There are ten degrees in the Order of the Crown, and the Knight and the Officer are the fifth and fourth. In 1913, Defourny became a Knight of the Order of the Crown - a high award of Belgian Kingdom, and in 1928 the Officer of the Order in the same year he was appointed the Representative of Belgian gunmaking industry at the Milano International Exhibition. Many details of the cooperation between Defourny and Brancquaert remain unknown, but it was beyond doubt mutually beneficent, and probably ran deeper than making guns.
#A FRANCOTTE LIEGE BELGIUM SHOTGUN FULL#
A manufacturing enterprise with heavy machinery necessary for full cycle gun production can hardly be expected to hop from place to place across the town every few years.įN shotgun and its lock. But that doesn’t explain moving to Rue Champs de Foxhalle and Rue de Jupille. Some of the moves could be in fact only changes in the numbering system on rue Nicolas Defrêcheux (consistently with this hypothesis, all rue Defrêcheux addresses are on the odd side of the street). After that, his address changed as many as seven times. His first shop was located in Herstal, on rue Petite Voie. It is highly unlikely that Defourny’s atelier had a considerable manufacturing capacity. The irony was, however, that Defourny himself depended on the trade to fulfill Brancquaert’s orders. Photo: Īpparently, Brancquaert, with his influence in live pigeon shooting world, was a godsend to the beginning gunmaker who only started his own shop at the age of 33 and at first did not build more than 15 guns a year. Brancquaert`s Model 1, Beesley-Purdey action. The same stamp from the shotgun assembled for Brancquaert by Joseph Defourny (Antoine Joseph Defourny`s son) in 1927. Especially valuable was his work on improving the Beesley self-opening scheme, to which I dedicated a separate chapter. Antoine Joseph Defourny made a great contribution to the Belgian gun trade as an inventor. By contrast, his son Noël patented his single selective trigger (which he later fitted to many of his father’s over/unders, including the early Anson&Deeley models) first in Belgium (in 1949) and then in the USA (Patent № 2.639.972 of March 31, 1953). He claimed 15 Belgian patents for various firearms improvements, but apparently never saw it necessary to protect his rights abroad. In 1895, Antoine Joseph Defourny started his first business of making «de luxe» firearms. Antoine Joseph Defourny Jr got married in 1891, and had seven children. His son Georget (1900-1973) was a gun trader. This firm continued after his death for some time and closed in 1955. Guillaume Defourny worked for August Lebeau, and in 1896 opened his own business, G Defourny-Sevrin. The genealogical tree of the Defourny gunmaking dynasty. 450 Express below it featured a patented cocking system and a rear sight that rose automatically when the selector was shifted to the rifled barrel and went down as the action was opened. Model 7 was a three-barreled gun, with two 12 or 16 gauge smooth barrels on top and a. Model 4 was Model 3 with double triggers, Model 5 was a bar-action hammer gun, and Model 6 was Model 4 without side plates. Model 3 was a side-plated Anson&Deeley boxlock with a single trigger it was advertised as the company specialty, not inferior in any way to English guns of the same type. Model 1 was a carbon copy of Purdey by Beesley’s Patent self-owner, and Model 2 copied the Holland&Holland sidelock. His guns were of best quality only and with an option to place the customer’s monogram or crest on the trigger guard.
However, things go a little deeper than that.īaron Raoul de Vriere, one of the best live pigeon shots of the late XIX century.īrancquaert sold his wares all over Europe through a wide network of sales representatives: there were nine in Italy alone. This alone would seem to imply that they were gunmakers of the same level. For example, let’s look at Brancquaert and Defourny.īoth Brancquaert and Defourny figure prominently on the list of the makers that Marco Nobili’s influential work identifies as equal to Lebeau-Courally. Belgian guns of the same class by different makers, on close inspection, usually turn out to have the same quality - if not prove to be the same gun. I don’t know who compiled this rating and what criteria they used, but I know that its value is dubious. In Russia, for instance, there’s an unwritten rating of Belgian makers that affects a gun’s price tag along with other factors such as condition. Gun lovers all over the world like lists of «best» gunmakers and love to argue who made a better gun.
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