London Proof House
| The Proof House | |
|
Middlesex | |
|---|---|
 The Proof House on Commercial Road | |
| Type: | proof house |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | TQ34148132 |
| Location: | 51°30’54"N, 0°4’5"W |
| Town: | Whitechapel |
| History | |
| Address: | 48-50 Commercial Road |
| proof house | |
| Information | |
| Owned by: | The Worshipful Company of Gunmakers |
The Proof House on Commercial Road in Whitechapel, Middlesex is the headquarters and gun barrel proofing house of the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers. The Company is one of the 110 Livery Companies of the City of London, though the Proof House stands just east of Aldgate and so outside the City boundary.
The Proof House has stood on Commercial Road since 1675, and been the home of the Gunmakers' Company ever since.
Although the headquarters of a livery company, the Proof House is not considered a livery hall as such. There is a small Court Room, a few offices and a workshop. The attached hall is tenanted and so not in the Company's use.[1]
History and modernity
In 1589 a group of gunmakers in London drew up draft procedures for proving the safety of firearms and to create a new company to enforcing regulation, but this drew immediate opposition from two existing livery companies, the Armourers' Company and the Blacksmiths' Company, who asserted that such action would infringed the privileges of those companies to regulate their own trades. Eventually in 1637 the Gunmakers' Company was created and incorporated by Royal Charter, required.[2] The Company was required to test gun barrels and stamp a proof mark on them, and was given power to search for and seize any unproofed guns.
The Gunmakers' Company ranks seventy-third in the order of precedence of the Livery Companies.
The first proof house was established in 1657 (during the Cromwellian period), beneath a bulwark near Aldgate. By the 1670s, the walls, bulwark and proof house were crumbling and so in 1675 the Company secured some land in a physic garden at Whitechapel, on what is now the Commercial Road, where the new Proof House was built in 1675.
A livery hall was established here, beside the Proof House, at what is now No.46 Commercial Road. This was sold in the 1920s, when the Company thought it superfluous to requirements, but it was repurchased in 2007 and is now tenanted.
Until 1813, the London Proof House was the only authorised proofing facility in the United Kingdom, notwithstanding that the main centre of gun-making was by that time in Birmingham, which had been busy arming the nation for the Napoleonic Wars. In 1813 a new proofing house was established in Birmingham; the Birmingham Proof House, which also still retains its role.
The Proof House today
The Company has remained a working company involved in the trade for which it was founded, in contrast to most of the city livery companies. It remains responsible for proof-testing gun barrels/actions for safety, which takes place at the Proof House.
The barrel testing technique involves test-firing a gun barrel/action whilst loaded with an extra-powerful charge of ammunition (the test cartridge develops 125% of the service pressure of the cartridge intended for the gun in question), held in a special carriage.[3][4] The barrel and action are then inspected and, if they have maintained structural integrity, they will be stamped with proof marks indicating the test pressure, bore diameter in millimetres at 9" from the breech face, chamber length, suitability for use with steel shot in the case of a smoothbore shotgun, a date stamp or code and the mark of the house; whether London or Birmingham.
The Proof Master may also be requested to investigate accidental gun and barrel failures.
Today, only two organisations are authorised by law for the deactivation and subsequent certification of the deactivation of firearms under section 58(1) Firearms Act 1968; the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers and the Birmingham Proof House.
See also
Outside links
References
- ↑ From the Clerk of the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers
- ↑ Worshipful Company of Gunmakers: The Livery
- ↑ Downing, Graham, (1 October 2018). "Proof of Arms". The Field.
- ↑ Vining, Miles (July 2015). "London Proof House Interview". Small Arms Review 19 (6).