The Point Of Owning A Purdey

In The Realm Of The World’s Most Exclusive Shotgun Maker, A Favourite Of The Royals, It Is Always Hunting Season.

- Hindol Sengupta

IN THE CAVERNOUS room the centrepiece is a rectangular dining table that seats 14; it has a tablecloth in regal magenta and antique chairs with upholstery in the same colour. On the walls are sepia-toned pictures of great hunts, and glass cabinets with shotguns.

Here is King Edward VII aiming his Purdey gun at flying birds at Sandringham, the beloved royal retreat in Norfolk, surrounded by crouching assistants in identical black suits, two in bowler hats and two in flat caps. There is Maharaja Duleep Singh shooting on the grounds of Highclere Castle in Berkshire (better known these days as Downton Abbey, after the hit TV series). He is not the only royal from India—there are also the Nizams of Hyderabad and the rulers of Baroda, Udaipur, and Mysore, and the king of Nepal.

And beside me is Nicholas Harlow, member of the gun sales team at the 200-year-old prized gunmakers in England, explaining that the company has a legacy so elite that it can proudly claim that not only is there almost no renowned monarch in Europe who has not been a Purdey customer, but the very room where we are standing is where Queen Elizabeth II has dined as a private guest of the company.

“This room is in many ways the heart of the Purdey company. For instance, U.S. President Eisenhower’s chief of staff General [Walter] Bedell Smith used this room for strategy meetings in 1942,” says Harlow, who also points out that Charles Darwin was a customer. Captain Robert FitzRoy, the captain of Darwin’s ship, the HMS Beagle, bought guns and knives for the expedition in the early 1800s. Purdey has also serviced almost every European royal house from Sweden to Germany to Russia.