Gibbs Guns

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.

During the Victorian and Edwardian periods, Gibbs became widely known for making accurate, dependable rifles, both double-barrels and single-shots. Frederick Courteney Selous, the famous African big-game hunter, swore by Gibbs firearms, stating, "You can kill anything that walks the earth with a .450 bore Metford rifle by Gibbs, of Bristol." Sir Samuel White Baker, considered the greatest hunter of the era, commissioned Gibbs to build a huge rifle weighing 21 pounds and firing a four-ounce conical bullet. "An extraordinary success attended this rifle," Baker later wrote, "which became my colossal companion for many years in wild sports with dangerous game." Gibbs also developed the powerful and highly effective .505 Gibbs cartridge.

Although known mainly for its rifles, Gibbs also built shotguns, including an innovative early smoothbore design that enjoyed wide popularity.

The Gibbs & Pitt gun, patented in 1874, has been called the first commercially successful hammerless shotgun to emerge during the golden age of gunmaking in Britain. The Gibbs & Pitt featured a triggerplate design. It was cocked using an underlever and had a side-mounted swivel safety. Geoffrey Boothroyd wrote that the Gibbs & Pitt possessed "the look that a shotgun has when it has been made by a riflemaker." A later model, which bore a greater resemblance to a standard sidelock, was cocked through the use of a rotating toplever that activated the backward movement of the bolt locking the barrels.

Both varieties of the Gibbs & Pitt gun were complicated and relatively expensive to build and stock. Nonetheless, according to British gun authority David J. Baker, "something on the order of 10,000" had been produced by the late 1880s. (These included a number sold under the names of other firms, both London and provincial.) In 1890 the patent lapsed for the Anson & Deeley action, and when many gunmakers turned to the simpler, less-expensive A&D design, the Gibbs & Pitt fell by the wayside.

Gibbs also made standard sidelocks and boxlocks. Teasdale-Buckell wrote that "West of England men swear by Gibbs, and many another sportsman besides thinks there is no gunmaker to be found, even in London, that is his equal." So sound was the firm's reputation that in 1906 Gibbs opened a London branch at 35 Savile Row and ran it until 1929. The firm even had a retail outlet in Vancouver, British Columbia.

George C. Gibbs-apparently more active in the firm than his brother, Herbert-died in 1918; the business was then bought by H.F. Stevens (a former Gibbs managing director), gunmaker John Harper and a Dr. Cates. The company went bankrupt in 1929 during the worldwide economic upheaval of that year. The factory was shut down and the London outlet closed; after paying off its creditors, the firm moved to much smaller quarters at 37 Baldwin Street in Bristol. In 1940 the company was bombed out and moved to 39 Baldwin Street, and after World War II ended it was able to move back to the 37 Baldwin Street address. During that period the firm continued to make a few guns and rifles and to sell firearms made for it by outworkers. In 1964 I.M. Crudgington, of Bath, and Norman Harper (the son of John Harper) purchased the company. Between 1964 and 2005, the firm made in the neighborhood of 100 guns and rifles. In 2005 Mark Crudgington, I.M.'s son, bought the name. Mark is still making George Gibbs guns (see accompanying sidebar), and so the company can be said to have remained in continuous operation since its inception.

For years I had heard good things about Gibbs guns, but I'd seen only a few of the company's guns-mainly mid-grade boxlocks, probably made by outworkers and then "bought in" and retailed by Gibbs. Recently I learned of a good Gibbs sidelock-a 12-bore with 30-inch Damascus barrels-for sale in England by Richard Moore of Salisbury. In need of a 12 for clays shooting, and a longtime fan of Damascus barrels, I bought the gun.

The Gibbs sidelock bears Serial Number E474. It was made in 1896. (Its age allowed it to be sent to the US as an antique.) It weighs a shade more than 6 pounds 10 ounces. The gun balances just in front of the hinge pin, and it feels quite lively in the hands. The Gibbs has checkered triggers, a removable hinge pin, a graceful swamped rib and disk-set strikers. The sideplates are engraved with rose & scroll. They have a silvery patina-no hardening color left on this old campaigner. The gun is a non-ejector. It has a silver diamond inlaid in the forend; Richard Moore tells me that if the Gibbs had been a "best"-quality model, the diamond would have been gold.

According to the Nigel Brown book as well as information supplied by Mark Crudgington, the "E" prefix on my gun's serial number denotes a third-quality Gibbs product, having the same component parts as a best gun but not being as highly finished. Second-quality guns had a "C" prefix, and a "B" prefix indicated a gun made elsewhere and bought in by the firm. Gibbs also made a number of best guns that many judged the equal of those produced by London's finest.

In preparing Gibbs E474 to be sold, Moore had its chambers lengthened to 23/4" and the gun re-proofed. He engaged an engraver to "pick up," or deepen, the George Gibbs name and the 39 Corn Street, Bristol, address on the tops of the barrels; he then had the barrels re-browned. When Moore told me the re-browning had been done by "a chap named Chambers in the Forest of Dean," I got an instant mental image of an elfin craftsman at work. In any case the job was nicely done, leaving the beautifully patterned barrels a rich plum brown. Those barrels are in excellent condition, with minimum wall thicknesses of .030" and no pitting.

Moore also had Mark Crudgington go over the gun. Crudgington works out of Marlborough, about 30 miles east of Bath, which lies a few miles south of Bristol. For E474, Crudgington made and installed a new mainspring. A top-flight stocker, he also renewed the gun's checkering. When I spoke with him over the phone, he remembered the Gibbs well. "Great barrels on that particular gun," he said. "It's very, very well put together, and the condition is excellent-almost as new."

As a third-quality model, the gun has somewhat less engraving than a best gun would. It is not stocked all the way to the fences. The wood, although reasonably well figured, is far from flashy. ("Think of a Webley 702," Moore had told me.) The stock merges with the lockplates in a graceful shoulder rather than the drop points customary on higher-grade guns. Moore opted not to have the stock refinished, and so it retains a certain history in the form of myriad small scratches and dents. Stock length is 141/2" to a checkered butt.

Number E474 is a backlock gun, a fact that is clearly visible from the location of the pins that secure the action: These are arrayed in a roughly horizontal constellation behind the large hammer trunnion.

An excellent photograph of the innards of a Gibbs backlock action appears in Heyday of the Shotgun, by David J. Baker. On the action, the inner surface of the sideplate is stamped "Joseph Brazier Ashes." Joseph Brazier was a lockmaker whose works, The Ashes, were in Wolverhampton, a town where lockmaking was a specialist industry. Brazier supplied unfinished locks to a host of gunmakers throughout the British Isles. The photo's caption reads: "George Gibbs of Bristol action and back-action lockwork, unusual in a best gun." Perhaps it's significant that Baker places the illustration in the chapter "A Gun for a Nobleman" along with text and illustrations of guns by Boss, Purdey, Atkin, Beesley and Holland & Holland.

But Gibbs differed in significant ways from the fancy London houses. According to Teasdale-Buckell, Gibbs placed considerable reliance on machine tools, "lumps of steel with a notch here and a slot there." Such a tool "holds the piece and directs the cutter or 'bit'; all the workman has to do is apply the power."

Gibbs preferred back locks for all of its sidelock shotguns, probably because the firm was accustomed to using back locks for its heavy-recoiling big-game rifles. The back action is an inherently stronger design than the bar action generally used on the sleek sidelocks made by firms such as Purdey and Boss. In back-action guns, the lockwork projects back from the action. (Moore referred to the Gibbs as having a "backward mainspring.") Using locks that extend rearward means that no metal need be removed from the body of the action to house the mainsprings, as in a bar-action gun.

Holland & Holland's Dominion sidelocks are back-action guns, notably strong but of a different (and clunkier-looking) design than the Gibbs. Many Charles Lancaster sidelocks of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, with their distinctive dipped, or "leg-o'-mutton," lockplates, were back-lock guns. So was the "12-20," a lightweight 12 bore: as light as a 20, or so its name implied, and a gun that had to be very strong to withstand the repeated firing of standard 12-bore loads. As is the case with my Gibbs, the 12-20 had lockplates of a normal curved shape. The 12-20 design persisted well into the 20th Century in guns made by Lancaster, Stephen Grant and a number of others.

Mark Crudgington owns the Gibbs record books as well as the firm's original blueprints and the factory tools that were used in filing springs, drilling extractor holes and making other components. "It's clear that Gibbs realized back locks were stronger than bar locks," he said. "On guns of their own manufacture, they refused to use bar locks until around 1900 to 1904." Some of the bar-lock guns that Gibbs sold were bought in from other makers. When Gibbs began switching over to building its own bar locks, the firm did so reluctantly and "purely in response to fashion," Crudgington said.

Another intriguing feature of Gibbs shotguns is the way the barrels were joined together and the lumps attached. Rather than using chopper lumps, the standard for a London best, Gibbs often opted for through-lumps. Major Sir Gerald Burrard writes in The Modern Shotgun that the through-lump method produces a strong joint but that "it is inclined to be slightly clumsy as it adds to the width of the barrels." (The other side of the coin: A back-action gun can be built with a slightly narrower bar than a bar-action gun of similar strength.) In through-lumps, a piece of tooled steel forms the lumps and is exactingly fitted to dovetails in the barrels, with the whole assembly brazed together. This central piece is machine-bored to accept the extractor rod. "It's a very strong way of putting barrels together," Crudgington said, "one that is arguably stronger than chopper lumps."

I often think that all of the debate about lock design and barrel construction is somewhat academic. The fact is that well-made guns, both boxlocks and sidelocks, both bar locks and back locks, tend to be good, solid, aesthetically pleasing tools that keep on doing the job for which they were made: smashing clays and bringing down birds, year after year.

Although I have shot the Gibbs on the skeet range, I have yet to take a grouse or woodcock with it. (Last fall in the game coverts I exclusively used my tried-and-true Jeffery 20, a well-used boxlock that I felt no compunction about placing hurriedly on the ground when I needed to go deliver a correction to a certain willful young black cocker spaniel.) But someday I am certain that I will enjoy success in the field with this vintage sidelock.

In the meantime I'm happy to be the custodian of Gibbs No. E474. It's a well-made, handsome firearm whose design sets it apart from most other sidelocks while embodying the Gibbs philosophy of building strong, enduring high-quality guns.

Author's Note: My thanks go to Mark Crudgington for critiquing this manuscript. I also thank longtime SSM subscriber Macgill James, of Houston, Texas, who sent me photocopies of several articles about the Gibbs company and the Gibbs & Pitt shotgun.

Charles Fergus is Shooting Sportsman's Book Review Editor.