Hawker proved a long-time friend of the company, buying Westley Richards guns and writing favourably about the maker and his wares. Peter Hawker, the shooting author and renowned sportsman, from his Longparish estate. I have tried it repeatedly and never yet knew it to fail’ wrote Col. His ‘Waterproof Safety Primer’ took the copper-cap percussion ignition system into the realms of reliability and safety. However, his major contribution to the sportsman during this period was the 1831 copper primer patent, which heralded the demise of flintlock and pointed the way to the future of sporting gun and ammunition design. Innovating from the earliest days of the business, William Westley Richards patented his first improvement to gun locks in 1821. He made his reputation in this pursuit and the company has been striving, for two centuries, to deliver on that sentiment. His motto was ‘To be the maker of as good a gun as can be made’. William Westley Richards was a sportsman, a public spirited individual and a well respected businessman. It was, then, the ideal location for a factory intent on housing a skilled and motivated labour force and producing complex machinery to very high standards. One hears nothing but the sound of hammers and the whistle of steam escaping from boilers’. One only sees busy people and faces brown with smoke. It is an immense workshop, a huge forge, a vast shop. The town itself has no analogy with other English provincial towns. They are generally very intelligent people, but intelligent in the American way. They work as if they must get rich in the evening and die the next day. De Tocqueville, in his journals, described it thus ‘These folk never have a minute to themselves. By the relatively tender age of twenty-two, he was the proprietor of his own gun-making firm.īirmingham in 1812 was a place to behold. They educated him well and, presumably, encouraged him into business. His family were middle-class Birmingham traders in jewellery, cutlery, guns and like items. William Westley Richards was born in 1789, the year that Parisians stormed the Bastille and set France aflame with revolution. gun-making factory go back to the days of the flintlock. The foundations of the modern Westley Richards & Co.
However, the past two centuries provided a turbulent ride for this, one of England’s great gunmakers. The old Birmingham firm has transformed itself, over the last twenty-five years, into one delivering the working rifle of choice for the quality-inspired modern hunter.
If I were a betting man, I would lay a significant wager that the twenty-first century double rifles now accounting for the largest number of African game animals are those made by Westley Richards.
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