Birmingham’s best
Birmingham’s Gun Quarter, born of conflict, has existed in the shadow of London and Scotland. Is it time to reappraise its position?
If the British “best” is the Stradivarius of fine guns, why is Birmingham seen as second fiddle? A look to the past might prove instrumental. The British gun trade is divided into three parts, in the manner of Caesar’s Gaul: London earned her much-trumpeted virtues delivering luxurious duellers, pigeon guns and fowlers to the aristocracy; Scotland provided sportsmen with guns and rifles suitable for Highland game; but Birmingham’s traditions are an altogether different bag of nails. Sir Richard Newdigate approached “lorimers and naylors” with two “snap hand musquettes of differing sorts for patterns, desiring you will please to cause them to be shewed to your Bermingham workmen”, in 1689. The snaphaunce musket patterns, supplied by the office of ordinance, would have been Dutch and like the later flintlock drove flint onto steel to create a shower of sparks to ignite the main charge.
A century later, when a Scottish reverend named Forsyth developed a detonating system that would oust the flintlock he looked to London, where Manton and Purdey would refine his system and, in the process, develop the fine London gun trade we know today. Birmingham’s early traditions, by comparison, rest on war and slavery.
With the completion of military contracts, it’s likely the Birmingham men would have returned to manufacturing “other fine works of steel” were it not for the slave trade. Cheap guns were assembled from parts made by subcontractors and shipped off to West Africa to be traded for slaves. When that trade ended, Birmingham returned to manufacturing soldiers’ weapons but the system of specialised suppliers remained. Multiple, one-man businesses coalesced around St Mary’s Chapel, creating the Gun Quarter.
It wasn’t until the end of the Napoleonic wars, when Britain established a governmentowned arms factory, that Birmingham began making sporting guns. The concentration of craft workers, each skilled in a specific trade, meant guns could be made quickly and cheaply. William Greener, a provincial gunmaker who had learned much from Joe Manton in London, realised he couldn’t compete with Birmingham and decamped there. His son, WW Greener, would build the largest sporting gun factory in the quarter and the world.
WW Greener is remembered for his eponymous cross bolt but today the firm’s reputation rests, at least in the eyes of connoisseur collectors, on the self-acting ejector, or “G Gun”. With both locks and ejectors contained within the action body the G Gun concentrates weight between the hands creating a liveliness even in big-bore wildfowlers. In its Fine Gun catalogue of 1914, Greener listed its best grade G Gun at £37 higher than its sidelock, “so beloved of the London Gunmaker”.
William & Charles Scott began as a modest gun-finishing business but it, too, built a large factory covering every aspect of