Walter Clode
Antique gun trader whose clients ranged from Indian maharajahs to Las Vegas hustlers
The Times
17 June 2022

Having had his bluff called by threatening to resign his commission from the cavalry unless he was promoted to major, Walter Clode found himself out of a job. It was 1955 and he had a wife and two young children to support, with a third on the way.

Through a schoolfriend he heard that Harry Rogers, the owner of the gunmaker Westley Richards, was seeking to dispose of his 52 per cent shareholding. The company, founded in 1812, had made its name by manufacturing the Enfield rifle for the British Army, but after 1918 its mainstay had been the sale of sporting guns to Indian maharajahs, a rapidly dwindling market.

Clode paid £2,000 for the shares and raised a loan to buy the company, which had an annual turnover of £20,000 but was making a loss. Part of the problem was that the company’s other two staple products were the Westley Richards harpoon gun, supplied to whalers, and the White Hunter double rifle, supplied to game departments in African colonies. The harpoon gun market was coming to an end because of protests against whaling, while the demand for White Hunter doubles was disappearing as African colonies were granted independence.

Over the next three decades Clode restored the fortunes of the business on the back of his ability to trade in antique guns. In 1959, while looking through the old Westley Richards ledgers, he noticed the huge amounts of weapons the Indian princes had ordered. He placed an advertisement in The Times of India and went out to Bombay, where he stayed at the Taj Hotel. Within a day, he had met Bobby Kooka, commercial director of Air India, who later agreed to negotiate the export licences for antique weapons on Clode’s behalf.

The Maharajah of Alwar was the first prince to answer the newspaper ad. “He took me to a room in the palace and on the floor was a huge pile of English flint lock pistols, about 200,” Clode later recalled. “I knew that there was enough money there on the floor to finance the whole operation without having to look elsewhere. It took two years to get this first lot out of India and back home.” Clode immediately put them up for auction through Christie’s, but he was later able to sell lots directly to collectors through specialist middlemen. The Alwar pistols provided the seed money for a dealing business that was to last 40 years.

Clode enjoyed travelling to America for the Las Vegas Antique Arms shows and relished the opportunities to play high-stakes poker. He always took fresh stock over. “Much of it was junk,” he said, but he “always liked the junk — matchlocks and other less expensive items — and it made good money . . . I was never fascinated as much by the guns themselves, I liked the dealing and making the money to keep the business going.”

One of his tricks was to have a fine but plain pistol engraved with a Hindi inscription along its barrel. It sold well and when it turned up in an auction catalogue several years later, Clode innocently inquired about the meaning of the inscription. The lot was withdrawn when the inscription was translated as “scrambled eggs”.

He also understood the value of having cash on the table when doing a deal and once left a pile of notes with an Indian playboy prince in exchange for an undetermined number of editions from the family’s antiquarian library. The lure of paper money enticed the prince to exchange it for a much greater value in paper books.

Walter Clode was born in Wimbledon, south London, in 1929, the only son of Charles Clode MC, a soldier, and his wife, Frances. Charles had been badly wounded during the First World War, but later served in the Indian army, leading his men up hillsides in Waziristan with khudstick and megaphone in pursuit of rebellious tribesmen, and rising to the rank of colonel (and acting brigadier). Walter’s father was assistant adjutant-general at Headquarters Eastern Command from 1943 to 1945 and subsequently AAG at the Directorate of War Graves Registration and Enquiries until his death in 1948. Frances Clode was appointed a Dame in 1974 for her work with the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service.

An only child, Walter inherited the name of his grandfather, a successful silk. He was brought up in Sindh, India, until the age of five, whereupon he was sent to Winchester College. “The truth is I hardly saw my parents for years,” he recalled. While serving in the ranks before going up to Sandhurst, Walter returned from a nightclub on the night the father he barely knew died at the family home in Kensington.

While at Sandhurst he was introduced by his room-mate to Alison McRobert, another child of the Raj, whose father was chief surgeon in Rangoon. They married at a Roman Catholic church in 1952.

After Sandhurst, Clode became a lieutenant in the 10th Hussars in 1950 and was sent to Germany. He was so badly behaved while on a course at Bovington Camp that he was, he claimed, confined to barracks for a year upon his return, “which was quite a thing of an officer in those days”. Ironically, this served him well, for when the Korean War began he applied to be posted there and his colonel was glad to get rid of him. He saw action, as the troop leader of four Centurion tanks, at the Battle of Maryang San in 1951.

In 1987 Clode persuaded his second son, Simon, who had worked as a commercial diver in the oil industry, to join Westley Richards. Simon, who was made managing director in 1994, revived the gunmaking division, pitching its hand-crafted, tailor-made guns to rich clients such as the Qatari royal family. He also reintroduced the company’s classic guns to the market and diversified into hunting and shooting accessories. But he pre-deceased his father, dying of cancer in 2016.

Clode also lost his older daughter, Sarah, but is survived by his wife, Alison; his son Charles, a retired legal executive; his son Alexander, who is a business manager for Bloomberg as well as chairman of Westley Richards, and his daughter Matilda, a social worker.

A Brexiteer, Clode was a Ukip supporter and flew the Union Flag at his home in Birlingham, Worcestershire. He was also a supporter of his local Anglican church, though not necessarily of the incumbent minister.

He was, in his idiosyncratic way, philanthropic, once saying to an associate: “A rich man must help those who are less fortunate. Here is a cheque for £500, for a project I never want you to start.”

Walter Clode, gunmaker, was born on March 27, 1929. He died on March 15, 2022, aged 92.