The firm of F. Beesley has been making guns since 1880. The founder Fredrick Beesley moved around the gun trade until he joined the prestigious gun makers James Purdey & Sons. He was a most successful inventor: indeed he was later given the sobriquet “Inventor to the London gun trade”.

To finance the setting up of his own firm, he rented what was to become his most famous invention, the spring opening gun (patent no. 31), to his erstwhile employers, who have used it ever since.

Beesley’s was never a big firm, indeed one of his granddaughters recalled a visit to her grandfather’s premises in St. James’s as a child and said there were only six gunsmiths working there: the same number as worked for us up until 1988.

Beesley’s standards of workmanship (which are still maintained), together with some twenty odd patents, attracted a lot of attention, culminating in his being given the Royal Warrant in 1926, as gun maker to His Majesty the Prince of Wales. The appointment lasted until the Prince as King Edward VII abdicated in 1937.