PURDEY PROVENANCE

I was most interested to read that Purdey is now offering a service that provides the history and provenance of the sporting weapons made by that august house over the years. How things have changed since the days of Richard Beaumont.

I well remember in the late 1980s I bought a collection of ‘Maharajah’ rifles, which purported to have come from the armoury of the Maharajah of Udaipur. Among them was a single-barrelled Purdey .246 Express rifle that, to my mind, was rare if not unique.

I rang Richard to ask if he could confirm the provenance of this rifle. He was intrigued because he did not believe that Purdey had ever made a single-barrelled rifle and asked if he could see it.

I duly turned up at South Audley Street and was shown into the Long Room where, to my relief, Richard confirmed that, much to his surprise, the rifle was indeed a genuine Purdey and that it had been built on a single-barrelled trap gun action. I asked him if he could confirm for whom it had been made originally. He stated firmly that Purdey would never reveal a customer’s name.

However, perhaps because I had given him the opportunity to see what he said was a unique Purdey, he excused himself for a moment and conveniently forgot to close the record book, which was open on the Long Room table. Unashamedly, I turned the book round and made a note of the rifle’s provenance and specification, which confirmed that it had been ordered by the Maharajah of Udaipur in 1936.

I also noticed that the consecutive serial number had been given to a side-by-side Express rifle in the same calibre also for Udaipur. By a strange quirk of fate, some years later I was able to buy that side-by-side rifle from a Swiss collector. Edward Asprey

Chapel Row, Berkshire