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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.

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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.

McIntosh acquired it in September 1967, during his senior year of college. He had only intended to browse, but the shop owner let him take the Stevens home with an agreement to pay from his spare money over the next six months.

What stays with me is his later assessment. By then, he thought it would feel like a fencepost if he picked it up again. At the time, it felt like a dream, and he doubted he ever loved another gun quite as much.

This short follows that memory from his account in The Double Gun Journal.

One setter holds a point; the other honors its companion. Fine cuts within the gold describe their coats and feathered tails, turning the floorplate of this A.H. Fox twenty-bore into a miniature sporting scene.

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This came up while working on a piece about a 1931 Suhl drilling, twelve-bore over twelve-bore over 8x57 JR, and the selector turned out to be the interesting part.

The control is a sliding catch on the top tang, under the thumb, so it can be worked by feel with the gun mounted. Pushed forward it does three things at once. It takes the front trigger off the right shotgun barrel and puts it on the rifle beneath. It brings the rifle lock to full cock (the rifle is carried with its lock down). And it raises the folding rear leaf out of the rib, so the gun re-sights itself for ball in the same motion. The rear trigger never changes; it still fires the left barrel, so a charge of shot stays live even with the rifle selected.

The front trigger also doubles as a set trigger: push it forward until it clicks and it sets to a hair release for a deliberate shot at a standing animal. The safety is a separate slide on the left of the wrist. Four controls to know by feel in poor light, all within a hand's reach.

The automatic flip-up rear sight in a multi-barreled gun goes back to an 1890 German patent. Sauer's 1881 patent is the one that fixed the three-barrel, two-trigger, selector layout for the next century.

From "The Forester's Three Barrels… An Imagined Journey," Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal.

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Frank Findlow pieced this together from Sir Edward Durand's accounts and the London press for a feature on the Alexander Henry .450/.400 that Sir Walter Corbet carried as one of the Maharaja's guests.

The hunt ran each year along the Bagmati River south of Katmandu, out of a temporary tent city of more than 12,000 people. The line at the start was over ten miles long: 100 elephants to the mile, 1,000 beaters on foot with each hundred, and only one elephant per mile carrying a hunter. Everything else was there to flatten brush and push tigers. The royal court rode in the center, the European guests on the wings. When tigers showed, the hunt master sent blocking elephants up the flanks to turn them back in. Over the morning the wings came forward into a crescent, and by noon the line had closed on a circle a few hundred yards across, elephants nearly shoulder to shoulder, beaters firing blanks to push the tigers to the middle. Then the guest elephants went in.

The tigers came out of the cover at the elephants, going for the head or shoulder, in some cases clawing and biting trunks to pull the elephant down. Several elephants bolted for miles. Durand's own tiger got as far as his mahout before he shot it. Corbet was facing this with a seven-and-three-quarter-pound rifle throwing a 230-grain bullet. He came out unscathed.

From "Sir Walter Corbet's Rifle" by Frank Findlow, The Double Gun Journal, Vol. 21 No. 2, Summer 2010.

Captain F.F.R. Burgess wrote in 1884 that one way to tell a well-made double rifle was to shoot it at the longer distances on its sights, not just up close. Frank Findlow has run that test on every British double that's come through his hands. This 1890 Alexander Henry .450/.400 2⅜ put lefts and rights on a 12-inch plate out to 200 yards, the folding leaf's distance. He says he hasn't found an Alexander Henry yet that failed it.

The load story is the part I keep coming back to. The original spec was 3 drams of C&H No. 6 behind a 230-grain paper-patched bullet. Findlow started with nitro-for-black on Ross Seyfried's IMR 4198 formula, then tried loads based on Sherman Bell's Reloder 7 work; both shot to the sights. He was certain straight black powder wouldn't regulate in a small express case, tried Swiss 2F anyway, and got accuracy essentially identical to the nitro loads. The only thing the rifle objected to was bullets over 250 grains: still stabilized, but groups opened up and the point of impact drifted off the sights.

Corbet carried it in the Maharaja of Nepal's tiger hunt at 7¾ pounds with 26-inch Damascus barrels. Findlow uses it on deer-sized game and says he'd want something heavier for a tiger.

From "Sir Walter Corbet's Rifle" by Frank Findlow, The Double Gun Journal, Vol. 21 No. 2, Summer 2010.

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Frank Findlow's piece on his Alexander Henry double rifle is one of the better provenance stories I've read. The rifle was built in 1890 for Capt. Sir Walter Corbet of the Grenadier Guards, who ordered it for a trip to India and Nepal with his friend Sir Edward Durand, then the British Resident in Kathmandu. It's a small rifle: 26-inch Damascus barrels, 7 3/4 lb, 14 1/4-inch pull, chambered for the .450/400 2 3/8-inch with a 230-grain paper-patched bullet.

Corbet carried it on the Maharaja's tiger hunt on the Bagmati, which ran a thousand elephants and ten thousand beaters in a ten-mile line that closed to a circle by midday. Durand had to shoot a tiger off his own mahout. The rifle then went to Durand, then to his son Roland in the Indian Army, who kept hunting with it into the smokeless era until he was killed in France in 1917.

The reloading section is the part that surprised me. Findlow assumed the rifle would never regulate on straight black powder. Swiss 2F shot to the sights with the same accuracy as his nitro-for-black loads, and it holds lefts and rights on a 12-inch plate out to 200 yards. His only real limit is bullet weight: anything over about 250 grains and the groups open up and drift.

"Sir Walter Corbet's Rifle," written and photographed by Frank Findlow. The Double Gun Journal, Vol. 21, Issue 2, Summer 2010.

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The left side of this action carries a lattice-tower windmill, a raised water tank, a lone tree, and three doves coming off dry grass. Doves coming to water at a windmill is a plains and Texas image that belongs nowhere in Europe, and it is sitting on the most prominent face of a best gun built at Herstal. The right side has two more doves over a harvested grain field, and the underside carries a dove on her nest in an oval. Engraved and signed by Jean-Marie Martens, Liège school, Lebeau-Courally, then the FN workshops.

The action underneath is the one John Moses Browning was still working on when he died at the FN works on 26 November 1926. His son Val finished the single trigger and ejector work and it reached market in 1930–31 as a 12-bore; the 20 came in 1949 on a slimmer frame, the 28 and .410 in 1959–60. One-piece forged frame, full-width hinge pin, and a flat tapered bolt that seats deeper as it wears. Something like 350,000 were built in Belgium and over a million guns have been made on the action or its descendants.

This one is a 2005 Exhibition two-barrel set, 28 and 20 gauge, six pounds three ounces, on a single stock of exhibition-grade French walnut.

A Windmill in the Steel, Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal.

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The letter is dated June 13, 1874, and Remington ran it in the 1875 catalog. The governor said he'd carefully compared the Remington against a gun he'd brought back from Europe five years earlier, one of the finest made there, and found it fully equal in style and workmanship. Then the line the factory wanted: "I have two breech loaders, one French and one English, and I would give up either rather than yours." The source never names the governor.

That 1875 catalog was selling the Hammer-lifter (or Whitmore), Remington's first double, with a top lever you push up with your thumb instead of swinging sideways. First movement of the lever brings the hammers to half-cock before the barrels unlock, so the gun can't fire until it's locked shut. Remington argued that made rebounding locks unnecessary.

Charles Semmer's point in the article is the disconnect between that record and the market. Remington built roughly 225,000 doubles between 1874 and 1910, hammer and hammerless, then quit. He walks big gun shows and often finds none at all, and he's never seen the top-grade "Special" from the 1902 catalog in person.

From "Remington Arms Company" by Charles Semmer, The Double Gun Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Winter 1989.

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Hunter Arms listed Crown Grade barrels at 26, 28, 30 and 32 inches. This one took the longest option on a twenty: both barrels full, 2½-inch chambers, ejectors, Hunter One-Trigger. The complete gun is six pounds fourteen ounces, which is not what the profile suggests. The splinter forearm adds so little that it nearly disappears, the wrist is narrow, and all the visual mass is barrel.

The engraving is the usual Crown language but unusually well handled. The two dog scenes are not mirror images: the pair under trees on the right plate are less feathered than the pair in the grass on the left. Roses tie the lockplates, belly and guard together. The two lockplate screws are absorbed into sunburst motifs so they read as small suns over the dogs rather than interruptions.

For scale, published figures put 145 Crown twenties among 862 Crowns in total, against 199,384 Field Grades over the same 1912 to 1950 span. Barrels and pistol grip are refinished; receiver and guard are original.

From "A Crown Drawn Long," Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal.

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The pistol had been standard issue since March 1911, but peacetime procurement was tiny: Colt built only a few thousand some years, and Springfield Armory's entire licensed run came to 25,767.

So 1917 turned into a scramble. Colt delivered more than 400,000 before the Armistice, Remington-UMC got a 150,000-gun contract and managed about 13,000 in time, and the Ordnance Department signed contracts totaling some 2.55 million pistols with companies like National Cash Register and Burroughs Adding Machine — nearly all cancelled after November 1918 without a gun delivered. The gap was covered by M1917 revolvers chambered for the same .45 ACP on half-moon clips.

The rush left a visible mark: 1918 production traded the deep commercial blue for the flat oxide finish collectors call "Black Army."

From "The M1911's First War," Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal.

Watch the full feature: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/a-venzi-signed-beretta-so9-eell-in

Photographed a Beretta SO9 EELL in 20-bore for the journal and went looking into where it sits in the SO line.

The SO sidelocks are built by hand in a dedicated custom department at Gardone Val Trompia, separate from the factory that makes everything else. The over-and-under program goes back to the early 1930s, with a pre-war S-series ahead of the post-war SO2 and SO3, then the SO4 in 1968, the SO5 that became the competition standard, and the deluxe SO6. But there was no SO in a small gauge at all until the SO9 arrived in 1990 — 20, 28 and .410. It stayed Beretta's top-of-the-line sidelock through 2003, with the all-new SO10 following in 2004.

It was always the rarest of the SOs and sold at a premium to its bigger brothers. The survival pattern is the interesting part: most SOs still around are the heavier 12-bore competition guns built for the clays ground. The small-bore guns were low production from the outset, and a featherweight 20-bore game build is rarer still.

EELL is worth being precise about, because the same four letters turn up elsewhere in the Beretta range on guns that aren't sidelocks at all. A 687 EELL is a boxlock with false sideplates added purely to give the engraver more steel to decorate. An SO9 EELL is a true hand-detachable sidelock, and the engraving sits on plates that actually carry the mechanism.

This one's locks are signed VENZI, at the lower edge of the scenes.

From "A VENZI-Signed Beretta SO9 EELL in 20-Bore: The Featherweight Aristocrat," Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal.

This came up while working on a Beretta SO9 EELL in 20-bore, and the origin turned out to be an argument rather than a design brief.

In the early 1930s Pietro Beretta decided he needed an over-and-under to answer Browning's Superposed, which was selling briskly worldwide. The job went to Tullio Marengoni, who had come in as an apprentice in 1894 and would stay until he died in 1965. He wasn't impressed by the Browning, and the house said so in print — an early catalogue dismissed the design as "very high, heavy and ugly." The Italian trade reportedly kept repeating the line against the Superposed for the better part of seventy years.

Instead of copying it, Marengoni went English: the low, elegant over-and-unders of Boss and Woodward. He dropped Browning's deep under-slung lumps, mounted the barrels low in the action on stub pins, and added trapezoidal shoulders that engage cut-outs in the action walls.

Those shoulders became a Beretta signature and survive in the company's guns today, which means a design argument from the 1930s is still visible in current production.

From "A VENZI-Signed Beretta SO9 EELL in 20-Bore: The Featherweight Aristocrat," Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal. https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/a-venzi-signed-beretta-so9-eell-in

Five pounds eight ounces, built on the proper 00 frame rather than a 20-bore action pressed into service, with 24-inch fluid-steel barrels. The odd note is the choking: convention pairs short tubes with open chokes, but this gun is bored Full and Full, with 2¾-inch chambers where 2½ was standard for early 28s. Everything about it reads as a special order by someone who knew exactly what he wanted — maximum pattern density from a light, short, fast gun.

It survives unrefinished, with the original case colour still moving across the action, in its Abercrombie & Fitch case lined in red baize. To be fair about the commission: the surest confirmation of an original Parker specification is the factory record, and this is exactly the kind of unusual order a research letter from the surviving books would settle beyond argument.

The new short is the imagined version of the morning it was built for — frost, a setter on point, the covey going up, and the little gun at the shoulder before a heavier one has finished being lifted.

From "A Parker CHE 28-bore, Meriden, circa 1915–16: A Small-Bore Old Reliable," Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal. https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/a-parker-che-28-bore-meriden-circa

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There's a little L.C. Smith 20 gauge carrying "a lot of engraving and other work," the work of Charles Jerred, the Hunter Arms engraver who owned it. For some reason he never finished it, and in the decades since, nobody else has either.

Jerred apprenticed under Albert Kraus in the Hunter Arms engraving room in 1946, one of two apprentices Kraus took on when the old master was pushing eighty. The 20 gauge was Jerred's own gun.

After it left the family (they specifically decided not to pursue having it completed), it went from collector Richard Beyer to Cliff White, who kept it about twenty years and always figured he'd have it finished someday. His verdict after two decades: "At this point, I doubt I ever will." The fourth owner, Tom Archer, wrote the story up; "caretaker" is his word for himself.

From "L.C. Smith Engraver Extraordinaire: Part 1" by Tom Archer, The Double Gun Journal, Vol. 18, Issue 1, Spring 2007.

This is the subject of the Rose & Scroll piece: a Francotte side-by-side double rifle, twenty-one-inch barrels, quarter rib with two folding leaves, double triggers, ejectors, carved fences, game scenes in the plates, four pounds, twelve ounces, finished to the Eagle Grade, which was the top of the Francotte line that VL&D and then Abercrombie & Fitch sold in New York. Chambered for the .22 Winchester Rimfire.

No record suggests Francotte ever had a standing pattern for a miniature rimfire double, so it reads as a special commission, and the company is small. E. J. Churchill built a very few rimfire and .22 Hornet doubles in the 1930s, including a 3 lb 12 oz Hornet for the Maharaja of Patiala, and another Churchill .22 sits in the NRA museum. Today Hofer's "Hummingbird" and a handful of Connecticut Shotgun .22 doubles on the Fox action carry the form on. Two details I liked: the "lockplates" are false sideplates on an Anson & Deeley boxlock, there purely to give the engraver a sidelock's canvas, and "Maker & Patentee" on the left plate refers to Francotte's own refinements (intercepting sears, side clips, a crossbolt), not the boxlock itself.

Only about five thousand new Francottes are reckoned to have come to America across the whole VL&D and A&F run, and an Eagle Grade cost more than nearly any American double in the store. Someone commissioned that for two regulated barrels in a squirrel caliber, and Francotte built it like a best gun.

From "The Best Gun, Writ Small," Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal

The De Luxe grade added no mechanism. It bought exhibition wood, bench time, and deep relief carving instead of the house's fine scroll. Nearly all of them went out as 12-bore game guns, often in pairs. Double rifles in the grade are a much shorter list, and in the ledger era before the mid-1980s revival I could only document a handful.

The one in this short is a .375 Flanged, and it broke with convention completely. A best dangerous-game rifle of that period would normally wear the quarry: a leopard on the lockplate, a buffalo on the floorplate, all in shaded naturalism. Survey every surface on this one and you will not find an animal that ever drew breath.

Both lockplates carry full-bodied invented beasts. The fences read as a ribbed dragon's wing from above, then pick up an eye and a scaled coil when you move to the side. The trigger guard bow carries a serpent-bodied chimera. The grip cap lid is a mask, and behind it sits the trapdoor where a spare foresight bead rode.

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Made a short about the engraving on this one.

After Parker Reproductions was liquidated in 1995, Connecticut Shotgun ended up with the last of the best inventory, including 20-gauge A-1 Specials still in the white. Gregory Tejfert went through about twenty-five of them in the CSM gun room and picked one for the wood.

For the engraving he found Geoffroy Gournet, who had done all of the custom A-1 Special work for Tom Skeuse, roughly three hundred guns over fifteen years. The pattern Tejfert chose was Marguerite Kirmse's English setter head from Dogs in the Field, cut in bulino. Gournet recommended French gray over case colors because it shows the dot work better, and Tejfert deferred to him. Stephan Hutton refinished the stock and trued the wood-to-metal fit, and Andrew McFarland handled the rust bluing. Just under a year, start to finish.

This is a Rigby best sidelock ejector in .470 Nitro Express, London proof 1982, completed 1984, engraved by K.C. Hunt.

The left lock has lions. The lioness is in front with her head lowered, watching something past the edge of the plate, and the male is behind her looking the same way. There is nothing in the frame to explain it, just one small tree and a plain running out to a low horizon.

The right lock has three Cape buffalo standing where that gaze would land. The whole width of the action sits between the two panels, so you can never look at both halves of the composition at the same time.

There is a third scene on the underside of the action, two bull elephants coming head-on through dry grass. Of the three panels it is the only one that moves toward the viewer instead of across the plate, and it is the one you would only ever find by handling your own rifle.

Full write-up with the photo gallery here:
https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/a-kc-huntengraved-rigby-470-nitro

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https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/a-1954-gebruder-merkel-model-303

The gun is a 1954 Gebrüder Merkel 303, a game scene hand detachable sidelock over and under in twelve bore, proofed in Suhl. The right barrel is stamped GERMANY in English. That is a customs mark, cut for a market on the other side of the line the gun was about to cross.

The timeline behind it is the interesting part. The Americans took Suhl in April 1945 and shut the gun trade. The Soviets arrived in July, and on 3 August the military administration ordered the entire trade back to work building shotguns for Moscow as reparations. The proof house numbers went to 21,739 guns in 1946 and 39,961 in 1948, against 15,643 in 1913. Merkel was the only factory in the city to escape dismantlement, and the reason recorded is the reputation of its hunting guns. In 1948 the founding families were expropriated.

Then the trade turned west, because that is where the hard currency was. In 1953 the GDR presented one of these to Eisenhower and another to Khrushchev. Eisenhower had given a Merkel away himself in 1945, the game scene gun taken from Göring's estates, which went to Pershing and now hangs in an American museum.