Shooting Times & Country Magazine
The fallen giants of gun retailing
The household names of Harrods and Army & Navy were stalwarts of the firearms trade, as Simon Reinhold reveals
You can walk into a branch of Walmart in the US and buy cartridges off the shelf, and not only one brand but myriad different makes of rifle and shotgun ammunition.
The world’s biggest retailer, which takes such pride in its corporate ethics that it puts it front and centre on its website, has no problem supplying the hunting culture of the US. If Tesco decided to stock ounce load 7.5s for clay shooting, there would be howls of outrage from middle England.
But it wasn’t always this way.
Some of the great names of the past in retail sold guns and all that went with them. Delving into the subject gives an interesting glimpse into past attitudes that seem to have morphed over time into some sort of false rectitude. One of the world’s most famous department stores — Harrods
— had what must have been a busy gun department, given the relative frequency with which guns engraved with its name come to market in the modern era.
Now owned by the state of Qatar as part of its sovereign wealth fund, it might surprise some to learn that the five-acre site in central London still has a gun department. Its outdoor sports and fashion department on the newly refurbished second floor has concessions from some of the great names in modern gunmaking.
Supply and demand
Harrods was part of a quest for high-street domination that involved the big department stores. It is the most familiar name left as the other greats of the past have fallen by the wayside. Gamages, famed for its toy department (targeting the offspring of exhausted parents is a sales tactic still in use in supermarkets today), had a gun department and recently a .410 boxlock retailed by ‘A. W. Gamage Ltd, Holborn, London’ surfaced in a sideby-side Facebook group.
Selfridges is reported to have had a ladies-only gun club. What this shows is that there was enough interest in game shooting from an aspirant middle class for the powerhouses of retail to cater for their needs.
The rise of department stores came directly out of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Great Exhibition showcased the world’s greatest artisans of the new industrial age and their wares.
If you think that Gunmakers’
Row at the Game Fair is a little overwhelming, try empathising with the visitors to the monumental glasscovered Crystal Palace. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.
The great gunmakers of the day also made their presence felt and Casimir Lefaucheux exhibited his revolutionary breechloading pin-fire shotgun for the first time. It signalled the end of the muzzle-loading era and was to light the imaginations of some of the best gunmakers of the Victorian age. Some 25 years of toil, sweat and trials organised by The Field (with a sprinkling of litigation) culminated in the breechloading shotguns that we know and still use today.
Another of the most well-known names among the supersized retailers was the Army & Navy Co-operative Society Ltd (CSL). Founded by a group of military and naval officers in 1871, its purpose was to provide cheaper goods to their brother officers through centralised buying.
At the height of the British
Empire, with a huge number of military personnel despatched to the far reaches of the globe, it was an instant success. The catalogues show that Army & Navy could provide almost anything you would need for domestic life overseas. This included sporting firearms for off-duty officers to hunt whatever the local mobile delicacies happened to be.
The guns were very well made, but typically understated, as frivolous decoration mattered less than a working gun when you may be thousands of miles and many months away from the opportunity to visit a bench-trained gunsmith. They were uncomplicated, functional guns that allowed a chap some sporting relief in dusty outposts, as well as bolstering the availability of fresh meat for his household or the officers’ mess.
It’s all in the name
Harrods, Gamages and Army
& Navy rarely, if ever, made the guns they sold. They were retailers, not manufacturers. The majority of the guns were made in the cauldron of smoke, iron and grime that was the Birmingham gun trade.
Department stores were not the only ones to employ outworkers to manufacture their wares and then retail them once their name had been engraved on the action or top rib, or both. Almost all of the best-known craft-oriented gunmakers in the London gun trade were doing exactly that to satisfy the large demand for sporting guns at the time.
Many of the guns retailed in London were made by either P Webley or W & C Scott, or, latterly, when they joined forces, Webley & Scott. These firms could produce prodigious quantities of the highest quality parts and whole guns for retail in the capital that could not be matched by the London trade.
“There was enough interest in shooting for the powerhouses of retail to cater for it”
Many people might sneer at a Webley & Scott 700 boxlock ejector, but apart from the guns produced in the 1970s when Britain’s industrial might appeared to reach its nadir, anything else can be seen to be an extremely well-made gun by one of the best-known makers in the world.
W & C Scott live pigeon hammerguns were used with considerable success in the high-stakes matches in both the US and Europe and they are much sought after today.
If your fortunes were tied to the British Empire, savage cutbacks were the only option when that Empire foundered. With the advent of the carnage of World War I, society and economies were altered beyond recognition. This was reflected in the department stores’ profits, as well as those of the UK gun trade with which they did business.
Army & Navy suffered staffing shortages and labour problems in the post-war economic slump. After the fresh tragedy of World War II, and severe bomb damage to its premises, came India’s independence in 1947 and a major overseas market all but disappeared at a pen stroke.
The company’s records (in the care of the University of Glasgow Archives) show that gun sales ceased in 1942. The company went on retailing pistols until 1965 and second-hand guns until 1971. In 1973, Army & Navy was
“Guns and shooting are no longer a part of mainstream retailers’ branding”
sold to House of Fraser and a gun department never featured in its new owner’s plans for reconstruction. House of Fraser is now owned by Sports Direct.
Sporting adventures
Even in the US, retailing guns wasn’t always straightforward. Abercrombie & Fitch is best known these days for selling clothes to teenagers and for marketing campaigns that both scandalised middle America and ensured the cool kids looked its way.
Fine guns, fly-rods and anything else needed by rugged types for their sporting adventures was the principal market aim of David T Abercrombie when he founded the outfitter in 1892.
When wealthy customer Ezra Fitch joined the business in 1900, however, things began to change. Fitch wanted to focus less on the wilderness, more towards the croquet lawn and the two fell out over the matter.
Abercrombie sold his share to Fitch after only 15 years of trading. During that time, the client list was impressive, equipping Ernest Shackleton, Amelia Earhart and Teddy Roosevelt’s famous safari.
Despite a move towards ladies clothing and a mail-order catalogue that nearly bankrupted the firm (it sent out 50,000 of the near 500-page catalogue in 1909, each costing $1 to produce), it managed to expand its elite client list so that by the middle of the century it included Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, John Steinbeck, Dwight D Eisenhower and John F Kennedy.
After wandering financially and directionally, the company struggled on to bankruptcy in 1977. A tasteless Texan revival in the 1980s caused Forbes magazine to remark that “sometimes it is better to bury the dead than to try reviving them” and the business limped further from its origins. Latterly, it has undergone a successful complete rebrand into fashion retail, deliberately courting controversy along the way.
Gamages, too, was a casualty of the 1970s shift in retailing and the company ceased trading in 1972. By the 1960s, new forces were beginning to have a radical impact on our relationship with food and meat in particular. The surge of ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ supermarkets has redefined the way we shop.
Some hard-of-thinking consumers are now so divorced from the realities of where they get their meat that it seems no hypocrisy to them to castigate those of us who shoot pheasants and partridges at the same time as cramming into their mouths dirt-cheap, factory-farmed chicken. Some of these chickens are the victims of appalling conditions in their short, miserable lives. I know which I would rather eat.
Guns and shooting are no longer a part of mainstream retailers’ branding. They are now firmly a niche sector.
Despite this change, I believe that if you ask the man or woman in the street whether they think it’s acceptable to kill your own supper, the sensible carnivores among them (which, despite what some in the media may want you to believe, is the vast majority of people) would very likely have no problem with what we do, as long as we treat our quarry with respect, kill it cleanly at a sensible range and cook it with the care and attention that it deserves.