Cased pairs

[sillymike]

Just post a question in the comment section.
- They're actually pretty good at answering.

 

[pirate604]

Ryan is correct. Matched pairs were developed for driven pheasant shoots (and red grouse and partridges), where beaters drive the birds to take flight and fly towards and over the waiting line of shooters. All very organized, with allotted positions, and once the birds start coming in, the shooting is fast and continuous until the drive is over. Only afterwards are the birds picked up. A sport not possible with muzzle-loaders, but possible with the new-fangled breech-loaders, which were fast to re-load. It was the need for speed in such shooting that led to snap-action gun actions, ejectors, part-cocking actions, and eventually self-cocking hammerless guns. It also meant individual daily bags of hundreds and sometimes thousands of game birds at the large estates. Better still was to have two perfectly matched guns, identical in all respects, the numbers one and two on the ribs being the only difference. Same weight, balance, decoration, wood colour (and often grain pattern), so that the shooter could not tell one from the other when using. Because of the extra work in making them identical (hand work, not machine-made), a pair was more costly than buying two separate guns. A loader (often one’s footman, or butler) would take and empty and re-load the fired gun and hand it back to the shooter. With two guns, they could be alternating guns in a continuous choreographed sequence. Quite something to watch. The first breech-loaders were very expensive, each one a status symbol. To be wealthy enough to have two… Some very wealthy sportsmen had sets of three, using two loaders.

To put it into perspective, imagine if buying a gun today meant spending one and a half or two times your annual salary… and ordering two of them. In some ways the cost of a bespoke Purdey hasn’t changed much in 170 years, in relative terms. Through modern production, the cost of a decent gun has come way down to something affordable to most.

On the subject dearest to me, pin-fires, I can say that I am not aware of any pairs of pin-fire game guns having been made. The sport of driven pheasants was only possible with breech-loaders, and the pin-fire double gun was fast enough to use for the number of pheasants being raised at the big estates. It took several years of determined pheasant husbandry to develop the facilities for, and raise, the large numbers of pheasants needed for the sport. By the time the big estates were rearing the big numbers of pheasants, the central-fire guns, even faster to re-load, were dominating the shooting field. And as shooting was a social activity of persons of rank, there was peer pressure to switch to the newest guns, and not use the out-of-fashion pin-fires. Matched pairs started with central-fire hammer guns.

To give an idea of the kinds of numbers I'm referring to, Lord de Grey, the 2nd Marquess of Ripon and the best game shot of his day, kept detailed records. In 1867 he obtained a pair of Purdey central-fire hammer guns, but only shot 741 pheasants with them. In 1868 that number rose to 1,601. From 1873 he was averaging over 3,000, and by 1876 he was bringing down 4,000 a year. Then it was 5,014 in 1881, 6,119 in 1883, and 8,514 in 1896, particularly good years. His best pheasant year was 8,647 birds in 1906. He kept shooting until 1923, by which time his total pheasant count was 241,224 birds (and over half a million game birds -- grouse, partridges, woodcock, snipe and ducks -- in total). In terms of individual estates, the day's count could be in the order of more than 3,000 pheasants, split between the shooters. Keen shooters could fire 20,000 rounds in a season. It is not surprising that hammer guns from the 1860s to the 1890s can be very tired.

Very cool bit of history there.

 

[Ashcroft]

Pairs of guns were quite regularly ordered by wealthy shooters, particularly from the more prestigious makers during the heyday of the big shoots, roughly 1890 - 1914. After WW1 demographics changed considerably, many of the wealthy participants were experiencing shrinking incomes as the British Empire shrunk and taxes increased. Estates were broken up and frequently pairs of guns were divided between sons or heirs. These orphans show up quite frequently today, most marked with a prominent ‘2’ or occasionally a ‘1’ or rarely a ‘3’ and the whereabouts of the siblings is lost to time.

 

[arcticcathonda]

I believe the premium charged on pairs had to do with finding enough high quality wood that had nearly identical figure. On some of the Beretta factory tour videos you can see wood blanks set aside in pairs. Some of the figure in the wood can be rare, but finding two guns worth makes the task even harder and rare. I think that's where the true pair premium comes from.

 

[Ashcroft]

I believe the premium charged on pairs had to do with finding enough high quality wood that had nearly identical figure. On some of the Beretta factory tour videos you can see wood blanks set aside in pairs. Some of the figure in the wood can be rare, but finding two guns worth makes the task even harder and rare. I think that's where the true pair premium comes from.

The challenge of matching high grade wood is definitely a challenge and must add to the premium charged for pairs but by far most of this surcharge relates to more subtle things that can’t be seen. Two stocks can come from a suitable blank, engraving and basic specs can be matched but these guns were all handmade and the greatest painstaking care ( spelled time = money) was expended in making balance, trigger pulls, stock dimensions feel and handling characteristics identical. Not close. Not similar. Indistinguishable. These were ( and still are) not machine made cookie cutter guns, every part right down to screws and springs were hand made and hand fitted from basic forgings by supremely skilled artisans using basic hand tools like files, jigs, callipers, balances. Very very few alive today have those skills.