A Wogdon Affair

Britbox is rerunning the old Lovejoy series, and I’m hooked.  If you have never watched the show—and I recommend that you do—the series is about an antiques dealer in England who possesses a special gift, he is a “divvy” a person who somehow just knows when he is standing next to a fake work of art.  I admit to being addicted to the series, despite its being more than thirty years old.

After eight seasons, the show went off the air—primarily because the public wanted grittier mystery shows, tougher protagonists, and stories with more violence and edgier dialogue.  There was no place left on the air for a show where an intelligent light-hearted hero broke the fourth wall to discuss art history.

Good movies and good television shows frequently get their start from good books and Lovejoy is no exception.  The Lovejoy series, penned by Jonathan Gash (the pseudonym of John Grant), is comprised of 24 novels, published between 1977 and 2008.  In real life Grant was a British Army doctor, who opened a private practice after he retired from the military.  Perhaps the real mystery is not a story told in one of the author’s books, but where he learned so much about antiques.

I recently tracked down a hardback copy of the first book in the series, the Judas Pair, which is about a matched pair of dueling pistols made by Durs Egg.  (No, that’s not a typo:  his name really was Durs Egg and he was arguably the finest gunsmith of his time.)  For a brief period, dueling pistols were the highest form of art in the realm of gunsmithing.  Finely crafted pairs of pistols were carefully fitted into wooden cases, along with screwdrivers, powder horns, bullet molds, and ramrods.

You didn’t have to use only dueling pistols to fight duels—there are lots of records of duels using an astonishing variety of bizarre weapons.  In 1808, two Frenchmen armed with blunderbusses fought in the sky over Paris until one combatant successfully shot down his opponent’s hot air balloon.  Otto von Bismarck suggested that duelists fight with sausages, one of which was to be laden with poison.  There are recorded duels with every imaginable edged weapon and one rather gruesome one conducted with sledgehammers.  

A friend and I once conducted a duel with roman candles at 20 feet. Although neither of us can remember quite why we fought, we did learn two valuable lessons:  The first is always to drink mescal in moderation and the second is that you really shouldn’t wear a nylon shirt while engaging in such a duel.

Another unconventional duel, equally fueled with alcohol, was Jim Bowie’s bizarre knife fight in the dark in what became known as the “Sandbar Fight.”  Bowie and his opponent were observing a duel with pistols, and when both participants fired and missed their opponents, the spectators joined in with whatever weapons were at hand.  Bowie was shot and repeatedly stabbed in the chest but still managed to kill Major Norris Wright with his knife. (Remember, Bowie survived to die at the Alamo.)

It was because of just such drunken brawls that a group of Irish aristocrats created the Code Duello in 1777.  Duels were to be serious affairs that settled matters of honor, not wild brawls in which spectators joined in the fighting.  First, there were “seconds,” (representatives of each duelist) to mediate disputes before dueling took place and whose job it was to arrange the place and time of the duel (usually in a secluded location to eliminate unwanted participants).  The challenged duelist was given the choice of weapons, and the seconds were charged with insuring that both weapons were strictly equal in all respects.

The favorite weapons were usually pistols, but this was not always the case.  In 1842, James Shields felt humiliated by a humorous letter Abraham Lincoln had written for the local newspaper.  Following the Code Duello, Shield’s second demanded satisfaction from Lincoln.  As the challenged, Lincoln chose broadswords.  The two combatants met on an island in the Mississippi River where Lincoln, nine inches taller than Shields, warmed up by cutting twigs from tree branches that no other man present could reach.   Not surprisingly, both seconds were able to settle the matter with apologies, thus eliminating the need for the duel.

This gave rise to the dueling pistols set: finely crafted weapons that were utterly reliable, and as nearly identical as possible.  These pistols were usually a smaller caliber than were normally used in warfare, since the object was to prove honor—not necessarily to kill.  Nor were the barrels to be rifled, because that would make the guns more accurate and, thus, more likely to kill.  (Some dueling pistols were smooth bore for the last two inches but rifled further down the barrel where it was difficult for the seconds to inspect.  This illegal rifling was referred to as “French rifling” in England.)

Duelists were to face each other after walking apart ten paces each, and at a given signal raise their pistols, aim, and fire at will.  If a pistol misfired or failed to fire because the hammer was not properly cocked, that was considered that opponents shot and he was not allowed to reload.  If either opponent deloped, deliberately firing his weapon into the ground or air, the other duelist was free to either delope or fire at his opponent.  This was assumed to have settled the affair, but if both parties still felt aggrieved, they were free to reload and fire.

The finest dueling pistols were made in England by such notable gunsmiths as Joseph Manton, Durs Egg, and Robert Wogdon.  The latter made so many sets that in England a duel was referred to as a “Wogdon Affair.”   The pistols at right were made by Egg for the Prince of Wales, later King George IV.  Today, they are on exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dueling in England was against the law, but rarely resulted in criminal trials.  When it was, juries rarely brought back a guilty verdict.  The last duel in England—at least the last one that was public—was fought between Lieutenant James Seton and Captain Hawkey in 1845 after Hawkey objected to Seton’s unwanted attention to Mrs. Hawkey.  In the first round of shots, Seton missed while Hawkey’s gun was only half-cocked and failed to fire.  The duel could have ended there, but Hawkey insisted on a second round of fire.  Seton missed again but Hawkey shot Seton in the abdomen—a fatal wound.  Hawkey was charged and tried, but the jury never left the jury box, taking only nine seconds to acquit the Captain.

Dueling lingered longer on the continent, and though the practice eventually died out, the idea of dueling never completely left.  At the Athens Olympics in 1908, two different dueling contests were exhibited.  In the first contest, athletes shot (unarmed) mannequins, while the second featured combatants actually shooting at each other but with wax bullets.  While modified dueling never became an Olympic event, the sport did become briefly popular.  The last public contest in the United States was held in Carnegie Hall.  

Reading the news, I sometimes wonder if we got rid of dueling too soon.  Perhaps we should bring it back, but limit participation to lawyers, gang members, and politicians.