12-bore Howdah Rifle

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The howdah rifle presented here bears the inscription "W & J Kavanagh" on the lock-plates, having been built by the very talented Irish gun-making family by that name. The top rib carries the firm's address: "12 Dame Street, Dublin". We know that William Kavanagh originally set up shop at Lower Ormand Quay around 1817, and moved up to the Dame Street foundry in 1821 where the company continued to trade for over 100 years! Like the rib and locks of this gun, trade labels from the second half of the 19th Century read "W & J Kavanagh", however the Dublin City Directory of 1850 listed only William Kavanagh as a gun-maker and no-one by the name of J. Kavanagh was listed in the trade. We can surmise that he joined the firm some time after 1850, a younger brother perhaps? Later guns made around the turn of the century were marked "Wm Kavanagh & Son", implicating the next generation of this famous gun-making dynasty.

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The Kavanagh firm hung its shingle alongside other well-known Dublin gun-makers, the most notable being William & John Rigby of Suffolk Street, and William Trulock of several addresses in the Dublin gun-making quarter including Dame Street. The well-respected London maker, Stephen Grant, apprenticed to William Kavanagh in his youth.

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Like the better-known howdah pistols, however, this stumpy 12-bore 3-dram rifle would have possessed all the short-range power required to dislodge an angry tiger from the elephant's head, at distances measured in feet and sometimes barely inches! Sadly, the attempts of modern man to distance himself from the soil have relegated many marvellous artefacts like this howdah rifle to insipid curiosity, and as a result the majority are now lost. For the avid hunter/collector, however, merely shouldering this surviving example conjures up the sights, smells, and excitement of shikar in that distant land so long ago!

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