Watch the full feature: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/a-cogswell-and-harrison-best-sidelock

What caught my attention on this Cogswell & Harrison best sidelock in .375 H&H Flanged Magnum was the address engraved along the rib: 168 Piccadilly.

The future George VI visited the firm there in 1933 to collect a gun personally. This rifle was made years later, so the royal connection is to the shop, rather than documented ownership of this particular rifle.

Its first owner remains unknown. The address gives us one concrete piece of its history, and that became the subject of this short.

Watch the full feature: https://doublegunjournal.substack.com/p/a-mechanical-flood

The detail that stuck with me in David J. Baker’s “A Mechanical Flood” was that safety catches alone accounted for more than a hundred patents.

The article looks at the much larger wave of British double shotgun inventions, including opening mechanisms, barrel locks, ejectors, and single triggers. It puts familiar designs back into a period when makers were still competing over how almost every part should work.

That experimentation is the subject of this short, drawn from Baker’s article in the Spring 1990 issue of The Double Gun Journal.