William Westley Richards

In 1826 the most famous shooting writer in England paid a Birmingham gunmaker an outrageous compliment. Colonel Peter Hawker told his readers that Mr Westley Richards, of Birmingham, was considered by some of the best sportsmen to be “Joe Manton the second”. Joseph Manton was the London gunmaker every gentleman wanted. Hawker went further. “Mr. Richards is really a scientific man,” he wrote, “instead of having more tongue than brains, like many of our gunmaking charlatans.”

That was not how people usually talked about Birmingham guns. Sixty years earlier Lord Shelburne had been told that half the cheap guns the town sent to Africa would burst “in the first hand that fires them”. William Westley Richards spent his working life showing that a Birmingham name could stand for the opposite.

A toyshop on the High Street

He was born in Birmingham in 1788 or 1789, into a family that already lived by metal. The firm’s own history describes his relatives as silversmiths, jewellers, cutlers and gunmakers, and his father, Theophilus Richards, is listed among the town’s gun makers in James Bisset’s illustrated directory of 1800. In 1812, aged about twenty-two, William set up in business at 82 High Street, where, according to Grace’s Guide, his father and grandfather had kept a toyshop. In Georgian Birmingham a “toy” was a small, fashionable metal object, a buckle or a snuff box or a seal, not a plaything.

High Street was the old commercial spine of the town, running down towards the Bull Ring. It was a street for customers. The guns themselves were made somewhere else.

A trade of many hands

Nobody in Birmingham made a whole gun. The trade was split into dozens of specialisms: barrel makers and lock makers, stockers, screwers, polishers, engravers and the “setters-up” who put the parts together. By the early 1800s the town directories listed fifty-one separate gun trades. Barrels were mostly forged outside the Gun Quarter, in Aston, Deritend, Smethwick and West Bromwich, and locks in the Black Country. The finishing was done in the crowded houses and backyard workshops north of Steelhouse Lane, with boys carrying half-finished guns from one workman to the next.

A Birmingham “gunmaker” was usually the master who ordered the parts, judged the quality, and put his name on the result. That made trust the whole business. In 1813 the trade asked Parliament for a proof house of its own, where barrels would be tested before they could be sold. The firm’s history says Theophilus Richards was among the petitioners, and the Proof House in Banbury Street opened in 1813–14.

William used it hard. When Hawker wrote to ask how barrels were proved, Richards replied: “The barrels at our proof-house are proved singly or together, as the parties desire. I prove mine singly, as this is a greater trial to a barrel.” It was a small boast with a big meaning: a maker choosing the tougher test.

The Bond Street window

Richards understood that his best customers did not come to Birmingham. They shopped in London, and many believed only London guns were any good. So he went to them. His agent, William Bishop, sold Westley Richards guns from 170 New Bond Street. Grace’s Guide dates the arrangement to 1815; Hawker reported it in 1826. By the 1838 edition of his book Hawker could write that “Westley Richards is quite the star of Birmingham, with more business than ever”, while “his Bond-street agent, Uncle Bishop” was perhaps the first man in London for a good gun at a few hours’ notice.

It was a division of labour on a national scale: Birmingham workmanship, London salesmanship. In 1840 Richards was appointed gunmaker to Prince Albert, and the firm’s trade cards carried the royal arms above the Bond Street address.

Primers and patents

His working life spanned the biggest change in sporting guns for two centuries: the move from the flintlock to percussion ignition, in which a small charge of detonating powder took the place of flint and steel. Every gunmaker in Britain was experimenting, and the race was fought through the patent office.

Bennet Woodcroft’s index of patents records William Westley Richards, “of Birmingham, gun maker”, six times: for gun and pistol locks in 1821; for touch holes and primers in 1831; for primers again in 1836 and 1838; for locks and primers in 1841; and for improvements in firearms and projectiles in 1852. The firm’s own history adds a hinged “flip-up” sight supplied to the British Army in 1834. Hawker gave a page, with an engraving, to “Westley Richards’s new steel primer” and praised it above the copper cap for shooting in wet coastal weather.

These were improvements, not revolutions, and the people who praised Richards did not pretend otherwise. What they valued was the combination: patient invention, fine finish and reliability.

Father and son

The firm’s history says William handed the business to his eldest son, Westley Richards (1814–1897), in 1840. The patent record suggests a gentler handover, since the father was still taking out patents in 1841 and 1852. Either way, it was the son who carried the firm into the age of the breech-loader.

The younger Westley Richards took out about twenty patents between 1855 and 1871. One produced a capping breech-loading carbine, nicknamed the “monkey tail” after the long curling lever on top of its breech. The British Library, which holds an example made at the government factory at Enfield in 1865, calls it one of several designs considered for the British cavalry around 1855–60, which “later saw limited production and use”. A survey of the Birmingham gun trade published in 1866 reported that it had been “tested in the field, both in China and in New Zealand”, in Britain’s colonial wars, and that a large number for the cavalry were being made “by Mr. Richards and at Enfield”.

By then the firm stood apart from most of the Gun Quarter. The Victoria County History notes that while many gun workers still sat in “cramped ill lit workshops”, Westley Richards ran “a highly integrated factory” and made revolvers “with a good deal of machinery”.

A Birmingham worthy

William Westley Richards became the kind of citizen his trade liked to hold up. He was a magistrate and, the firm records, a churchwarden of St Philip’s, a trustee of George Fentham’s charity, chairman of the 1849 Birmingham exhibition, held in the grounds of Bingley House, and a juror at the Great Exhibition of 1851. He died at Hall Hill in Edgbaston on 14 September 1865, aged 76. His memorial tablet in St Philip’s, now Birmingham Cathedral, carries the line: “The memory of the just is blessed.”

From the High Street to Bournbrook and back

The business kept moving with the city. In 1894 the firm opened a purpose-built factory in Grange Road, Bournbrook, south-west of the centre, leaving behind what the Victoria County History calls “the cramped surroundings of the gun quarter”. It worked there for 114 years. In 2008 Westley Richards moved into two converted Victorian and Edwardian factories in Pritchett Street, which the firm describes as “an arrow’s flight from the traditional Gun Quarter”. The Bournbrook building was demolished the following year.

When Grace’s Guide checked in 2008, Westley Richards was the only one of the famous historic Birmingham gunmakers still working in the area. It still is.