Morrow single barrel arrived yesterday much better than I expected what a lovely thing.

I'm happy for you pedder. Will you be using it for game, or targets....????

I shoot quite a bit at high driven pheasants here in theUK and I’m going to see if I shoot better with only one shot,my preference is for good hammerguns but anything British will do or best Spanish I have quite a few of both.

Congratulations, you have good taste.

No gun can compare handling wise with a quality English single. I am really curious to see how you will do with it at driven shooting and how the experience will compare with using a double.

I have handled a fair number of these quality singles and they puzzle me. Obviously they're too good for the role of normal (ie cheap) single shots. They seem to have been well looked after, that and the 2 1/2 chamber do not indicate wild fowling. Makes me wonder about who ordered and how they used these guns.

Best of luck to you with it. I hope you bond well. I think you may well find that you shoot better with a single. I have found that to be the case using an American made trap gun for birds. Please report back on your experiences with it from time to time. It will likely be shooting birds much sooner for you than it would have had I won the auction. That would've probably been a six month process at best, as I understand it. But, I'll be looking for another nice single in future sales and auctions. My usages would be for doves ........ maybe even ducks and turkey. There was one characteristic of the Morrow I would have had to rectify had I won it. The drops were measured at Holt's at 1 1/2" DAC and 1 7/16" DAH. I could not have shot that as it is. Are they actually that, pedder, or did Holt's make a typo in what they sent me?


Me too, Sl. Have wondered about that for a long time.

I recall reading somewhere, it might have been one of Gough Thomas's articles in the Shooting Times, that these quality singles were often bought by vicars for use at late season invitation shoots, and they were known as vicars' guns.. Apparently it was the custom to invite local dignitaries like vicars, local council official and others to shoot on estates once a year. The quality single was an economical yet quality choice for this kind of infrequent use. Considering the number of these singles there must have been a lot of shooting clergymen in the early part of the 20th century.

A patient of my father was a vicar from Abergavenny in Monmouthshire.

He used to shoot with a pair of Boss SLE, game engraved with the birds modelled after the Archibald Thorburn plates in the Encyclopaedia of Sports.

One is illustrated in Donald Dallas’s book on Boss.

I suspect he was not wholly dependent on his stipend.

I once had a well aerated Boss gun built in 1861 as a pinfire and converted to centerfire. It was built for a clergyman who happened to be a younger son of some high ranking muckity-muck who owned Harewood House and was Earl of Harewood. Google Harewood House; it makes Downton Abbey look like a hovel. The clergyman was a high ranking official at Ripon cathedral. We once had a thread on that gun here where one of our foremost weapons experts called my gun a tomato stake...Geo

Was the foremost weapons expert wrong???

Nah, I tried to get the barrels sleeved and even arranged for my friend Steve Bertram to ship'em off to England, but the rest of the gun didn't measure up to what we considered safe standards, because the very thin detonator's and the single bite underlever didn't appear strong enough to handle modern loads.

Luckily someone else was happy with the Boss provenance and the barrels as they were and I sold it to a collector for a small profit. Just goes to show you that old jOe ain't always wrong...Geo

The Earl of Harewood was one of the governors of the school I went to in nearby Knaresborough in the 1960s and gave the prizes out on speech day each year. A very friendly chap who loved to talk shooting and ferreting with eager schoolboys. As we say here, no side to him at all.

Thanks for the information, Mr. Thruxton. The gentleman who ordered my Boss in 1861 was IIRC the sixth child of the fourth Earl. I don't know what "no side to him at all" means, but I think the Earl you refer to was the sixth Earl and first cousin of QE2. He was the old gentlemen with the pointy beard in Prince William's wedding picture which we saw over here. The family fortune, I understand was made in the three corner trade. When I bought the old Boss, I got a copy of the purchase order from Boss, and followed the Lascelles surname in order to discover what I know of the owner's distinguished family...Geo

The phrase is a Yorkshire/Lancashire one which roughly means no airs and graces which may also mean "What you see is what you get". I drive past the Harewood estate most weeks to get to my rough shooting and its one of the few left which is still relatively intact with its farms and land geared to shooting.