Elmer Keith was born at the tail-end of the frontier period, on 8 March 1899 in Missouri, and thus was in contact with an earlier generation of frontiersmen and met and spoke to many Civil War veterans and gunfighters in his early years. He learned to shoot a handgun from a former gunfighter turned barber, shooting at the patterns in the linoleum in the back of the barber shop. In 1911 he was badly burned in a fire and nearly lost the use of his left hand, a disability he overcame with courage. The lion, weighing over 500 pounds, which Mr Keith shot on his 1957 safari During the 1920s and 193 ..read more

It is a Modele-de-Luxe, the name Westley Richards has used for its extra-finish guns and rifles for over a century. Quite why so many British gunmakers used French to describe their highest quality products is a reason lost to time. Perhaps, like the fashion for naming gun models in Latin in the last quarter of the 19th century, it just sounds more sophisticated. Perhaps the first thing a customer thinks about when he decides to order a new rifle is the cartridge. After-all, the rifle is primarily a means of delivering the contents of a cartridge to its final destination, if one is to be redu ..read more

Three months seems like a long way in the future but it isn’t. There are vaccinations to book, flights to arrange and kit to pack. The elephant rifle is taken care of. Michael will be taking the Westley Richards .470 NE drop-lock he had them build a decade ago. I will be bagging ducks for camp meat and sport in the down-time and for that will take my trusty old Thompson 12-bore hammer gun. However, my other main interest when not carrying a rifle is the chance to take photographs and record the hunt, the place, the characters and the action. The trip is really a focused elephant hunt this time ..read more

Add to the temperature factor, the need, in some situations, for a garment to provide protection from the sun, a barrier to the ravages of tsetse flies and mosquitos and good resistance to tearing, when snagged by tree branches or thorns. T-shirts, shirts, jackets and coats all have their part to play but a heavy safari shirt is one of those indispensable items that has to be accommodated; largely for its flexibility as several garments in one. Two of the staples of the Westley Richards collection are the Huntsman Overshirt and the Expedition Safari Shirt. The examples pictured here are in M ..read more

Not just a perfect modern iteration of the company's best known model, it transports nineteenth century aesthetics and developmental genius into the hands of the twenty-first century hunter. Regulated for 250-grain bullets, loaded into the traditional brass bottle-neck case especially made by Kynamco for Westley Richards, this wonderful medium game rifle is again viable, after decades during which the world considered the .318 cartridge obsolete. Westley Richards customers know better and we remain the only company on earth making rifles in .318 Accelerated Express. Any reader wondering why s ..read more

As US columnist Doug Larson is quoted as saying: "Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days". That image of the file seems apt when discussing the gun trade. The spectre of nostalgia is one all too often invoked by the average gun trade marketeer. As an industry, we (and I include myself) are overly susceptible to its haunting influence. Were we born too early? Do we belong in another era? We may pretend we do. We like the old things, like leather cartridge bags that smell of Ballistite. We collect Victorian shotguns and hang maps of a long-dead empire on our stud ..read more

Like many a managing director before him, Taylor co-patented, along with one of his employees, several important improvements to sporting guns and rifles. He may be best known among sportsmen and collectors for the 1897 hand detachable ‘Droplock’ which is still the cornerstone of the doubles Westley Richards builds today, but the one patent that carried his personal marker throughout its life was the L-T capped bullet. Like the Holland & Holland ‘Paradox’, introduced in the 1880s, the Westley Richards ‘Explora’ and ‘Fauneta’ were designed to shoot a solid projectile as well as a shot cart ..read more

This stunning rifle is just such an order. Built to the highest level of specification and beautifully engraved, it chambers the old, straight-cased .450 cartridge that was banned by the British for use in India and Sudan, giving rise (in 1907) to Lang’s .470, which was ballistically almost the same but bypassed the legal restrictions then in place. Old it might be but effective it surely is. The 450 NE was based on the old .450 black powder case, loaded with 70 grains of Cordite and a 480-grain bullet. Kynoch’s latest load data lists the .450 as sending a 480-grain bullet down range at 2,150 ..read more

Whatever terrain you encounter, your feet will be the part of your body most in contact with it and the quality of your boots the key factor in determining how pleasant or otherwise that contact is. Bad boots remind you of their presence with every painful or noisy step. Good boots render you oblivious of their presence and allow you to focus on what you are doing; be that climbing a rock or stalking a lion. Ray Mears learned the joys of Courteney Boot ownership long ago. “I guess this world splits between those who have fallen in love with Courteney Boots and those who have yet to discover th ..read more

Every one captures something of the essence of what hunting means to each of us. The range illustrates the glorious diversity of experience, activity, people, animals and landscapes encompassed by the term ‘hunting’ and each delivered, to our offices, some element of personal insight from our readers’ worlds into our own. Selecting a winner was hard. We had to go through a mental checklist of composition, definition, light and subject matter but the shortlisting process was influenced as much by gut reaction to a shot when it was put on the table. Some simply stood out and drew instant admi ..read more