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I've come into ownership of a Holland and holland 450 express double rifle.

Its a cool and interesting piece, its in an honest aged condition, everything still being good an tight but the case colours have gone and the metal work is a nice gun metal grey. The edges and corners are still nice and crisp. Its completely un adorned with no engraving other than Holland and holland and the load and charge information engraved on the side of the action. Barrels are in good order engraved on the tubes holland and holland on one tube and "winners of the field rifle trials ", the bores near mint, the express sights for 3 different ranges with their thin platinum lines and the safety fitted with a bolted safety. In short the guns a piece of prosaic utilitarian beauty, its the sort of article I imagine was procured by someone who took their sport very seriously, the guns had use no doubt about it, but its also been well cared for. When I level the piece in front of me I can well imagine this old reliable sending forth a bullet as accurately into my dangerous game now as ever it did so perhaps on the plains of africa or sweaty jungles the world unknown.

Ive written to holland and holland and they do have the history put together on the piece which I will shortly handing over £70... it seems a lot of money to hand over for a bit of information, but if its origins are as strange as how it came into my ownership then it could be a worth knowing.

There is one piece of this story missing; I work as a gunsmith in northern England, and this gun was first brought to me about four years ago. Mr T we shall call him came to the workshop, he had a broken stock on his shotgun and could I look at repairing it. I quite like repair work as each poses a unique challenge. He withdrew from a slip an over under browning shotgun with a cracked stock. A little too quickly I said "no, cant be done" it came out like a cough. The truth is id been called to a gunshop about three months earlier and looked over the same gun; I told Mr T so and he said it was quite impossible as he was living in America at that point and he has left his gun with his brother who assured him that it had happened just the week before he returned from America; that one day he opened his gun safe and simple found it to be broken. The story I had heard three months ago was that it had been ran over with a quad bike. It was quite clear to me that Mr T trusted his brother implicitly and thought that I had surely got two similar looking guns mixed up. It seemed a wasted meeting until

" have something else you can look at for me.." and out came the double rifle described above. The description above doesn't reveal the other side of the story. While the gun is exactly as I describe its got a few parts missing. The stock, the forend, the forend iron, the right hand lockwork in its entirety and the left hand mainspring... other than those losses its exactly as described. I quoted him for the nearly endless amounts of work restoring and re manufacturing all the missing articles and he left saying he just couldn't justify the expense. He always maintained it was something interesting as Holland and Holland had refunded fee and request for information.

He had found it in a pile of guns and parts of guns at a gun show in America, at some point he must have brought it back to England with him, and over the next couple of years he would call in at the workshop for a chat and ask me quarterly if I had thought about the Holland any more, as though a bit of thought would some how abridge the work and bring the missing parts to life on a shoe string budget. years passed, covid came and went and came and went, and eventually he told me it was to sell, that he needed the money to get back to America and it turned up at the workshop again along with all sorts of tools and bits and pieces he had picked up over the years. I think its fair to say I grossly overpaid.

With its travels between America and England, while i can easily believe that the original stock was maybe broken, or replaced by some jungle craftsmanship and subsequently thrown away, the lock work and the forend bugs me, for one thing with no mainsprings in the gun what so ever its quite hard to envisage how it should be made. For another thing making a new forend and lock work might not be so difficult but even when its achieved it will never be the "original". it seems likely that someone somewhere has in a drawer somewhere that little plate that says "Holland and holland". But it seems even more likely that these parts will never be found. If your reading this is England or America and have an old shoe box or biscuit tin with a Holland and Holland lock and or forend iron floating around in it then id like to hear from you. I'm not expecting my inbox to be full any time soon.

Perhaps ill update this post when I have heard from Hollands about its original owner and sale.
The first part of the rebuild will begin with the forend iron.

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