One more time, Ben. Virtually all of the London makers, as well as many Birmingham and provincial, "bought in" guns from the trade to one degree or another. Some did so only little, some a lot, and some did so exclusively.

A REAL Rigby? That's absurd. A real one has Rigby's name, address, and serial number on it, and is entered in Rigby's records, just like the one above (which is also real).

REAL? So I suppose that Holland & Holland didn't exist before 1893, when they started building some of their own guns? Did W. J. Jeffery (Jeffery never had a factory) and William Evans never exist (both retailers)?

They all did it, and the guns don't lie. Serial numbers that clearly don't belong to the retailer. Proof marks from places they never would have been had they been built in London. Trade marks that don't belong to the retailer. They're not hard to identify. The suggestion that they're fake is simply ignorant. When a maker bought in a gun from the trade and retailed it under his own name, he was stating that the quality was up to his standards, period. That was all that mattered and still is.

Rigby retailed a lot of guns. Pre-WWII, the falling block single shots, boxlocks, and Mausers were the work of others. Sometimes Rigby stocked and finished them, but many were bought in complete.