Purdey Sporter

Becky McKenzie weighs up the qualities of this pedigree over-and-under shotgun

At the end of last year, I received an email from Purdey at the Royal Berkshire Shooting School (RBSS), inviting me to a ladies’ shooting afternoon. As I didn’t really want to spend a load of money just before Christmas, I thought, instead, to send the people at Purdey an email to see if they’d be interested in letting me do a gun review for Sporting Gun.

I sent the email and then went on the Guntrader website to have a look at some Purdeys. After picking myself up off the floor, I thought that maybe I had made a mistake in sending the email, as they were somewhat above the value of guns that I am used to. I need not have worried, however, as a nice gentleman called Andrew Ambrose replied, saying that they’d love for me to come down to the RBSS and test their Sporter.

Honoured 

I actually felt quite honoured that they’d let me shoot one of their guns but, for some reason, my email highlighted the Ambrose in Andrew Ambrose, so I proceeded to call him Ambrose – not the most auspicious of starts. We arranged a day to meet and I was warmly greeted on arrival with a coffee by the roaring log fire. I introduced myself to ‘Ambrose’ and almost died of embarrassment when I realised that his name was Andrew.

Anyway, Andrew laid out on the table three of the new Sporters – a 12-, 20- and 28bore. I had only brought 12-bore cartridges, so the 12-bore it was. This Purdey was originally designed and launched in 2008 and was partly made in Italy in collaboration with Perugini & Visini. However, as of last year, production is now entirely at Purdey’s in-house factory in Hammersmith, London, along with all their other models.