POTD: A Flintlock Built in 1996 – “The Leeds Gun” by Peter Dyson & Son

Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have a 14 bore flintlock double gun that is younger than a lot of the people reading this. This is the Leeds Gun, built by Peter Dyson & Son to mark the opening of the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds by Elizabeth II in March 1996.

Building a flintlock from scratch in the 1990s sounds backward until you consider who commissioned it and why. Dyson are the gunmakers to the Royal Armouries, and the museum exists to hold the national arms collection. A commemorative piece in any modern configuration would have missed the point. Bernard Dickens designed this one as a period English sporting gun and put the entire story of the institution into the metal.

Everything on it means something. Owl for Leeds, raven for the Tower of London, and those two birds repeat on the breeches and the barrel slide escutcheons. One silver butt panel shows Father Thames pouring out the river with the White Tower behind him. The other shows the source of the Aire becoming the canal that runs past the museum door, along with the horned helmet Emperor Maximilian I sent Henry VIII in 1514, which is one of the collection’s best known objects.

The locks follow William Smith’s pattern from around 1820, and the barrels use Henry Nock’s patent breech, which was the change that made British flintlock shotguns fast and reliable in the first place.

Most of our POTDs utilize images from our friends at Rock Island Auction Company, the premier firearms auction in the United States. Take some time to browse their current auctions – who knows, maybe you’ll find a piece of history to take home!

“The Famous ‘Leeds Gun’ by Peter Dyson & Son Ltd. in 1996.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/detail/4097/208/the-famous-leeds-gun-by-peter-dyson-son-ltd-in-1996. Accessed 1 Aug. 2026.

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