Bastin/Purdey 12 bore pinfire
Having been born in 1950, I enjoyed the full teenage experience of the Swinging Sixties — surely the most exciting decade of the 20th century. The 1960s were a great hedonistic social whirl to me, with girls and guns my raison d’etre. By 1970 I had an excellent understanding of the history of British gun development and realised that exactly one century before, in the 1860s, exciting developments were afoot but of a very different nature.
During the 1860s, the breechloader was introduced to, and accepted in, Britain. At the end of the 1850s the muzzle-loader reigned supreme but by the end of the 1860s it was completely obsolete. In their quest to develop efficient breech-loaders, gunmakers erred down many paths and blind alleys to patent eccentric designs that at the time looked
