Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

apprenticeship in Alcester’s gunmaking industry has come to light. 195
It may be that
gunsmiths jealously guarded their trade, not wishing to train up someone who may later
compete for work when times were hard, for the gun trade was particularly prone to
slumps created by international politics. Many of Alcester’s gunsmiths kept the trade
within the family.
The gunlocks in Haines’s inventory are a precursor of a growing trend towards
specialisation within the trade. From the 1720s to 1760s we find specific references to
gunlock-makers in Alcester. Presumably Alcester gunlocks were sent to Birmingham to
be assembled with other parts made elsewhere in the west midlands. The first quarter of
the eighteenth century was certainly a boom time for Alcester’s gunsmiths, but references
to those in the trade after 1730 become forebodingly less frequent.
The reasons for this decline are not explicit, but bar-iron was no longer forged at
nearby forges, and the supply of local charcoal may have been running low, so the town
could not compete with gunsmiths in Birmingham and the Black Country who enjoyed a
more accessible (and therefore cheaper) supply of iron, steel and pit-coal. Perhaps some
of Alcester’s gunsmiths relocated there, but James Whissell left Alcester for the capital,
where he worked in H. M. Gunsmiths’ Office in the Tower of London, returning to
Alcester to die in 1792. In 1748 he had been a gunlock-maker in Alcester. Smithian
division of labour is also exemplified by John Jennings, described as a gunlock-filer. 196
Other Alcestrian gunsmiths may have switched their metal-working talents to other
products. Another James Whissell advertises in 1792 as a toyman, perhaps suggesting
195 TNA, IR1/47 records John Burford, Alcester, gunlock-maker, taking on an apprentice.
196 TNA, PCC probate of James Whissell, late of HM Gunsmith’s Office, now of Alcester, 1789, and
WoRO marriage licence of George Whissell, Alcester, mason, 1748 and WaRO, DR360/141, a deed
regarding the sale of Jennings’s house to the parish for the use of the poor in 1762.
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