Mickey

As far as I know, Daniel Fraser made his own actions, and externally there are several distinctive features such as the shape of the toplever, the serpentine fences and fancy action back that made them “stand out from the crowd”. His high-grade boxlocks were finished internally to a high standard; the equal of the best London sidelocks. For example, both of the .303’s in my photo have gold-plated lockwork, and this is common on Fraser’s guns. To my mind, his early best-grade boxlocks are better finished and more desirable than London sidelocks,. To this day, I have never seen or heard of a Fraser sidelock, so maybe Fraser had similar predilections?

The action reinforce on your .400 is similar to the type often encountered on Birmingham-made boxlock doubles, signed by the likes of Midland Gun Co. and is reminiscent of a Fraser that I saw once that had a pair of 28 bore shotgun barrels made for it by someone else.

I would be interested to know the Serial No. of your Dan’l Fraser .400 to see whether is was of later production, after old Daniel had carked it?

About the aperture sight; I believe that the purpose of many of these sights was not for use as a traditional “peep” sight, but rather to provide an optical device for improving “depth of field” for ageing shooters that have trouble getting target, foresight and backsight into focus simultaneously. By necessity, they have to be mounted further back near the eye for this to work. Consequently, the backsight does not fold down; although I have seen some that do. In this case, the aperture is usually quite narrow, and mounted further forward (sometimes on the toplever pin – in the case of Purdey) and usually a fold-down rear leaf sight is fitted, presumably for