Hide to seek

Handcrafted leather gun slips are a joy to behold; Jamie Tusting looks at the process

When out on a shoot day, I am often asked where my gun slip is from. I proudly reply that it was made in my grandfather’s leather goods factory on the border between Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire.

A well-made gun slip really is a masterpiece of craftsmanship, but it is hard not to feel like some of that artistry has been lost when you see the generality of mass-produced alternatives. Endless identical slips cause great confusion and sometimes embarassment when you walk to your peg with someone else’s gun.

It’s not that I have a problem with the fact that many people use a gun slip that has been mass-produced. But it does make me wonder whether the skill involved in the handcrafted masterpieces, seen on shooting fields not so long ago, might have been lost.

The heavy leatherworking industry gathered pace in Walsall in the mid-19th century. With the invention and development of the sewing machine in the 1870s came the mechanisation of stitching.

The small leather-working workshops that had dotted the streets for centuries gave way to much bigger factories as the Industrial Revolution swept the country and Walsall became the centre of production for heavy leather products, such as saddles, bridles and harnesses.

The issue for gun slips, though, was that there was no machine that was able to stitch the cup on to the bottom of the slip, so this process had to remain a hand-stitch job, making mass production more difficult.