London Armoury Company

• 1. Introduction

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  The London Armoury Company opened its doors on the 9th of February 1856, in the Bermondsey section of London, on the former site of the South-Eastern Railway Company. It was a modest British arms manufactory, rooted in a personal dispute and a set of patent ambitions. Within a few years it would become the most important supplier of weapons to an army fighting a war thousands of miles away. How a London factory ended up at the centre of the American Civil War, and why it could not survive once that war ended, is a story shaped by falling-outs, rival inventors, and the desperate arithmetic of blockade running.

• 2. Founders and Feuds

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  Robert Adams, the inventor of the Adams revolver, was the principal shareholder when the company was founded. He brought in his cousin, James Kerr, as another significant stockholder. Adams had recently split with his former partners, the Deane brothers, and he intended the new Armoury to manufacture his popular revolver under his own terms.

  The company's board had other ideas. In 1859, directors voted to expand rifle production, judging that demand for infantry rifles outweighed demand for revolvers. Adams disagreed with that decision sharply enough to sell his stock and walk away. When he left, he took his revolver patents with him, which forced Kerr to start designing from scratch.

  Kerr, who had worked as a foreman at Deane Brothers before joining his cousin's venture, designed a new revolver in .36 and .44 caliber, sometimes listed as 54 bore. He also made improvements to the Enfield 1853 pattern rifled musket, which the Armoury was already manufacturing under a British government contract. Production of the new Kerr revolver began in April 1859, but the British government declined to contract for it, and civilian sales stayed modest. What saved the revolver was a war the Armoury's founders had no way of anticipating.

• 3. The Confederate Connection

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  When the American Civil War began, both the United States and the Confederacy sent buyers to Britain searching for weapons. In November 1861, Union army buyers purchased sixteen Kerr revolvers at eighteen dollars apiece. That transaction, though small, showed that the Armoury's guns had a market across the Atlantic.

  Two years later, Confederate arms buyers Major Caleb Huse and Captain James Bulloch struck a far larger deal. They contracted for all the rifles and revolvers the Armoury could produce. The British firm Willoughbe, Willoughbe and Ponsonby played a prominent role in running those shipments through the Union naval blockade to reach Southern ports.

  By the war's end, the London Armoury Company had manufactured and shipped more than 70,000 rifles and roughly 7,000 revolvers to the Confederacy. That figure of 7,000 came out of a total production run of about 10,000 revolvers, meaning the South received the overwhelming majority of everything the factory made. Confederate soldiers reportedly praised the Armoury's guns as the finest weapons produced in Britain. The exact number of shipments that made it through the blockade is unknown, but enough arrived to keep Confederate forces well supplied through the course of the war.

• 4. Collapse and Continuation

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  The London Armoury Company's survival was almost entirely tied to Confederate purchasing power. Once the war ended, that client disappeared, and the company dissolved in the spring of 1866, roughly a year after the fighting stopped. Ten years of operation, from 1856 to 1866, ended with the loss of the one market large enough to sustain it.

  Most of the gunsmiths and staff who had worked at the Armoury did not scatter far. In that same year of 1866, they came together to form London Small Arms Co. Ltd. The name changed but the craft knowledge and the workforce carried forward.

  Decades later, the London Armoury Company name surfaced again during the First World War, when it was used to import arms from America, including the Colt New Service Revolver in .455 Eley caliber. Whether that revival was purely a matter of administrative convenience or carried a deliberate nod to the original factory's reputation is not recorded, but the name crossed from one war-era company into another, separated by half a century.