3 OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MAN-MADE OBJECTS
Enzo Ferrari described it as “the most beautiful car in the world.” He wasn’t talking about a blood-red Italian thoroughbred. He was talking about the Jaguar E-type. This kind of admiration for the work of a competitor is rare, rarer still in gun making. It tends to be reserved for those designs that are so far ahead of the rest, so suited for their stated purpose that not to admire them would seem wilfully obstinate. Another great of British design - the Spitfire - is in the same class. Adolf Galland the German World War II fighter ace famously replied to Reichsmarshall Goering with “I should like a squadron of Spitfires for my group” when he was asked if there was anything he needed at the end of a tense meeting regarding the Luftwaffe’s tactics in the air war. Galland was making a point about bomber defence during daylight raids and it was the beginning of the deterioration of his relationship with Goering which saw him eventually under house arrest. Galland knew the risk he was taking with this insult to the notoriously bombastic Goering, but he said it anyway.
The gun making equivalent to both these design classics is the Scottish Trigger plate round action. The trigger plate action first devised by James MacNaughton in his Skeleton action ‘Edinburgh’ gun, and later adopted by John Dickson was unlike other shotgun design. If it had a flaw according to Major Sir Gerald Burrard, the eminent critic, as Diggory Haddoke explains in The Vintage Gun Journal, then it was “the absence of an intercepting safety bolt or sear. Dickson’s will argue that a well-made gun does not need one.” It is widely regarded by gunmakers ancient and modern as a landmark in design; the perfect combination of strength, balance, reliability and handling. In short everything that the perfect game gun requires.
What connects the E-type Jaguar, the Spitfire and the Dickson Round Action is that they were not built to be the most elegant engineering masterpieces of all time. This is merely a result of the design process aimed at technical perfection.
Malcolm Sayer, the designer of the iconic 1960’s sports car was also responsible for the Jaguar D-type which won the Le Mans 24hrs race 3 years in a row in the 1950s. He was an aerodynamic specialist and imaginative mathematician who had come from the aircraft industry working in the years after World War II for de Havilland and the Bristol Aeroplane Company. His intense scientific methods, rarely understood by his colleagues, were strictly rational. They were born of a meeting with a German Professor in Baghdad where Sayer was teaching just after the war. This Professor reportedly instructed Sayer in the mathematical equations for the design of shapes. We know it now as CAD (computer-aided design).
The purity of Sayers equations was essential to the proper function of the E-type. Mike Kimberley, a Jaguar worker once recalled that when someone decided that the bonnet would look nice with a Jaguar badge on it he carefully indented it, all 1.5mm deep, so it was flush. Sayer apparently “took off” and insisted it was removed for interfering with the essence of his calculations. This was not about form, it was about function; beauty was the bi-product.
The E-type has been described as a Spitfire without wings. That name ‘Spitfire’ still resonates today as a byword for power and beauty. The elegance of the design comes from the elliptical wing shape. This was radical for its time bearing in mind that up till then the RAF fighter squadrons were made up of bi-planes. The designer behind the Spitfire was R.J. Mitchell. He had seen the developing threat from Nazi Germany played out in the Spanish civil war and had worked with the air ministry to begin developing a fighter able to match the growing threat. Mitchell worked with his Canadian aerodynamicist Beverly Shenstone on the K5054 project for Supermarine Aviation Works, a subsidiary of Vickers-Armstrong, to solve two conflicting requirements for the aircraft wing: it had to be thin enough to avoid induced drag in the thin air at high altitude, but also be capable of housing the retracted wheels and the ammunition for the eight Browning .303 machine guns, four in each wing. After the failure of the Spitfire’s predecessor the Type 224 a lot was riding on the project for Mitchell personally as well as the company and later as it proved, the country as a whole. He said to a colleague that he didn’t care what shape the wing was “as long as the bloody thing works”. It did work, and when in March 1936 it took to the sky for its 8-minute test flight the test pilot Capt. J. ‘Mutt’ Summers said on landing “Don’t change a thing”. R.J. Mitchell died shortly afterwards from cancer at the age of 42 and never saw it go into production but must have been aware of the sheer beauty and grace of his creation during those early test flights.
In a side-lock ejector the working parts of the action are housed on each lockplate. In an Anson & Deeley box lock they are housed inside the squared-off action. Both these designs have ejector work in the fore-end. The Dickson Round Action’s working parts are mounted on the trigger plate and the ejector work in the action body. This has several benefits for the gun as a whole. The centre of gravity is moved down, towards the bottom of the gun. It is also brought further back between the hands of the person shooting. All of this results in a much more responsive, faster-handling gun. No metal has to be removed from the action bar to accommodate springs or other working parts and because of this it can be rounded off to reduce weight without compromising strength. The inherent strength in the action also reduces felt recoil for a gun that handles this fast (although the benefits of this disappear if you choose unnecessarily heavy cartridges that marketeers would have you believe are necessary). No wonder that many modern gunmakers have now adopted the trigger plate as the basis for their designs. All of those factors culminated in a gun specifically designed to shoot Scottish grouse - the most demanding of game birds. The rounded action, only possible through this design, gives flowing lines that are the result of the design process and not its main intention. It is accidental, understated beauty. Superbly fit for purpose and a design classic in the same rank as the E-Type Jaguar and the Spitfire. In my opinion, few other man-made objects come close.
Made in 1976 the documentary below is a fascinating insight into what it was like to fly a spitfire, fight in one (Douglas Bader is superb in this), and build one by those who did it. Included is an incredible anecdote about being taken up on the outside of a Spitfire because the pilot hadn’t been properly briefed (she survived.) It’s worth your time.