The first rising-bite Rigby game gun—one of a pair—built in a century. The hallmark “vertical bolt” and stout locking loop are front & center. This action helped build Rigby’s enduring reputation for reliability.









A century on, a new gun meets—and makes—gunmaking history

By Silvio Calabi
Photographs by Terry Allen

It isn’t every day that a shotgun goes into production again after a century’s hiatus, but this happened recently at John Rigby & Company, in London. And in February I got to inspect and shoot the reborn gun: No. 18711, a “best”-grade 12-bore sidelock ejector with 28-inch barrels (arranged as God meant: horizontally) that was made for a former American Cabinet Secretary. Also as the Deity intended, it is one of a matched pair—twinned with Rigby No. 18712. The client has had the guns straight-stocked and balanced on their hinge pins; each weighs 6 pounds 8 ounces, and together they fairly shout, “Take us to a grouse butt!” Or a perdiz stand in Spain, or a pheasant and partridge peg in the Cotswolds. Possibly even a grouse covert in New England or the Upper Midwest.

Fine game guns from legendary London houses are nothing new, of course. What sets these guns apart—and what makes them continuation models that leapfrog an entire century—is their actions. Nos. 18711/12 are “rising-bite” guns, made with the unique barrel-locking mechanism that became the signature of Rigby’s most expensive guns and rifles at the turn of the 20th Century. Crank the toplever to the right, and watch the rabbit disappear into its hole, to unlock the barrels and let them drop open—the “rabbit” being the steel pin, or bolt, or bite, that engages the top-rib extension.

Rising-bite is a modern term; it was called the vertical-bolt action when it was patented, in February 1879, by Thomas Bissell and John Rigby. Bissell, described then in The Field as “a well-known and skillful London action-filer and barrel-maker,” did business from the 1850s into the 1890s in the city’s somewhat grimy Southwark Borough before disappearing. John Rigby was then in the toney West End, and today the firm is the oldest gunmaker extant in the English-speaking world. Through the 1880s, Bissell’s name appears so often in Rigby’s ledgers that he could have been an employee; he was probably an outworker. With his help, Rigby had found a way to latch its break-action guns so that they shouldn’t “shoot loose.”

At the time the British gun trade was in ferment. Spurred by the aristocratic craze for shooting small birds and large mammals, business was booming and gunmakers were developing better-mousetrap versions of everything from forend latches to triggers to lockwork and cartridges, and the great boxlock-versus-sidelock debate was already underway. The hinge that joins barrels to action was a particular target for the tinkerers.

The greatest strain on this joint comes not from cycling it—made and greased properly, a hinge should open and close hundreds of thousands of times with no appreciable wear—but from firing the gun. Each detonation tries to push the barrels off the wall, or face, of the action, and this momentary expansion and contraction eventually can loosen the hinge. A gun that’s gone “off-face” shows gaps between the breeches and the action. Once begun, it only gets worse; the gaps widen as the barrels slam back and forth ever farther.

Victorian gunmakers sought to counter this tendency by fine-tuning the geometry of their actions, to reduce the leverage of these forces, and by fastening their guns in all sorts of ways. Eventually Purdey’s double underbolt became the standard and still is used today: an internal bar, linked to the thumb lever, that slides forward into notches in the two barrel lumps, to clamp the barrels against the action flats. But this wasn’t enough for some designers, who contrived various versions of a “third bite”—an extra clasp, often at the top of the breeches, where the rib meets the face—to really keep those pesky barrels clamped down: crossbolts, hidden pins, screw-grips, doll’s-heads and more.

To this end, Patent No. 1141 of 1879, for “vertical/horizontal bolting for drop-down guns,” helped build Rigby’s enduring reputation for reliability. The horizontal part was the Purdey-style sliding underbolt; it was the other bit (or bite), the vertical lock, that made the 1879 action exceptional. To this day it is worshipped as the strongest way to fasten a break-action gun—especially a powerful big-game rifle.

John Rigby (1829-1916) was, like his grandfather John, who founded the company in Dublin, a rifleman—an outstanding one at that. At the age of 29, he took over the business and, in 1865, opened a store in London. (Eventually he moved Rigby’s to London entirely.)

For about 30 years John Rigby was involved in national and international target shooting and won about every significant trophy, often with rifles of his own make. In 1887, Queen Victoria’s government snatched him away to supervise the Royal Small Arms Factory, at Enfield Lock. There his team worked to perfect the bolt-action .303 Lee military rifle, both the Metford and the Enfield. He had to retire from civil service when he hit 65, so he went back to Rigby’s and, for double rifles, invented the first smokeless Nitro Express round: the .450 (which ended the reign of the 8-bore black powder behemoths). Next, for magazine rifles, he cooked up the .416 Rigby Magnum cartridge, and then he persuaded Mauser to modify its bolt action to accept it. There’s plenty more—John Rigby might have been the first to apply the word “Magnum” to a cartridge—but . . . well, when he died, an obituary hinted that if he’d been allowed to stay on at Enfield, he’d have come up with an autoloading infantry rifle, something that then had to wait for the next World War.

Sporting rifles made Rigby’s name but, popular as deer stalking and big-game hunting were in Scotland, Canada, India and Africa, the big money was in bird shooting at home. Rigby’s produced at least as many shotguns as it did double rifles. And from 1880 until the Great War (1914-’18), most of the company’s top-shelf doubles, smoothbore and rifled, had vertical-bolt actions.

John Rigby the engineer probably realized that the rising-bite action is strong enough that underbolts aren’t needed, but he wisely kept them. The tinkerer in him must have delighted in the novelty of the new fastener, while the marketer likely rejoiced in something that so clearly set his products apart. The rising-bite became a Rigby hallmark partly because of its merit and partly because it was so tricky and expensive to make.

Rigby’s Rising

The rising-bite is a good deal more complicated than other third-fastener actions. As the patent notes, its parts move both vertically and horizontally, and a complex recess has to be cut into the top of the break-off for that stout U-shaped loop. The loop itself is filled by two steel posts—the front one fixed (part of the recess, really) and supporting the rear one, the “rabbit,” which slides up and down behind it. Open the thumb lever: The rear post withdraws from its loop, the under bolts withdraw from their notches and the barrels tip down. Close the barrels: The under lugs slide home, the rabbit rises back into its hole and the action is bolted shut. Precision is the name of this game. So is strength—the action body contains a lot of steel.

Finally the time was ripe to return to making shotguns too.
How the Victorians made the rising-bite, or vertical-bolt, action is a puzzlement; it’s difficult enough with modern tooling. Patent No. 1141 of 1879 may be the only important action design that was never widely adopted by any other gunmaker, even after the rights expired. Only Frederick Beesley’s rare and super-costly Shotover guns also had vertical bolts, as did two Boss over/unders (No. 6179, a rifle made around 1913, and No. 8515, a 20-bore shotgun from 1938) and one Powell, a 16-bore hammerless side-by-side, No. 7496, made in 1882. (Today gunmakers Max Ern, in Germany, and Butch Searcy, in California, turn out a handful of rising-bite guns annually. The patent elapsed long ago.)

Rigby’s Rising

Company ledgers show that Rigby’s made rising-bite shotguns in popular bore sizes from 8 to 28 and rifles in everything from .256 to .577, with the preponderance in .303 and .450 and .470 Nitro Express. The first rising-bite Rigby appears to have been an un-numbered gun made by Thomas Bissell in 1880, when the company still had a presence in Ireland. A daybook entry for May 31 reads (with emphasis added): “Mssrs John Rigby of Dublin one 12 bore Rigby Bissell patent underlever hammerless dble gun with top rib vertical bolt extension, lock work on trigger plate intercepting and trigger bolts. Stock screwed and bored for shooting, shot and ready for cleaning & chequering. This is the first underlever experimental gun and goes in with cost of patent.”

Until this past February, the last-known rising-bite Rigby shotgun was No. 17862, a 12-bore turned over on August 15, 1914, to a Mr. A.F. Clarke, Esq. It was made as the No. 3 gun to a composed pair (Nos. 16590 & 16692, sold a year apart, in September 1898 and ’99) but with its own case. It had a “rubber face pad” at a “special price.”

However, the last vertical-bolt order in the books is for a pair of rifles, Nos. 18190/91, completed for the Maharaja of Karauli in 1932, with gold inlays of his royal crest by Harry Kell. The first was a .350 No. 2 (re-bored around 1980 to 9.3x74R); the second was in .405 Winchester. These were special orders, maybe built on remnant actions found in a drawer somewhere.

Otherwise, rising-bites were all but gone by 1913; thereafter Rigby “bests” largely were built on screw-grip actions furnished by Webley & Scott. We don’t know exactly why Rigby adopted a simpler third fastener, but the cost of building rising-bites may have risen beyond the market, a key craftsman may have retired or the source of the action forgings may have dried up. In 1909 Rigby charged £68/5s for a rising-bite gun; in 1910, when the cheaper screw-grip action came along, the retail price remained £68/5s. (A decade later Beesley was asking £150 for his rising-bite Shotovers, surely one reason so few were made.)

Rigby’s bench is deep in young talent; Diggory Hadoke, Marc Newton and the author admire the new guns; Rigby Managing Director Marc Newton goes through the motions in the firm’s South London showroom.

Based on patent-use numbers, over 50 or so years Rigby produced not quite a thousand rising-bite guns and rifles; today the survivors are prized by shooters and collectors alike. With their distinctive lockplates—the rebated, or dipped, edges are mostly for show—and carved foliate fences in addition to the rabbit in the hole, they are instantly recognizable from across a room or a clearing in the bush.

That was then; Rigby Nos. 18711/12 are now. Five years ago Rigby’s first rising-bite of the modern era, a .470 Nitro Express, went to the London proof house for testing. Steve Helsley and I happened to be there then, and we comforted Managing Director Marc Newton. Somehow word had gotten around that the rising-bite was an obsolete design, even a relic of the black powder days. You’ll see, we told him. It’ll pass. Don’t worry! And so it did. Elated, or relieved, Newton presented each of us with the empty case and flattened bullet from the two proof cartridges. (Mine are on the desk in front of me as I write.)

Rising Details

With Rigby’s new rising-bite shotguns, the sophistication and performance of the 1879-patent “vertical/horizontal bolting” with intercepting sears have been improved upon by modern steels and digital repeatability. In addition, the hand-fitting and -finishing meet or exceed anything Rigby did in the Victorian Era (and the floorplates are no longer pierced).

Rigby rising-bite 12-bore guns start at £79,000, 28-bores at £87,000 and 32- and .410-bores at £89,000. Other gauges are not (yet) available, and custom engraving costs more. (On the guns pictured, the game birds were engraved by Geoffrey Lignon and the scrollwork by Steve Kelly.) Prices do not include the UK’s 20% Value Added Tax, but VAT is not levied on goods exported to the US. Orders may be placed directly through John Rigby & Co. or with Gordy & Sons Outfitters, in Houston. Expect delivery within three years.

What did we know that Rigby’s boss didn’t? This was the culmination of a process that began in 2010, when several American enthusiasts acquired Rigby—with its handwritten ledger books dating back more than two centuries, to 1781—and vowed to build “rifles and shotguns that reflect the style and workmanship of the Golden Age of Gunmaking.” They hired Helsley, Roger Sanger and me to write a history of the company (Rigby: A Grand Tradition, 2012), and they commissioned Butch Searcy to strip down an original rising-bite rifle and scan the parts for engineering drawings. But before production could begin, they got an offer they couldn’t refuse and sold Rigby onward, to a couple of Germans who also own (among many other nice things) Mauser. And the first thing they did—after elevating Marc Newton and setting up the new workshop in South London—was to supply Mauser barreled actions to Rigby, just as Paul Mauser had begun doing with John Rigby in 1898. And, finally, they green-lighted Newton to bring in master machinist Ian Clarke to reverse-engineer a rising-bite double—the same rifle Searcy had pored over—and figure out how to manufacture the action anew.

Since “Proof Day,” November 6, 2014, Rigby has now built at least 20 rising-bite double rifles. (And since opening its new doors, Rigby has turned out some 950 bolt-action rifles—an astonishing figure that equals Rigby-Mauser production in their pre-WWI heyday.) Finally the time was ripe to return to making shotguns too.

Just as on the new double rifles, John Rigby & Co. uses computerized machining (thank you, Ian Clarke) to assist, not replace, its craftsmen; and the critical fitting and finishing of each bit of each gun is done by hand (thank you, rising-bite executive Nick Coggan) by a team of artisans that must be the youngest and most switched-on in the British trade (thank you, Marc Newton—himself just 31). The House of Rigby is rockin’ & rollin’, and the energy and pride are palpable.

I wonder if they would trade an AYA 16 bore #2 and a Dickensen elite 12 bore even up for the pair.

There are British guns, then there are the rest....

That is a beautiful gun!

I love it!

Thanks for posting.

Simply beautiful

Yummy

Those are stunning! Even if I had the $$$ and connections to buy one of those, I'd be scared spitless to take it out in the field lest I scratch it.
😳

That's what it is for.

Ken,
I know, but man, I would cry after the first scratch or ding. ☹️

Going with Elk on this....I’ve got some nice rigs that all cost a small fortune. I don’t abuse them, but, I hunt them to the degree necessary to fill tags...I’ve offered my rigs up to a few pards to hunt. They couldn’t believe I would give them a custom build to hunt...”Why Not”?
“I had it built to hunt”....I got a $1k scope right now in the hands of a hard charger here on the Fire who’s a confirmed scope killer.

We’re both interested in seeing what the scope can handle...I had the scope, and he had the time to test it...All our awesome rigs and gear ain’t going with us when we’re dead...Hunt it...Use it...Enjoy the hell out of it. Buy a Van Gogh if you want to only look at something.

Just my opinion....😎

PS
Elk, you’re still a Dick 😬

Builds the character and the story of the gun. Every scratch is a memory of a hunt.

I’ve got a 450/400 Jeffery’s double. Built in 1900 I’ve had it 25 years. It’s worn some, but there is NOTHING like an English double ❗️

I'm thinking the same, or more, money would be required for that pair - as to pay off the remaining mortgage on my ranch.

Now all we need is that driven pheasant hunt !! I'm in. Heck I'll even be the loader.

Beautiful!

Has anyone in this thread ever shot a Rigby?

Man I'm a sucker for English SxS's.

Thanks!

Shot one? Which one and how much

I see what you did there

Back in the 80s I got to London for a while and went to Purdeys. I got fitted using their "try" shotgun and was nervously waiting for the bill when the gentleman said it was no charge. Laughingly said they rarely got Yank service members in there and he'd enoyed the opportunity. The cheapest sxs they sold at that time was £60000 but they had some nice ones, too, (his quote). Good memories, thanks for bringing up the subject.

Yeah, but those English guns can get wore out just like all the rest. Might take a little longer. Me and some others been trying to wear this one out for about 125 years.



12 bore, 30" F&F

fine guns but remember, even the brits admitted that A.H. Fox knew what he was doing.

He may have known what he was doing, but he wasn’t making fine Birmingham guns...

This George Daw shotgun was made in 1868 and is still taking game 150 years later. You can't deny the classic lines and function of a nice English shotgun...

British guns were refined and enjoyed the access to fine hand filers and engravers which set them apart. The Birmingham trade was sort of the stepchild of the London makers though they made fine guns as well. Fine British game guns were purpose built for their sport enthusiast which in the kingdom was driven game. Most of their 12 bores were bored for 2" shells. Their loads weren't as stout as most Americans are used to shooting. Once Jack O'Connor said that an American customer commented to an H&H representative that the self opener was hard to close to which the reply was that our clients don't close their guns.

They are beautiful works of art and one can only wonder what might have been had the American gunmakers been able to compete with their trade. Fine guns have never been cheap. Fine craftsmen have never been easy to come by.

Beautiful workmanship. Thanks for posting.

a “best”-grade 12-bore sidelock ejector with 28-inch barrels (arranged as God meant: horizontally) that was made for a former American Cabinet Secretary.


Laughing.

The Woodward, Boss over/under is quite possibly the best ever made. I am not privy to what God intended but I shoot O/U's a lot better than I do the side by side. All that rannygazoo about holding the barrels down and back against the standing breech is done underneath in the shallow framed Woodward.

.......... "made for a former American Cabinet Secretary"............

You pursued the wrong profession Mark.....being a thief and a liar pays better than ranching.

I once owned a Rigby magazine rifle in 303. Biggest mistake when I sold it. I've also shot a 470 Rigby Double.

Very little is as presented. Rigby thought highly enough of Basque work to put their name on guns made by Pedro Arrizabalaga. I once owned a Holland and Holland Made in Birmingham - - and sold in London. Horse traders had nothing on high grade gun makers. ;-{>8

If you want to have a very interesting few hours in Dallas visit Hollan & Holland.
Very nice staff. Knowladgeable and interested. They are not name droppers.
Great conversation and interesting inventory
Good selection of high quality new and used firearms.
Prices are what you might expect but the quality is there.
https://www.hollandandholland.com/gun-room/about/dallas-gun-room/

The same English companies that made the "Fine English Shotguns" also made some shotguns for the working folks in the colonies. They wouldn't be called "fine", but they are still very good. This Westley Richards 12 gauge has been down the road a few times and made it back. It's going on 117 years old. It has ejectors, steel barrels and is proofed for smokeless shells. While it looks like it has been abused, and it probably has, it is still tight as ever, shoots great and is ready for another hundred years. It cost a lot less than an equivalent Fox or Parker too...

Several years ago my wife and I went to NYC for a bit. Told her the only thing I wanted to do was visit Holland and Holland.

Just showed up there one day and got buzzed up. They were getting ready for the SCI convention and were really busy. But they took about an hour out of their schedule to show me around.

Amazing. Somewhere there's a photo of me holding about a half of a Howda pair worth about as much as my house.

Got a major compliment there when, while waiting for my friend to return from the men's room, a lady approached me and asked me a question about their merchandise. I told her that I did not work there, at which point she apologized and said I looked like I belonged there. ;-{>8

The “Mozart’s” or “Handel’s”, “da Vinci’s” or “Michelangelo’s” of the gun world.