W. W. Greener

Lore & Background

The history of W.W. Greener begins in 1829, when William Greener, who had worked for the London gun maker Manton, returned to Newcastle and founded the W. Greener company. In November 1844, he moved his business to Aston New Town, Birmingham, because most of his materials came from Birmingham and the distance was hampering his work.

Between 1845 and 1858, W. Greener was appointed to make guns for Prince Albert. William Wellington Greener erected a factory on 'Rifle Hill', Aston, in phases starting in 1859, beginning in one of the live/work courts off Loveday Street. The company began to prosper around this time.

William Greener was a firm believer in muzzleloaders and refused to make breechloaders. His son, William Wellington Greener, struck out on his own, founding the W.W. Greener company, and produced his first breechloader in 1864. When William Greener died in 1869, the two companies were amalgamated as the W.W. Greener Company, carried on by William Wellington Greener.

Under his leadership, the company established offices in Birmingham, London, Hull, Montreal and New York City. William Wellington Greener was succeeded by two of his sons, Harry Greener and Charles Greener. Leyton Greener, Harry's son, took over as Chairman in 1951, and today the company has a fifth generation, Graham Greener, as one of its directors.

During the 1880s, as the company became well known, several small manufacturers in Belgium and Australia attempted to manufacture copies of Greener weapons, using misleadingly similar names such as Greenen, Horace Greener, Albert Greener, A. Greener, W.H. Greener, and A.H. Greener. J.H. Greener and Albert Greener were two brothers of W.W. Greener, and both also made guns; most J.H. Greener and a few Albert Greener guns are genuine.

Reader's Guide

W.W. Greener's significance stems largely from its innovations in shotgun design, particularly the introduction of choke boring in 1874. While American gunsmiths were pioneers of the choke boring system, they had not progressed beyond an elementary stage, and their guns would lead, throw irregular patterns, and not shoot straight.

W.W. Greener derived his first intimation of the choke formation from a customer's letter in early 1874, which described a choke but gave no details on size, shape, or how to produce it. Through many experiments, he determined the perfect shape and size for a given bore and developed tools to produce the choke bore profile correctly and smoothly. His system was so successful that it was later adopted by other manufacturers, and some authorities credit him with inventing the concept.

The company's choke bore guns won at the London Gun Trials of 1875, 1877, and 1879, and at the Chicago Field Gun Trial of 1879. These results made the W.W. Greener name famous. The company also produced the 'Treble Wedge-Fast' breech action in 1873, one of the strongest breech actions ever invented, which was widely copied after patent rights expired.

In 1876, the firm introduced the 'Facile Princeps' hammerless gun, cocked by the dropping of the barrels, and restarted production of this model in 1998. In 1895, W.W. Greener invented the world's first Humane Killer, a gun for killing livestock, adopted by the War Office and Admiralty. After the original models became obsolete in the 1960s, the company introduced the Humane Killer Mk II, which fires a .32 ACP round.