a gunsmith
As creatives, we’re all very passionate about what we do for a living whether it’s designing, building, manufacturing, repairing or perhaps even repurposing. The work that we do keeps us motivated and focussed on delivering the best services or products we work with. Every day can be a different day if you love what you do for a living. Josephs world is certainly that
I often ask the question of those that I document as to how they find themselves where they are today and there are many reasons why. In Joesph’s case, being engrossed from a young age within his fathers world as a gamekeeper, it seemed rather inevitable that those early experiences would rub off on him. That’s exactly what happened to Joseph but where would he start from and which direction would he take given those experiences?
“ I always fancied it as a career path”
Well, Joseph happened to find out that Westley Richards, a leading gunsmiths in Birmingham, were always on the look out for new apprentices, so he rang them up. Being 15 at the time he was told that he was just too young. They told him to ring back once he’d left school. He did that as an excited teenager and ended up doing a weeks work experience with them. A week later, they offered him a job. It seemed that the knowledge and the handling of guns from fathers side at an early age clearly helped Joseph follow his dream towards becoming a gunsmith.
10 years down the line and with a wealth of experience under his belt, we now find Joseph operating a well established and successful gunsmith business here in Cornwall. Now, you’d be forgiven in thinking that the work of a gunsmith might be a simple one, that’s simply not the case. An expertise in the area of engineering is essential as the work that Joseph undertakes is extremely precise in so many ways when you consider what he works with. Joseph’s clients have an extremely varied selection of sporting shotguns, rifles and pistols that they bring into him for many different reasons. It might be a service, a re building of a stock or those who choose to decommission their firearms. His workload is not only interesting and challenging but very rewarding too. When a gun leaves Joseph’s workshop, that gun has undergone the best professional service possible for his customers.
Joseph told me “There is such a variety of work that comes through the door, which usually brings some characters in as well which is always amusing” Sadly, the world of the gunsmith is a dying trade in comparison as to how it was so many years ago but Joseph will be keeping those practices alive for years to come.
For those of us that enjoy what do for a living, one could say that it doesn’t really feel like a job to us, perhaps more so a love. I think Joseph feels that way too. RD
