I’ve just acquired a sidelock Belgian 16 sxs and need some help identifying the maker.
The watertable has the *S, P.V. and the Perron, so these marks are easily understood.
The barrels also have a *K which indicates another inspector...have looked these up. Barrels are also both marked 16.9 choke 16.8. And “Importe de Belgique”; NL.
From the inspectors’ marks, *K for Delsaux, Walthere, *S for Daenen, Charles and an apparent rho, P, on the watertable, I’m guessing a gun produced ca. 1958.
On top of the barrels it is marked “St. Hubert” and then spaced apart “Briard” , and on the top of the left barrel, “Coulommiers”, a town west of Paris in the heart of the La Brie region. The St. Hubert is probably the (Belgian?) name of the model of the gun, after the patron saint of hunting.
Briard may have been the importer (lots of uses of that name in Coulommiers, even a restaurant and a cement company as well as the paper, Le Pays Briard, today), as Coulommiers is in the region of La Brie. Briard was perhaps added to the model as a regional identification since Briard seems to be a strong regional identifier there in an agricultural region that might have (or had) good bird hunting. Coulommiers also appears to be known for its brie, le brie de Coulommiers! A Briard is also an old French breed of sheep herding dogs, but I don’t think this is a reference to them.
The gun has only edge decoration on the once case hardened sidelocks, but has fences and oak leaf carving on the action. Moderate engraving on the underside.
So I’m left believing that this is possibly a Liege made middle range shotgun ordered by and exported to a dealer in Coulommiers, France, with the local marking of Briard (like the Crescents in the US perhaps) identifying it as a gun for the local region, La Brie, thus a Briard. Then it somehow made its way eventually to the US.
Always fun to track down the markings on these guns and learned a bit more about a nice little region of France too. The only still puzzling thing about the gun is that there is an NL, probably the maker’s mark but I can’t find who it is, on the barrels.
So, hoping that one of the sages on this site know who NL was, as you did when I asked about LC a couple of years ago!
