doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com The pinfire game gun

Back to pinfires, and we finally get to the famous 1864 Powell Lifter action, next in terms of significant snap-actions to appear. Thanks go to Steve Helsley for some of the historical details below. The errors are my own.

Guns by William Powell & Son of Birmingham are always well built, and this one is no exception. What makes this one of particular interest is that it has been converted to dual-fire with an extractor, strengthened hammers and the pin holes left unfilled, thus being able to use both pinfire and centrefire cartridges.

The Powell name goes back a long way in British gunmaking. The first William Powell started a gunmaking business in Birmingham with Joseph Simmons in 1802, and from 1812 he started selling under his own name. His son, also William, took over the business by 1841. The second William Powell had a son born in 1823, also named William (side note: naming the first son William is a common tradition amongst some family lines in Britain -- it is the case with my family, but being the second-born I escaped this practice). It is the third William Powell that is of interest to me. In 1847 at the age of 18 he was made a partner in the business and the firm's name changed to William Powell & Son.

In the 1861 census records William Powell described himself as a gun maker employing 6 men and 5 boys, which gives an idea of the size of the business. In the 1860s there were few large-scale gunmakers, mostly providing military contracts, and firms building sporting guns were often quite small. Some, and sometimes all, of the work on sporting guns would be done by outworkers providing specific parts, such as locks, or doing specific tasks, such as jointing actions or fitting stocks. While all gun makers were able to build a complete gun (a requirement to becoming a member of the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers), in day-to-day business most did only part of the work themselves, such as putting everything together and finishing, and making proprietary designs. It makes me smile when I read descriptions of early breech-loaders that include the term factory-this or factory-that -- when the "factory" probably wasn't bigger than my kitchen, and with less light. But I digress...

William Powell became a Guardian of the Birmingham Proof House in 1855, a post he held until he died in 1905. In the course of his life he registered a number of important patents. The one illustrated here is his very successful Patent No. 1163 (May 1864), for a rotating bolt single bite snap action with a lift-up top lever and transverse pivot behind the action face, which locked against the barrel lump which extended rearwards from the barrels into the action face. This patent was successful for both pinfire and centrefire hammer guns, with some of these actions being supplied to the trade and appearing on other makers' guns. Approximately 750 patent action pinfires were made, out of about 2000 hammer guns built based on this patent in the following 25 years, accounting for much of the firm's business. The lift-up lever continued on their hammerless guns until 1922, approximately 3000 more guns. The lifter action quickly became popular, with two guns sold in 1864, 70 in 1865 and 100 in 1866. This also gives an idea of the scale of a "successful" sporting gun maker in Britain -- compared to American factories turning out thousands of machine-made guns a year. A bespoke maker selling 100 game guns in a year was doing very well indeed.

Many Powell records prior to 1858 have not survived, so it is not possible to know exactly when William Powell first built breech-loaders, but he built pinfire game guns from at least 1859, and the first documented record is the sale of two 16-bore guns August 7, 1860 to Mr Owen Powell, noted earlier in this thread. Powell built his first centrefire breechloader in 1867, and by 1870 Powell was marketing both pinfire and centrefire guns (though probably selling many more of the latter than the former). It is important to remember that pinfires and centrefires were sold and used concurrently in the 1860s, it wasn't a case of makers stopping to make one for the other. Some shooters preferred the pinfire, which offered advantages such as being able to tell easily if the gun had shells in the chambers (by the protruding pin). There was also the matter of availability of cartridges, something we don't think much about nowadays.

The latter point is of relevance to this gun, which was built as a pinfire then converted to dual-fire, to be able to fire either cartridge type. Towards the end of the pinfire period, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, some thought it was a good idea to be able to use both -- because it was not yet certain that the centrefire would prevail (I suppose like some people didn't think the Internet was going to amount to much...). In the case of this gun, converted in 1890, this seems very late, but the owner would have had his reasons.

Gun no. 3690 was first completed on 9 November 1866 for H. W. Lord, who may have been Henry William Lord, barrister and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. However, something happened and this name was crossed out in the company ledger, and the gun was renumbered and sold again on 16 December 1869 under serial number 3790 to "J.B. Dellap", listed as "best patent breech loader, best damascus barrels, 30 in., 7 lb." for £27.50. I believe the original owner was James Bogle Delap of Lillingstone Lovell, Buckinghamshire (born 1847). He was the great nephew of Colonel James Bogle Delap of Monellan, Ireland, whose family wealth came from Jamaican and West Indies sugar plantations. He would have been around 22 at the time of picking up his Powell.

The gun is a good representation of Powell's best offerings, and the conversion was carried out by Powell in 1890. Signs of the conversion are the extractor (not necessary on a pinfire, and in any case pinfire shells had little or no rims), the action bar with recesses cut for the extractor, centrefire strikers fitted to the breech, and metal added to the stems of the hammers to strike the strikers. Unfortunately the cuts on the action bar have obliterated the patent use number, which would have identified how many lifter actions Powell had made up until that point.

Usually conversions were straightforward, though dual-fire guns are rare -- perhaps for good reason. The idea is clever, but how it worked in practice is open for speculation. Would the unsupported base of the pinfire cartridge rupture? Would the strikers uselessly dent the pinfire cartridge base and make the gun difficult to open? Might gases escape from split centrefire cases through the pin-holes? I've not fired the gun, as it is slightly off face, and pinfire cartridges are rare enough.

The gun is in reasonable condition, but it has obviously had much use. Some wood has been replaced near the hinge, not uncommon in bar-in-wood guns. Thin wood on a gun firing thousands of rounds a season is a recipe for cracks and chips.

As a final note, it has been devilishly difficult to find a Powell & Son in the original pinfire configuration. I can only ascribe this difficulty to the soundness of their construction and therefore being good candidates for conversion to centrefire without spoiling the looks of the gun. Like Westley Richards pinfires, I expect, most Powell pinfires were converted to centrefire, and used afield for many more years.