The fallen giants of gun retailing

The household names of Harrods and Army & Navy were stalwarts of the firearms trade, as Simon Reinhold reveals

- Simon Reinhold

You can walk into a branch of Walmart in the US and buy cartridges off the shelf, and not only one brand but myriad different makes of rifle and shotgun ammunition.

The world’s biggest retailer, which takes such pride in its corporate ethics that it puts it front and centre on its website, has no problem supplying the hunting culture of the US. If Tesco decided to stock ounce load 7.5s for clay shooting, there would be howls of outrage from middle England.

But it wasn’t always this way. Some of the great names of the past in retail sold guns and all that went with them. Delving into the subject gives an interesting glimpse into past attitudes that seem to have morphed over time into some sort of false rectitude. One of the world’s most famous department stores — Harrods — had what must have been a busy gun department, given the relative frequency with which guns engraved with its name come to market in the modern era.

Now owned by the state of Qatar as part of its sovereign wealth fund, it might surprise some to learn that the five-acre site in central London still has a gun department. Its outdoor sports and fashion department on the newly refurbished second floor has concessions from some of the great names in modern gunmaking.

Supply and demand

Harrods was part of a quest for high-street domination that involved the big department stores. It is the most familiar name left as the other greats of the past have fallen by the wayside. Gamages, famed for its toy department (targeting the offspring of exhausted parents is a sales tactic still in use in supermarkets today), had a gun department and recently a .410 boxlock retailed by ‘A. W. Gamage Ltd, Holborn, London’ surfaced in a side-by-side Facebook group.