The Shooting Field

The Shooting Field is part of the British Heritage. Lord Ripon, the greatest shot who ever lived, said that when we no longer continued to shoot 'the England of whom the poets have sung will have ceased to exist'. This book tells the story of the London gun trade from the earliest days, and in particularly from 1835 through the eyes of a most famous maker, Holland and Holland, and of their customers, their rivals, and their craftsmen. We travel to India with the Prince of Wales and to Africa with Sir Samual Baker and Teddy Roosevelt. These great shots tell us in their own words what it was like to shoot with a Holland and Holland, an experience denied to all but the most fortunate of men. And women too, like the legendary Duchess of Bedford who worried about the length of her skirt when out shooting.

The company's existing archives have been exhaustively researched to reveal the continuous experiments which Holland and Holland carried out which resulted in the wealth of innovative patents that the company has filed. Of special interest are instructions to cartridge loaders and manufacturers which stipulated in the minutest detail the pressures and velocities they required. The tables from the archives reveal to the number of proud Holland and Holland owners around the world the approximate date of their weapons.

We learn of the development of the double barrelled rifle, the breech loading shotgun, the cartridge, the punt gun, even a gun designed to shoot down Zeppellins in the Great War.