The Worshipful Company of Gunmakers was founded in 1637, after decades of argument over which City Company would regulate the emerging trade of gunmaking. The first recorded use of gunpowder and cannon by an English army was at Crecy in 1346, as a sort of opening act for the longbows. But guns were not seen as an essential element of warfare until the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588. Sound cannon and good tactics enabled the small, quick British fleet to cut a swath through the lumbering Spaniards. After that, the supply of guns became a matter of national importance.
In 1589, a group of gunmakers drew up draft procedures for proving the safety of firearms. But their efforts to form a new Company for the regulation of this emerging trade immediately ran into opposition from existing Companies, notably the Blacksmiths and the Armourers. After a generation of squabbling, a Royal Commission was created in 1631. On its recommendation, an independent Gunmakers Company was given a Royal Charter by Charles I on 14 March 1637 – although even then further bureaucratic opposition, plus the outbreak of civil war, delayed enforcement of that Charter until 1656.
The Charter defined the role that the Gunmakers still play today. It created a proof mark, a stamp of the letters GP topped with a crown. The mark is stamped on guns that meet the Company's safety requirements. Only the Company can bestow it, and it is illegal to sell a gun without a recognised proof mark. To administer proof, the Company was given broad “powers of search, gage, proof trial and marking of all manner of hand guns in London or … imported from foreign parts” – including the power to search (with a constable) for unproved guns and seize them.
The Company is unique in having always existed outside City bounds, possibly due to the noise and nuisance of its early (and now superceded) proof procedures. It established its first Proof House in 1657, just outside the City walls, underneath a bulwark near Aldgate. But by the 1670s, walls, bulwark and proof house were crumbling. So in 1675 the Company secured some land in a physic garden at Whitechapel, on what is now the Commercial Road. At 46-50 Commercial Road, it built a small compound which included the proof house, where the actual work of testing barrels was done, livery hall and, in earlier centuries at least, housing for the Proof Master (pictured at right in a nineteenth-century sketch). The livery hall at number 46 was sold in the 1920s, when the Company thought it superfluous to requirements. It was repurchased in 2007, although it remains let to commercial tenants.
The gun trade grew strongly over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of the new companies were located in Birmingham, to take advantage local expertise in metalworking and engineering. So in 1813, an Act of Parliament authorised creation of the Birmingham Gun Barrel Proof House. The two proof houses now divide the work of gun proof in Britain between them, and cooperate internationally through membership in the Commission Internationale Permanente pour l’Epreuve des Armes à Feu Portatives (CIP).
The Gunmakers are proud to remain a working company, one of the few City of London Livery Companies who still carry out the work for which they were founded. But together with the rest of the Livery movement, the Company has also evolved to include more social and charitable activities. Although the Company maintains strong links with the British gun trade, its 250 members encompass a broad range of professions. They enjoy a variety of social functions over the course of the year, including lunches, dinners and charity-fund-raising and other events hosted by other livery companies. More recently, the Company launched the Gunmakers' Company Charitable Trust to help support training and innovation in gunmaking.
The Company is governed by a Master and Court of Assistants. The present Master is Mr Clive Richards, OBE.