The Sidelock Double Rifle is the tour de force of the gunmaker’s art; the ultimate combination of craftsmanship and artistry, combined with the painstaking regulation required to ensure that both barrels shoot accurately. Built on a reinforced version of the famous Purdey self-opening Side-by-Side action, it is also the most time-consuming design to produce. While such a rifle requires significant investment, those who decide to order one become part of an extremely select club, as less than 1,600 hammerless double rifles have been built in the last 140 years.
The history of our double rifles goes back to the very earliest days of the company. James the Founder was a keen rifle shot, who regulated all of the rifles he made himself. This included a pistol and rifle he built in 1842 for Colonel Davidson, who invented one of the first telescopic-sights. It was to Davidson that Mr Purdey confided that “he did not think he could live without a whiff of the rifle smoke.”
At the beginning of the 1850s, James and his son, James the Younger, collaborated on the development of a double rifle that, by the standards of the time, had a small-bore, generating both a higher velocity and correspondingly flatter trajectory. The Purdeys famously likened their performance to a railway train, and so the ‘Express’ rifle was born in 1852.
While these early rifles were muzzle-loaders, the term continued to be used into the breech-loading era, with the creation of ‘Black Powder Express’ cartridges. Many of these are now loaded with smokeless powder as ‘Nitro Express’ cartridges and remain popular dangerous game calibres today. Alongside these were the ‘bore’ rifles, chambered in shotgun calibres. The largest ever built by Purdey was a 4-bore hammer rifle, which weighed in at 17½lbs. It was built for the Paris Exhibition of 1878, and then sold to Earl de Grey as part of his ‘Indian Outfit’ two years later.
The first Purdey hammerless double rifles were sold in 1882, chambered in .450 Black Powder Express. This was a standard deer cartridge of the day, and a favoured one of the then Prince of Wales when he was shooting in the Mar Forest in Scotland. Due to the higher pressures, these were usually completed with a spring-loaded rotary-underlever rather than a toplever. These snap back into position with some force as the rifle is closed, which can occasionally catch the fingers of an unwary shooter!
By the 1890s, common calibres included .303 (British) and an early form of the most famous of Purdey’s proprietary cartridges; the .400 (Purdey), which remained a mainstay of the company’s production until 1948. Prior to 1933, the largest calibre available in a Purdey double rifle was the .500/.465, but this changed when the Bombay Armoury ordered a .600 (Nitro Express) for one of their royal clients. That same year also saw the first Purdey double rifles in .577 and the .470.
Today, the double rifle remains a rare but extremely desirable beast. They are mostly commissioned in larger calibres, all with rimmed (or ‘flanged,’ to use the older term) cases. These ensure much better ejection – a must, given the quarry they are intended for. The size of the action, specially scaled for the much higher pressures, lends itself to commissioning a piece that is also an expression of the engraver’s art, as well as of the gunmaker’s skill. The results are exceptional and striking, and it is no wonder that they often form the pinnacle of any collection.