50 Years in the Gun Trade

NICE LITTLE SIDELINE

Jason Abbot is one of the best-known english gunmakers, his refurbished side-by-sides hang from the arms of shooting aristocracy such as the Dukes of Northumberland and Norfolk. To celebrate his 50 years in the trade, Steve Faragher went to meet him…

USING the grand knocker on the front of Jason Abbot’s home, a converted rectory in the leafy heart of the home counties, sets off an immediate kerfuffle inside as dogs bark excitedly. Then the door opens and Jason appears framed by the doorway, a grin on his face and a shock of dark hair on top of his head that belies his advancing years. He’s casually attired, and clearly still fit, though he does walk with a slight stoop. Two extremely friendly black labradors rocket past him to say hello.

“This one’s only eight months old,” he says, by way of welcome, pointing to the far more enthusiastic of my two greeters, and after some excited sniffing, whirling in circles and wagging of tails we all make our way inside.

Jason explains as we wander through the house that he bought it a few years ago, and has since added an enormous conservatory, a duck pond and converted two rooms for the conduct of business. These days that business is the restoration of best english side-by-sides.

His gun safe—the room where the vicar used to meet with any troubled members of his flock—is stacked with legions of glorious guns. Best english Holland & Hollands and Purdeys are his mainstay, a Manton has pride of place on his desk. Some are already restored with gleaming new stocks, others still await their rebirth.

We have to recognize that there are areas of shooting which are very unattractive

His enthusiasm for the guns is obvious, as he pulls several out to show me, all lovingly restored by Jason’s team. “I’m not a gunsmith,” he tells me, “though I rather grandly describe myself as a ‘gunmaker’. My main thing is that I know what a good job is, and who does it. And I do an awful lot of shooting. So I think very much like my customers. and try and put myself in their shoes at every opportunity. I put the people together to bring them back to life, and the advantage is that they are so much cheaper to buy that way.” One Purdey he points out to me would by his reckoning cost £140,000 new, and just £14,000 from him, a tenth of the price.

All this is partly because side-by-sides are so out of fashion of course, but Jason is having no suggestion of their being inferior to over-and-unders. “The difference when competition shooting between a side-by-side and an over-andunder is just a few points, which is almost insignificant.”

Jason should know, he won the the British Open Side-by-Side Championship three times—first in 1993 and then again in 1995 and 1999.

“It was quite glamorous back then,” enthuses Jason, “[the event] was held at Northolt, where West London Shooting School is. It was just a rather nice, traditional old place. It was sponsored by The Daily Telegraph, and they had a grand marquee with guys walking around in top hats and tails. And you could do it in any order you wanted. You just had your card, you joined the queue, and went around and it was all very relaxed. And if you got there first thing in the morning, you could shoot a round pretty quickly. These days, I think everything is much more regimented, and you have to go around in a squad, with a load of strangers, and do it in the order they say.”

As we settle down with a cup of tea the black labs take a final sniff of me, then content that I am no longer of interest curl up to snooze. The views from Jason’s conservatory are spectacular, northwards for miles across a hillside almost empty of human habitation.

Jason begins to tell me how he started up his business.

“It’s not actually 50 years since I got started,” he confesses, “but in March it is 50 years since I opened up my shop in Princes Risborough. Before then I worked from my parent’s home, and I joined the Horsham gun shop as an employee in 1972 and worked there for a year or so. I had a good knowledge of English guns at that stage because I’d had a very good mentor and he became a partner, and then my partner started being rather difficult so I left him and started the Princes Risborough shop.”

“By chance and a bit by design, it was right in a sort of vacuum. There was no competition for miles and miles and the business just took off. I was paying 15 quid a week rent, not employing anybody and living upstairs. It was a tiny shop that was about half the size of this room with the same upstairs.”

“There was no mail order to speak of back then, there was no internet. And so the country was full of gun shops in every county town, who had a complete selection of all things to do with shooting—all the different calibres in current use in stock, and a good selection of guns all at normal retail prices, which in those days was 50% markup on cost. And you could make a profit on a tin of slugs or a box of cartridges, and because of that, you were very happy to sell obscure calibres and things which you didn’t sell much of.”

“That carried on for a couple of years, and in 1979 I bought the freehold of a bigger shop 200 yards away but still in Princes Risborough—I borrowed every penny I could to do so. Bank managers in those days could not lend you money fast enough at 15-16% interest.

"So then in a moment of madness, my ex partner in Horsham wasn’t doing very well and I bought him out freehold and all. So I had two shops I was running for about 10 years, but I struggled with the second branch because like all these things, it’s tricky if you’re not there yourself. So we closed that down. I still own the freehold and it’s a tandoori restaurant now.”

“Then 30 years ago a friend and I bought a hotel called The Swan in Tetworth, near Thame. The hotel had been closed down for 10 years previously, we reincarnated it as an antique centre and a restaurant and I tucked my gun business into a barn in the carpark. We ran the shop from The Swan for 20 years. 10 years ago I sold that and moved here about five years ago. And I’ve been here ever since. My gunsmith was working from the workshop here to start with.

He’s now retired. And my secretary has just retired as well.”

So is Jason giving up soon?

“Well, the thing is, Steve, I enjoy what I do. And I’m sort of thinking about that very thing all the time, because I don’t want to be stressed or pressured. So I’m trying to hive off the bits I don’t like. If I can find a one day a week person, I think they can take the paperwork off me and the actual buying is certainly very few guns at the minute. So I can deal with that. I’m farming out the repairs. I’ve got some very good gunsmiths within half an hour of here. So I can juggle that.”

It would be a shame to lose Jason with his wealth of experience. He tells me then that he helped Bonhams set up their gun auction, that he mentored Nick Holt back in the day, and that he still has a lot of blue chip customers. He clearly still loves his guns and as long as great shots across the country want to buy them from him, who is he to refuse?

After taking some photographs we head off to the pub for ham, egg and chips and a pint of best for me. Jason drinks white wine, and refuses to let me pay (“you’re on my patch”, he insists.) We cover many topics over lunch. Jason is a Telegraph reader and a self confessed Brexiteer, but feels “we’ve been sold a pup.” He has a grudging admiration for Mark Avery, but won’t tolerate Chris Packham, he believes raptor persecution is “totally unacceptable” and doesn’t like the fact that the main shooting organisations in his view don’t take the positive stories of shooting to the public enough. As we part though I ask him if he’d do it all over again if he were a young man now. “Good god no,” he looks at me sharply, his eyes catching the low sun and twinkling. “Given all the things we’ve just discussed it sounds like too much fuss nowadays.”

Bank managers in those days could not lend you money fast enough at 15-16% interest

THE WISDOM OF JASON ABBOT

After so many years in the trade, Jason has a spicy opinion on all sorts of topics…

Cheap Imports

“I can’t remember exactly when it started. But there was a wholesaler called Sports Marketing that was importing Russian guns—Baikals they were—which were good, rugged guns. And they started mail ordering them at huge discounts. That spread like a cancer. And retail price maintenance got banned. So the wholesalers were not able to exercise any discipline on their retailers and the margins disappeared from 50% down to 5. So I stopped selling new guns.”

Side-by-sides

“I think they’ll have a resurgence because they have a sort of unique quality, especially the lovely old English ones. A good gun is more than just a tool for shooting things, it’s an object of great beauty. As long as they’re maintained properly and not abused, they are very reliable, and very sweet to shoot.”

Computers

“I find online stuff is excruciating, irritating, you know. Particularly there’s simple things like paying your electricity bill or your phone bill. Everything wants a bloody password. And all I want to do is pay the bill. And then you try to reset your password and you can’t do it unless you’re a teenager.”

A future Labour government

“I hope they learn from the hunting bill which really hasn’t achieved much and the sort of foolish failure to realise that the downside of all legislation is that it costs money to implement and takes police away from other activities. On the other hand, shooting people have got to recognize that there are areas of shooting which are very unattractive. We know about illegal raptor persecution, which, although greatly diminished, still does take place and is absolutely unacceptable. And I personally think that there are some extremely excessive bags of pheasants and partridges being made, which, particularly when the market for that game is saturated, again, is a very unattractive, unacceptable thing.”

Lead in game meat

“The actual science is very thin. And although we know lead in certain forms is dangerous to mankind, there is no proven evidence that anybody in the history of mankind has ever suffered ill health from eating a lead-shot gamebird. And so to create massive legislation on the strength of speculation like that is I think, a little bit scaremongering.”

Expenses

“I had a bit of a brush with the Inland Revenue when I first started, because I used to buy, I still buy, grouse shooting and a bit of other shooting, which I claim as a business expense. And they challenged this. And I managed to prove that I can justify it with the sales to the people that I meet.”

Michel Roux

“Well, Michel was my dear friend. I sold him his first guns when I started. The first time he came shooting with me was 40 years ago, when I ran a shoot. And he phoned me a couple of days in advance, saying could he bring his wife? And I said, yes, of course. Then he phoned up the day before and he said, actually, my mother’s over from France, can I bring her too? And after that we shot every year together, and he would invite me to The Waterside every year, which always involved staying the night with breakfast, and he was the most generous, lovely man, and I miss him terribly.”

Grouse Moors

“I mean, there’s the whole atmosphere of grouse moors. Wonderful because of the beautiful countryside and in fact you’re harvesting a crop from this, which is what Chris Packham doesn’t understand. He and Mark Avery disapprove of the artificially high numbers of birds on the moor, which they think is at the expense of raptors, which is not necessarily so. But grouse is the crop and it has been the crop from otherwise pretty sterile countryside And they’re very difficult to shoot—there’s no such thing as a boring grouse. They’re all exciting and delicious to eat. And the dog work is wonderful because the heather’s a foot deep.”