William Roper, gunmaker - obituary
Master gunmaker who was apprenticed in the 1940s and had his shop door blown off by a customer.
William Roper, the master gunmaker, who has died aged 84, was one of the last of his trade to go through the traditional apprentice system.
William Roper, known as “Bill”, was born in East Ham on April 27 1931. His father died when he was four, leaving his mother Bessie to bring him up with his three siblings on her own.
After leaving school, he joined General Electric as an office junior but hated the work and, on the strength of his invention as a boy of an “automatic peashooter”, won an apprenticeship in 1948 with the London gunmakers Charles Hellis & Sons, which paid him the princely sum of 9d per hour.
He completed his training after two years’ National Service in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, learning his craft in old mews workshops in Birmingham, where he was intrigued to find that most members of the gun trade seemed to prefer snuff to cigarettes. All became clear when he was told of how his mentor “Pop” Dudden had once blown the contents of his workshop into the mews when his burning cigarette had come into contact with a pile of gunpowder.
On one occasion, Roper and his fellow apprentices decided to celebrate November 5 by turning an old gun barrel into a Roman candle, with the help of some disassembled signal cartridges. On lighting the touchpaper in the courtyard of Hellis’s shop, they saw their creation soar over the roof and disappear in a trail of smoke. Hopes that their indiscretion might have gone unnoticed were dashed when a policeman, on point duty in Hyde Park, came into the shop and deposited the mangled barrel on the counter.
After completing his apprenticeship, Roper moved, first, into Hellis’s old cartridge workshop in Burwood Mews. By the late 1950s Roper had gone into business for himself as a gun repairer and out-worker to the trade and subsequently moved to premises in Connaught Street.
As his career progressed, he became the first gunmaker to perfect the art of fitting or sleeving new tubes on to older shotgun barrels at a time when the cost of making a complete new barrel was not only prohibitive but materials were not available.
Through this work and his connections in the shooting world, Roper also became the first gunsmith to refurbish a wildfowler’s punt gun – an immensely powerful shotgun used for bringing down a large number of waterfowl in a single blast – and through this found himself working with countrymen such as Jack Hargreaves to refine the sport. Among other projects, Roper helped to develop a new gun known as “The Wolverhampton Monster”, which failed its safety tests in spectacular fashion by blowing the louvres out of the roof of the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers’ London Proof House in Commercial Road.
On another occasion, Roper was trying to free the slide of a customer’s semi-automatic pistol by holding it between his knees and heaving back on the slide, when the gun, which he had assumed was unloaded, went off. At the time he thought that the bullet had buried itself in the floor and it was only some time later, when he had an X-ray after falling off a ladder, that the projectile was discovered lodged in his knee. Some years later, by which time the bullet had begun to cause him discomfort, Roper decided to have it removed. Rather than go to the hospital he persuaded a medical student friend of his son’s to remove the missile while Roper was sitting at his desk at an office party.
Another time, Roper’s left hand got caught in the gear train of his rifling machine, causing a friend looking on to faint with shock. Roper had to reach over and reverse the machine to extricate his hand, then wake his companion up and get him to drive him to the local hospital. Doctors told him they might have to amputate, but Roper refused. After skin grafts the hand proved perfectly functional.
Occasionally customers caused accidents. One picked up what he took to be two “snap caps” or test cartridges from Roper’s shop counter and loaded them into his shot gun, only to find, on pulling the trigger, that they were actually brass-cased cartridges. The resulting blast narrowly missed Roper’s head, blowing his glasses off his head, and his shop door into the street.
In the 1960s a down-turn in the fortunes of the gun trade, coinciding with the import of cheaper mass-produced guns, led Roper to close his workshop in Connaught Street and move to Kent where, for a time, he worked as a fitter on the nuclear power station being built at Dungeness.
In the 1980s, however, a resurgence in the trade led to a renewed demand for his talents. As one of very few craftsmen who could not only make a gun from scratch but also produce a fine London “blue” finish to his barrels, he found his skills in demand.
Bill Roper is survived by his wife Valerie and two sons.
William Roper, born April 27 1931, died September 18 2015
