The founding of a company is, and has always been, an uncertain act. The risks are many and the likelihood of success is slim, particularly in an established market. James Purdey was not new to his trade though. He had started at the age of fourteen, when he had been apprenticed to his brother-in-law, Thomas Hutchinson. James spent seven years learning his craft as a stock maker, before refining his skills under Joseph Manton, the ‘King of Gunmakers,’ and later the Rev. Alexander Forsyth, rising to become the foreman of his workshop. By 1814, at the age of 30, James was ready to strike out on his own, and had already established himself as a skilled craftsman, with a reputation for the highest quality work.
Purdey’s first premises were at 4 Princes Street ( now Wardour Street) on the western edge of Leicester Square, where he spent ten years building his nascent company’s reputation.
Colonel Peter Hawker described Purdey as ‘a rising gunmaker of extraordinary merit.’ Despite the financial instability caused by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the company grew rapidly. Although Purdey had built percussion guns for Forsyth, up until the mid-1820s the majority of his guns were flintlocks, reflecting the demands of his clientele. He was also involved in a patent safety-guard, registered by Matthew Wyatt in 1818, and which appears on two of the earliest guns in the Purdey collection. Demand increased steadily, and by 1825 James was building around 165 guns a year – an impressive feat, but one that also placed a great strain on his small workshop.
The opportunity for expansion came in 1826, when Joseph Manton was declared bankrupt, allowing Purdey to purchase the lease to Manton’s premises on Oxford Street at the end of August that year. Purdey’s new Oxford Street premises were two buildings, Nos. 314 and 315, which sat on the south side of the street. However, the numbering on Oxford Street had not yet been standardised, and there were several other premises with identical numbering, including that of another gunmaker, Isaac Riviere. To counter this, from 1827 James advertised his own shop as 314½ Oxford Street, the address borne by every Purdey gun built over the next 55 years.
In October 1838, Queen Victoria purchased a pair of double-barrelled pistols for presentation to the Imam of Muscat. Further purchases of gold-mounted guns and pistols as gifts were made later that year, and in 1840 her husband, Prince Albert, purchased his first Purdey gun. It was the beginning of a relationship with the Royal Family which has continued to this day.
In 1841, James’s success was recognised when he was elected Master of the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers. He had been born behind the Company’s Proof House in Whitechapel forty-seven years earlier and became a liveryman in 1820. As such, it must have been quite an honour when he was elected to lead them. It is also one which every subsequent generation of his family have also enjoyed, and today Purdey holds the record for having contributed the most Master Gunmakers, at thirty-one.
In 1850, Purdey's son and heir, James the Younger, completed his apprenticeship, and started his career as a journeyman gunmaker. Over the next year, he worked alongside his father in developing what became the first Purdey ‘Express’ rifles – small-bore, high-velocity rifles that became very popular for deer-stalking in Scotland. The two men worked together for seven years, before the father decided to retire and asked his son to buy him out. An agreement was eventually reached, and on 1 January 1858 the business formally passed to James Purdey the Younger.
The 1860s and 1870s were particularly important to Purdey for several reasons. The company had made its first forays into breech-loading guns in 1857, but it was under James the Younger that the first Purdey patents were registered. Three of his designs were particularly important: the first successful roll-turnover tool for loading cartridges (1861); the ‘Purdey Bolts’ (1863); and the concealed third-bite (1878). The ‘Purdey Bolts’ was readily adaptable to the new centre-fire cartridge when it was introduced in 1865. Its popularity provided an additional form of income in the form of royalties from other companies wishing to use the design.
It was also under James the Younger that the company’s relationship with the Royal Family was formalised, receiving the appointment of gunmaker to the Prince of Wales in 1868, and to the Queen in 1878. The latter was confirmed just three months after he had formally brought his two eldest sons, James (III) and Athol, into the business, renaming it James Purdey & Sons.
While the prestige for the business was enormous, it seems to have led James to look at the Oxford Street premises from a different perspective. As one writer later described it, the shop was ‘somewhat confined in space and rather dark and inconvenient,’ which wasn’t how the newly appointed royal gunmaker wanted to be seen. James began looking for a new site where he could build a modern showroom for his company, and in 1881 commissioned a new building that opened in 1883 as Audley House. The rest, as they say, is history.