will it shoot down a clay pigeon? On Paul’s instruction, I poise my finger on the trigger’s smooth curl (“The finger on the trigger – it’s the most delicate part of a customer’s anatomy,” says Keith Ward, who has been making them for 39 years).
Paul and I are shoulder to shoulder, sharing the sight down the barrel by leaning into each other like a sunset-watching couple on a park bench. His right arm is supporting the gun and his left is behind my back, the button in his hand.
He presses it. From the shallow valley we’re looking down on, a disc emerges, rising lazily into the grey West London sky. “Follow it…”, mutters Paul, and I swing the gun to the left to track its rise. It climbs, climbs some more, and then, like a roller coaster car at the top of a slope, seems to pause for a second. “Fire.”
There’s a crack and some recoil, and fragments suddenly on the grass. What’s left of the clay pigeon veers drunkenly into the muddy bank. If this is a trick intended to flatter me, it’s gone well: I feel like Kim Jong-Il after his first and only round of golf, in which, his biography tells us, he shot a 38-under par round that included no fewer than 11 holes in one, prompting his immediate and triumphant retirement from the sport.
“Good!”, says Paul, and takes back the gun; the two cartridges pop out like bread from a toaster, with a pale wisp of smoke to match. Discussing the shot, he catches them one-handed without looking.
Making the ejectors is yet another of the crafts; weeks of work have gone into the split-second of action curtailed by Paul’s wicket-keeping. And, in total, 600 to 700 hours will have been spent on this gun, as with most of those produced by Purdey.
No wonder they cost so much (it varies depending on customisation, but a new one is often worth more than £100,000), and no wonder Purdey has two royal warrants. Indeed, Prince Philip, given a pair of 12-bore Purdeys as a wedding present by George VI, his father-in-law, has since attributed his ability to keep up with good shots on game shoots to the reliability of his guns.
For my part, I’m relieved not to have shown myself up, and for that I can thank good coaching, a finely-calibrated firing mechanism, a well-weighted shotgun and, of course, the languidity of the clay pigeon’s flight. If ever I need a £100,00 gun, I know where to go.
