HOLLAND AND HOLLAND.
On learning that perhaps the most important ingredient in the manufacture of a 12 bore shotgun costing about the same as a brand new 328i Convertible is, in fact, soot, you’d be forgiven for thinking twice about disturbing the moths in your wallet.
However, having just spent an utterly riveting morning at Holland and Holland’s north London factory, and the afternoon happily chastising the cumulo nimbus with just such a weapon, I for one will be fervently smashing piggy banks and stealing pocket money from children until I have amassed the requisite £32,000. I can’t remember ever having coveted a thing of beauty so much since I first discovered that the opposite sex existed for reasons other than the pulling of hair and the administering of the occasional Chinese burn…
In 1835, a London tobacconist named Harris Holland started making guns. There were at least 90 gun makers in the city at the time and, in the face of such skilled competition, Harris’ efforts should best have been labelled a hobby. But his customers thought otherwise and in the 1870s, following the lengthy apprenticeship of his nephew Henry, Harris finally forfeited cheroots for cartridges altogether and Holland and Holland was born.
At the turn of the century, shortly after Harris died, Henry moved the factory to a large building on the Harrow Road with a gently unfortunate outlook over Kensal Green Cemetery, where it has remained ever since. Gun making activities are not the sort of thing you wish to advertise too overtly these days, and now the only clues as to building contents are the painting of doors and woodwork in a rather obvious, British Shooting Green and a large map of the area in the local police station with the words GUN FACTORY writ huge all over No. 906 Harrow Road.
A Holland and Holland shotgun starts life in two places simultaneously: A British Steel foundry, and half buried in a field somewhere in Europe or California. For the stock is always made from the walnut tree which, depending on the depth of colour you chose comes either from Turkey (dark), France (medium), or California (light); there is indeed, still, some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.
And a stock does, literally, begin life half buried underground: This section of timber is deliberately chosen to give an elegantly broken, whorled grain -from below ground- to the main body of the stock, and a straight grain -from above ground- to the ‘hand’; the part you hold. This is important: Straight grain is much stronger. It needs to be to withstand up to 18 tons of force generated by some rifles.
In the Wood Shop on the top floor of the factory, stocks -fashioned so roughly that they look best suited to a Fred Flinstone firearm at this stage- are kept for anything up to ten years as they mature; excruciatingly slowly shedding moisture until they are stable and won’t further alter shape. Both Turkish and Californian walnut is very popular with the Americans, Holland and Holland’s biggest client these days, but give me that classic, French colouring any day.
Meanwhile, the Machine Shop in the basement begins the production of barrels and ‘actions’; the bit that makes the gun go bang. Hollands today are unique in manufacturing their own barrels from solid forgings of three percent nickel steel on site. In fact, the only operations not performed on site are blacking and hardening, which we’ll come to… All of the components of one gun’s action are cut from a single ‘billet’ -a lump of mild steel resembling the pendulum of a giant grandfather clock- to ensure a perfect match on the completed gun.
Andrew Lawley, Holland’s designer, takes great pains to explain that the beautifully milled components coming off computer controlled cutting machinery cooled by what looks like an endless supply of unpasteurised milk are, in fact, merely a rough facsimile of what they are to become. But I’m reluctant to believe these exquisite, abstract, steel sculptures are already anything less than perfect until he explains that the finished article won’t be delivered to the customer for a further two and a half years …
Barrels, turned and drilled in the basement, and already identified for their end user, then make their way upstairs to the Barrel Shop, where we find foreman, Phil Turner, painstakingly both reducing the outside dimensions of the barrels and enlarging the insides to bring their diameter to within .004 of an inch of the finished size. Lapping, which inexorably slowly wears away the inside of the barrels to a mirror finish, involves working a revolving lead plug coated with an abrasive paste -about the size and shape of a weasel stiff with rigor mortis- to and fro inside the barrels. Phil will also form the choke at the end of each barrel which controls the spread of shot, either to a fixed aperture, or with variable, screw in chokes. Once the gun has been proofed, though, further tweaking will be carried out, on a range, to ensure that every gun produces nothing less than an ideal spread of shot from each barrel.
The barrels are then brazed together at the non-business end with silver solder at a temperature of 700 degrees Celsius, and the central rib welded in place with tin at a far lower heat of only 300 degrees. This reduces the chances of heat distortion, and makes the barrels far easier to take apart for repair. And the only thing that has changed in this entire process over the last 100 years, is that the lapping lead is now spun by electric motor…
Next door, in the Action Shop, foreman Paul Faraway has the job of marrying barrels with the ‘action’ bodies he’s building. Shotgun firing mechanisms were once made almost exclusively by locksmiths, hence the naming of so many components in the action -tumblers, locks and triggers- after bits you’ll find buried in your own front door. Paul’s job is also to further cut the action into its final, intricate shape -each action is unique- ready for engraving and to fit the particular stock for which it has been designed. The action goes together with the precision of an automatic watch, each component lovingly honed, re-honed, and honed again until the fit is perfect. Deliberately slightly tight, in fact, at this stage.
And this is where the soot comes in: The junction of barrel and action is almost invisible. You can’t close a gun on a single human hair. In fact, the barrels are joined to the action by the thickness of smoke; the finest layer of soot. The flame from a guttering oil lamp is played over one half of this all important joint and the blackened face married to the action. Where soot
remains, further filing is need. Simple as that. Except, one mistake and months of work is fit for nothing more than the circular filing tray.
Soot is used in this fashion throughout the gun making process; on every floor of the factory rows of guttering flames imbue the place with a distinctly medieval air. And I’d not be in the least surprised to come across a dungeon somewhere in the bowels of the building, sporting some hapless apprentice stretched over a rack for a minor misdemeanour which has set a gun back six months…
Apprenticeship is still taken very seriously indeed at Hollands. Every man at every workbench has undergone a full year of off-bench training before being allowed to even touch anything at all, followed by a further four years training at a chosen specialisation. During this time, he will not only be expected to become a master-craftsman at his chosen skill, but also to make his own set of tools for said trade.
Once the action shop have completed their work, the gleaming guts of a 12 bore -called an ‘action barrel’ are ready for a trip to the London Proofing House for christening as a shotgun. A proofing charge is about two and a half times that of a standard cartridge and prudent proofers, having strapped the loaded action barrel down, retire to a safe distance -in this case, another room altogether- before firing. This they do by tugging on a good, old fashioned and reassuringly long, piece of string.
Jason Schofield, foreman of the Stocking Shop has, what seems to me to be an wholly impossible job. Using terrifyingly sharp chisels that carve through solid walnut like a spoon through cold custard, it takes him three weeks to carve each stock and, once again, the slightest mistake will result in him having to start all over again. But he can’t make a mistake: The matured stock has already been selected by the client; there is no substitute if he fluffs his lolly.
The most important fit, he tells me, is the marriage of the ‘action’ face to the stock. Once again, the all important soot is in evidence to ensure a perfect fit. If the meeting isn’t exact the gun will fire with a slapping motion into the shoulder rather than a solid push. But it isn’t even that simple. In some places the fit should be less tight than others: “Not a gap” insists Jason. “Never a gap. Just not quite so tight.”
When Jason has finished his work, what was already a pretty slender stem of walnut will have had its innards almost entirely carved away, with astonishing accuracy, to fit the firing mechanism. It is, in effect, an exact wooden negative of the steel action, as painstakingly perfect as that to which it must marry, and a thing of exquisite beauty. It’s hard to believe that such a skeletal framework could take the full force of the gun firing…
Carving the body of the stock, by contrast, is a matter of moments for Jason. ‘Cast on’ or ‘cast off’ -the amount by which the stock bends to fit the shoulder and cheek of a specific client- will have already been determined, and the action made to suit. Ask any sculptor how they can possibly fashion perfect shapes out of nondescript lumps, and they’ll always tell that it’s easy; you just
take away the bits that shouldn’t be there. And Jason tells me he can recognise, at a glance, every stock he’s ever made. I believe him.
Already reeling from the impossibility of Jason’s profession, the Engraving Shop is almost more than a mere mortal can stand. The only sound in evidence is the endless, tiny, tic..tic..tic of hardened steel chisels, points sharper than hypodermic needles, picking away remorselessly at actions and barrels. You may have your gun decorated as you see fit; one American client has had scenes from Jurassic Park, perfect down to the last velociraptor, engraved on his. But, for those of us with taste, Hollands have a number of standard patterns which buyers may opt for; the ‘Royal’ being a firm favourite. And the engravers know their way round these designs with barely a glimpse at a pattern guide.
Even for the most detailed work they seem to shun the help of a magnifying glass. At one end of the bench, one engraver is working on the design of a woodcock in flight the size of a toddler’s fingernail; without the magnifying glass, I for one can barely even recognise the form. I’m very much in danger of running out of superlatives here. Suffice it to say that the work of the engravers is, in a word, astonishing. No wonder it accounts for up to half the cost of every gun.
Once engraved, the components of the ‘action’ body are sent out of the factory for hardening. This involves the mysterious alchemy of introducing the chosen components into a carbon nitride rich atmosphere, from which they absorb carbon and, thus… well, harden. I’d probably be able to give you rather more detail had I ever paid the slightest attention from the back row of the chemistry classroom…
Blacking, the final colour of a gun’s barrels, is something of a, um, black art. Very, very few folk know the secret, and all have their own recipe for what is effectively a chemical corrosion process; oxidising the steel like a controlled form of rusting. Hollands send all their barrels to the same man for blacking, and he’ll hand the technique down, in turn, to his son. This little outpost of the gun makers art -no, they didn’t tell me who, or where- is the last bastion of an industry that used to be entirely cottage based, with individual components coming together from specialists throughout the land.
The Finishing Shop strikes me as something of a misnomer. Every gun has been assembled and then taken apart again at least 50 times before its component pieces are gathered here for final assembly. And should you feel, as you watch two and a half years of outrageous craftsmanship snugging, sliding and clicking smoothly into shape, that £32,000 is a shade too much to spend on a shotgun, it’s worth considering that very few cars -even those costing double this- are built in more than a single day… Yet the engraving alone on a Holland and Holland ‘Royal’ shotgun takes a month.
Understand, then, my trepidation when Andrew Perkins, my instructor for the afternoon at Hollands’ shooting grounds in Northwood, offers exactly this jewel of a 12 bore to my absolute beginner’s shoulder.
Well, hang on, that’s not strictly true. I’ve shot rifles all my life. But shotgun shooting is a very different discipline indeed; the one requiring a complete absence of movement, the other having constant movement as a fundamental to success. The net result being that, on the two previous occasions I’ve tried my luck at the clays I couldn’t, it transpired, hit a cow’s arse with a banjo.
Andrew Perkins is patience personified. He has a nice, gentle, good humoured line in the “Ahem. No, no, no, you blithering idiot, sir” school of coaching, and has the tricky job of assessing exactly what, apart from blowing large holes in the ground, trees and possibly his foot, I’m capable of.
We start with what is considered the easiest shot, a clay pigeon flying straight away from me; very little gun movement involved, just point and fire: The clay ambles into sight. Not one of those tiny black, competition jobs that fizz off the launcher with audible venom, this a great angry orange wok of a thing, wafting away from me with indolent sloth, almost blowing a raspberry of contempt so safe does it feel from my attentions. Gun already ensconced in shoulder -not the way to do it properly- I let rip. The equivalent of the tip of a tail feather tumbles reluctantly of the wok and Andrew reminds me that a hit is a hit; they all count with clays.
Suitably invigorated, I blast away at several more woks with only modest success. It doesn’t matter, I just love using this gun: Having overcome my anguish at despoiling a work of art (many owners feel the same way and tend to keep their Royals for Sunday best), I relish its impeccable balance, the lightness that is a hallmark of Hollands’ guns, the intricacies of a mechanism that re-cocks the gun and sends a pair of smoking cartridge cases arcing over my shoulder with an audible ‘ploop’ at every reload, the smell of cordite, the kick in the shoulder, the fact that I can’t hit a damned thing…
But I must be measuring up in some respect (or maybe he’s just bored), for Andrew suggests trying a different shot. This time the clays, smaller and black now, will fly towards me and overhead. Trickier shot; gun movement required. My deeply ingrained tendency to lock everything solid at the point of pulling the trigger isn’t doing me any favours here and Andrew concentrates on getting me moving, and keeping it that way ’til after I’ve fired.
Further emboldened, we take the plunge and try shooting properly, with the gun lowered, stock tucked into my rib-cage when the clay is launched. This gives me time to properly assess the flight of the clay before bringing the gun to my shoulder, starting my swing to overhaul the clay, firing, and missing by a margin that would make any self-respecting pheasant suspect an amnesty had been declared. But I still don’t care. I’m still too deeply involved with the gently primitive pleasures of simply wielding this work of art disguised as a shotgun.
Let’s face it, were I ever required to go out and slay woolly mammoths to actually feed the family, my other half would starve within the week. But at least she’d expire with a smile on my face.