Book III: Something of Boss & Co Guns

Boss & Co
Boss & Co can trace its origins to 1773, when William Boss began his apprenticeship in Birmingham. In the late eighteenth century he moved to Joseph Manton’s firm in London and his son Thomas Boss was apprenticed to Manton. When Thomas finished his apprenticeship in 1812, he started his own firm in St James’s Street, where he began making Best Guns only. This policy is still applied, prompting King George VI to say:

“A Boss gun, a Boss gun……bloody beautiful, but too bloody expensive!”

It is true to say that they are still, unashamedly, amongst the most expensive new guns in the world.

A Boss gun was such a favourite with Papa Hemingway that he used one to end it all.

The firm does, by popular demand, also make a more economical model, called the ‘Robertson’, named after John Robertson, who bought the firm in 1891 and devised the Boss single trigger in 1894, the Boss ejector in 1898 and their own over-and-under in 1909.

After a few moves around the West End, the shop and the workshop are now at Kew Bridge. A selection of shots of a fine pair of Boss & Co side-by-side shotguns is shown in the picture, courtesy of Boss & Co.

Wearing formal hats and something more of soft felts

Another excerpt from Book III (coming up):

All formal hats - for example, toppers, cokes and hunt caps - are properly worn to sit more or less straight on the head but, in the case of toppers and cokes, tilted slightly forward - but not at a rakish angle, which might be appropriate to soft felts, panamas and tweed hats and caps. On the subject of soft felt hats: the trilby hat is named after George du Maurier’s late 19th Century novel and play, Trilby; because one of the protagonists, Little Billee, is ‘discovered’ wearing such a hat. The heroine, Trilby O’Ferrall, an artist’s foot model, was mesmerized by the evil, controlling Svengali. George Palmella Busson du Maurier (1834-1896) enjoyed a youthful career as a Bohemian artist in Paris, before he settled in Hampstead, North London. He worked as a cartoonist for Punch and his most famous cartoon was True Humility (1895) above, from which we get the familiar expression ‘a Curate’s egg'.

The caption is:
Bishop: “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones!”
Curate: “Oh, no, My Lord. I assure you! Parts of it are excellent.”

George was the grandfather of the even more successful novelist, Daphne du Maurier.

The higher-crowned, broader-brimmed fedora hat is also named after a fictional character: the heroine of Victorien Sardou’s 1882 play, Fédora.

Blagging for A Doctorate

Overnight I had an interesting offer. Sometime ago, I had signed up to undertake editing work with a particular agency and had had no offers of anything, until this morning. The 'editing' offered was to undertake a doctoral thesis in its totality on a specified subject and to deliver it by April 2011. The fee offered was £2,000. So, for £2,000, prospective Dr X buys a high academic qualification and I am asked to be an accessory to this cheating and, for what it matters, a cheap accessory at that. Looking into the subject of academic cheating assistance, the internet is rife with crooks hiding behind fancy academic-sounding names and openly offering theses and 'model answers' for cash. Why is nothing done about it? Surely, it is a serious threat to the fabric of society? What happens if, say, medical and architectural qualifications come to be 'awarded' on the basis of cheating, by people who are incompetents? It does not bear thinking about. In an age in which small details of daily life are highly (and, arguably, over) regulated, it utterly beggars belief that the prosecuting authorities overlook this tawdry racket and that academia is too limp-wristed to stamp it out. It is bad enough that students no longer have to memorize anything, even the basics of their subject, and are allowed to turn in work that is seldom done in true examination conditions but I suppose that it is all a consequence of there being so many so-called 'universities' and the notion that just about anyone can be a graduate.

A Near Mid-Night Beach Walk

Conscious of my defalcations in entering posts here and, more importantly, out of booze and cigs, I strode the mile or so of beachfront road into Sleepy Hollow Centro last night, at about 11 pm. The bank ATMs were all closed and little else was open. The Village of The Damned came to mind: just big, dead leaves, drifting crisply across the road. Defeated in my main objective and, the moon being around about full, I decided to return along the shoreline. The lights in a rather run-down, seaside kiosk attracted my attention and there, beneath, in the half-light, I saw a Kiplingesque maiden, right out of The Road To Mandalay smoking "a whackin' white cheroot". Not one to intrude upon the smoking habits of others in these illiberal times, I proceeded, in an orderly fashion, along the tideline, enjoying the blown spume and the flung spray of the South Atlantic Ocean, in my own quiet way; still wondering how I would make up the missing days' posts on here; wondering, wondering, wondering: until this moment. There is no picture for this post, as my moble 'phone camera does not work in the gloaming.

Trafalgar Day 2010

Today is, of course, Trafalgar Day and there will be the traditional dinner onboard HMS Victory and the toast to Nelson. Above is a copy of the ledger, relating to Nelson's hat, of the design worn at the battle, complete with green eyeshade. He needed this since he lost most of the sight in his right eye from a bursting shell and sandbags during the siege of Calvi. It is a myth that he had an eye patch, as such. The eyeshade was designed between Nelson, hatter James Lock II and his foreman on 11th February 1803 and Nelson probably took two of these fine hats onboard HMS Victory with him as he sailed off to crush Boney's navy. One of them is preserved on Nelson's wax effigy in Westminster Abbey.

Beach walk

I walked along the beach a couple of days ago and saw: vultures feasting on a dead dog and a dead penguin; a pair of sea eagles, several albatross; South Atlantic skuas and sandpipers. The sea was rough and the wind was high. I saw no one else along a mile stretch and it certainly cleared my head. The photo shows the view of the beach from the church promontory.

Fleet Street Memories

There used to be The City Golf Club in an ancient lane leading down to St Bride's Church, off Fleet Street. Of course, it was just a members' drinking club in the times when the Fleet Street boozers were closed to the Fourth Estate in the afternoons.

There was also, strangely, a golf shop in New Bridge Street too. Don't forget that Blackheath was (is, although relocated), the first golf club in England. The City Golf Club was a members' only boozing club with walls decorated with (token) old hickory-shafted clubs and wot-not -just like the old Wig & Pen: a refuge for all-day Fleet Street topers (who worked between 8-00 am and 11-00 am), until El Vino's re-opened in the evening, for its short hours, and then it was off to: The Wine Press; The Printer's Pie; Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese; The Bell; The King & Keys; The Tipperary How could I forget the Tipperary! Guinness and Green King IPA and those Beaujolais Nouveau breakfasts. The hours that I spent in there. There was also The Popinjay (the old 'firing' pub - if a journo was taken in there by his editor, it was sacking time, apparently); The Punch: The Cock; all ending up at Spaghetti Opera (an Italian restaurant which employed opera singers to entertain); The Temple Bar Tandoori (one of the best Indian restaurants in London); The George, or Daly's. Ah! I remember it well! All long before that pretentious Olde Bank of England nonesense: these were places where you went to get slaughtered. And if you weren't slaughtered by the time that your bladder-bursting frame got off the homeward conveyance, then, unless you were "Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid", you were definitely slaughtered just as you walked through your own front door. On one occasion it was a hatpin and, on another, a carving knife in the arm, which, besides necessitating a couple of stitches, more irritatingly, totalled a perfectly good hopsack suit.

Was ever an area better served for pubs? I am sure that it has all changed but it probably isn't just because the journos and printers have gone so much as because of changes in attitudes: the insidious, increasing, puritanical up-tightness of modern Britain: getting hammered even just on Fridays; maybe getting hammered at all, is probably a disciplinary offence now, let alone getting hammered and then disappearing in a thick, blue cloud of Turkish tobacco smoke! All the light-heartedness of working life has gone and been replaced by a Cromwellian bleakness and dutifulness, well, apparent dutifulness. They'll never know that there is no better state to write up a piece with a bit of a kick to it than three sheets to the wind: warm glow in the belly and trembling fingers, mind racing and coffee spilt.