Email this page  Print this page  del.icio.us  digg  Feed

George C. Gibbs was a crack rifle shot. According to G.T. Teasdale-Buckell in his 1900 book Experts on Guns and Shooting, during a match at Winstow, England, in 1886, Gibbs put 48 out of 50 consecutive rounds into a three-foot bull's-eye at 1,000 yards. In accomplishing that feat, he shot an open-sighted Gibbs-Farquharson-Metford .461 target rifle built by his family's gunmaking firm. There is also a persistent story of Gibbs using one of the company's rifles-perhaps the same blackpowder big-bore-to sever the rope and thus shoot down an effigy of a parliamentary candidate that pranksters had hung beneath a suspension bridge in Bristol, the city in western England where the Gibbs firm was located.

George C. Gibbs was the son of an earlier George Gibbs, who began making guns around 1830 at 4 Redcliffe Street in Bristol. After several moves, the company conducted business at 29 Corn Street between 1858 and 1890 and then at 39 Corn Street for the next several decades. An off-premises "manufactory" was built in 1873; Nigel Brown's book British Gunmakers, Volume Two, reproduces an engraving of the three-story building, which housed a work force of 90. George Gibbs the younger worked in the factory and is known to have rifled the barrels of many of the firm's firearms. His brother, Herbert-said to prefer smoothbores-looked after the business at the Corn Street offices and showroom.

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to Shooting Sportsman»