Boss & Co, The Gunmakers Gun.
Boss&Co the Gunmakers have released a film highlighting the exceptional skills of their craftsmen, and the history of the firm. I visited their facility last year and saw firsthand the detail that goes into every gun. Thousands of hours per pair.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4F5EXzFBKsBZeY7OSTmLFw
The Boss family have their origins in Leicestershire. William Boss began his gunmaker’s apprenticeship in 1773 around the age of fifteen. This apprenticeship, with the gun and pistol maker Thomas Ketland in Birmingham, marked the beginning of the Boss family trade in gunmaking.
Boss & Co, today, is London’s oldest Gunmaker and have been in continuous operation since 1812. From its inception, Boss has been “Builders of Best Guns Only” and has long been renowned for producing the finest sporting guns in the world.
Circa 1920 Boss & Co produced a booklet to promote their guns, and that booklet started with two paragraphs. Both of these paragraphs, remarkably, remain as true today as they did in 1920 and describe the ethos that has been steadfast in the company for over two hundred years…
We would say from the outset that we make only one grade of gun and have never placed a second quality make upon the market. This policy has enabled us to retain the services of the finest workmen in London, and to give them continuous employment. The advantages attending the production of best work only are manifold. There is no opportunity for the work of inferior men to be utilised in the economy of the workshop, which is frequently the case when more than one class of weapon is produced.
The owner of a Boss gun has the satisfaction of knowing that he has the best gun that money can buy, and that no one has a better. The Boss gun has, therefore, always a standard value whether new or second hand. Our output is strictly limited according to the amount of first class labour available.
It was these words, words that are still followed to this day, and the passion they portray that inspired the film we created to tell the story of how London’s oldest Gunmaker continues to make the finest sporting guns, by hand, in 2019.
The film gives a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of the Boss & Co London gun factory, a place where tradition is greater than modernity, where skilled hands are celebrated and where each individual gunmaking process can take hundreds of hours to complete.
It also celebrates the almost lost art of the gunmaker, a craft that still thrives at Boss & Co. Boss was the first gunmaker in the world to make a reliable single trigger gun in 1894 (until this point, guns relied on a double-trigger mechanism) and was also the first British gunmaker to make the, now hugely popular, over and under shotgun in 1909. This glimpse into the Boss & Co factory reveals a world where hand-made, skill, knowledge, craft and patience remain of paramount importance, especially in this world of non-stop automation.
A Boss & Co gun is revered by shooters, collectors, and enthusiasts, and is admired by those who appreciate the finest hand-crafted products. Produced in limited numbers, it is the very finest Sporting Gun that money can buy.
Find out more about Boss & Co here:
https://bossguns.com/
Photos Boss & Co