Longthorne Gunmakers Charts Its Own Course as a Singular British Presence on the Sporting-Clays Tournament Circuit
Iconoclasts play a generous role in shaping historical events through their willingness to challenge and change the status quo. Iconoclasts disrupt the orthodoxy. They create acceptance for innovation and evolution. Even if their ideas fail in the face of resistance, iconoclasts can influence public opinion that ultimately leads to progress in surprising ways, while inspiring others to pursue unconventional paths to new heights of success.
So perhaps the most iconoclastic match-up in sporting clays shooting today is England’s Longthorne Gunmakers and their fully sponsored shooter in the U.S., a 21-year-old competitor from Maryville, Tennessee named Todd Hitch. Together, they are flouting the Euro-centric grip on shotguns in clays competitions. In an arena dominated by Italian and German shotguns, it’s quite possible that Todd Hitch is the only sporting-clays entrant on the international tournament circuit shooting a British shotgun. While we’re starting to see Longthorne appear at major tournaments in the U.S. and abroad as an exhibitor educating shooters on the benefits of their shotguns, they have something more to prove whenever Todd steps into the stand.
“I get a lot of pushback saying I won’t be able to win with that British gun,” Todd said. “People come up and say, why did you switch from the Beretta?”
“I think it’s brilliant that he’s shooting a British gun,” said Elaine Stewart, owner of Longthorne Gunakers. “Todd has a mind of his own, good for him. There’s a lot more companies bigger than us and have more clout and he’s displaying a real strength of character.”
The Longthorne VIVO.
You can argue over a pint or two whether or not Longthorne is a best gunmaker in the pantheon of the handcrafted British beauties such as Boss, Purdey, Holland & Holland, Westley Richards and Rigby. And although Rigby remains primarily a rifle maker, Purdey and Holland & Holland over recent years have introduced sporters as a means to expand their market and draw new clients from the clays clubs to their primary firearms at hand – field guns. But the likelihood of Holland & Holland or Purdey sponsoring a clays shooter with their new models is close to zero. Unlike their posh automotive brethren Aston Martin and Bentley who compete in the most grueling endurance races with fire-breathing beasts, Holland & Holland and Purdey just don’t seem to be made of the same stuff.
Instead, Longthorne has taken up the Union Jack and stepped into the breach with its 100-percent, British-made shotguns. In 2010, Longthorne had appeared on the scene with the most incredible conceit of machining a set of shotgun barrels in their Northampton factory from a single steel billet. Longthorne’s patented barrels start life as a 59-pound length of high-specification steel (the company also makes barrels from Damascus steel or titanium). From that monolith is born a fully integrated set of barrels that includes the top rib, middle rib and forend loop, with muzzles of fixed constrictions or threaded for chokes. Defying tradition, Longthorne doesn’t solder, weld or glue any part of their barrels. What remains among the metal shavings are a set of barrels that weigh about three pounds depending on their length.
For the old guard, which for centuries has joined shotgun-barrel tubes either by high temperature brazing, soldering and being pressed and welded to a mono-block, Longthorne’s state-of-the-art approach was often viewed as blasphemous by an upstart outsider. But the company’s founders, engineer James Longthorne Stewart and his wife, marketing maven Elaine, proved their iconoclastic mettle by pushing forward, compelled by their own vision. And now, Longthorne shotguns remain in high demand with prestigious American distributors such as Pacific Sporting Arms, Orvis and Griffin & Howe.
As Elaine told the U.K. countryside writing platform Scribehound in June 2021, “In the early days we did encounter inevitable resistance to our technology, surprisingly, mainly by a few members of ‘the trade,’ but we fully understand that it is difficult to engage with technology when it is perceived as a threat and it is not quite understood. New ideas always take time to establish, that’s why we developed in-house processes and became completely self-reliant, which enabled us to monitor our quality and make changes very quickly if we need to.”
And it’s that iconoclastic streak shared by Longthorne and Todd that sparked their initial attraction.
“We were interested in sponsoring an American shooter and decided we wanted to sponsor him,” Elaine said. “He handled himself as a gentleman on how he acted and behaved on the field, and he was a good shot.”
As Longthorne’s sole sponsored shooter, Todd seems an equally unlikely candidate on the sporting-clays circuit. The 21-year-old was home-schooled and studied business administration through online college courses. Like many rural young men, he started hunting deer at age eight with his great grandfather. At 12, Todd became involved with the Scholastic Clay Target Program, which provides students from elementary through high school and college the opportunity to compete in trap, skeet and sporting clays as well as the Olympic disciplines of bunker trap and international skeet. Since 2013, SCTP and it’s sister group the Scholastic Action Shooting Program have provided more than $800,000 in scholarships to over 900 athletes.
In 2023 Todd represented Team USA, and in the same year won the gold medal at the 2023 Junior World FITASC Championship in addition to becoming the first American to win the Kings Cup in Madrid, Spain.
Like his home-schooling education, Todd was self-taught in sporting clays. He watched YouTube videos of champion shooters, focusing on the Professional Sporting Clays Association competitions that drew some of the world’s top competitors. He currently practices sporting clays two-to-three times per week on the family farm in Tennessee, using six Promatic trap machines on the property.
“I watched every YouTube video on sporting clays and did a lot of reading about it,” he said. “But the PSCA videos were the most helpful because I could really watch them to see how they moved their gun.”
Todd participated in his first sporting-clays competition at the 2017 Gamaliel Cup using a Remington 1100 semi-auto. He scored 123 out of 200. At the time, he was ranked E Class by the National Sporting Clays Association. Come 2018, when he started working with clays-shooting coach Tom Seay, Todd had risen to Master Class. In 2021, he found redemption by winning the 2021 Gamaliel Cup, shooting a 198 using the Beretta DT11 bought with his own money.
Still, Todd figures he has taken about eight lessons total so far, including a few from shooting legend, Wendell Cherry. Regardless, he still considers Tom as his coach while competing in about 15 tournaments annually, accumulating some 30,000 to 40,000 miles in his 2015 Toyota Tundra pick-up showing 175,000 miles on the odometer.
In addition to Longthorne, the financial burden of competing is eased somewhat by other sponsors including Cole Gunsmithing, Jack Links, Quail Creek Sporting Ranch, Remington Ammunition, Promatic traps, Comp-n-Choke, JD Watch Repair, Demobox, the Kids and Clays Foundation, PMS Glasses, Castellani USA and The Field Shop by Hadleigh’s Field Shop. Todd also gives sporting-clays lessons.
It was at the 2023 CPSA World Championships held at the EJ Churchill Shooting Grounds outside of London where Longthorne first spotted Todd in action.
“We liked him,” said Elaine. “We share similar values as far as being nice to people. He’s very likeable and his family is very nice.”
After visiting Longthorne in England for a fitting, Todd received his Longthorne VIVO with 32-inch barrels in October 2023. He started competing with it in the first week of November. The VIVO is a trigger-plate boxlock over/under. The trigger is adjustable. Its flat-ribbed sporting barrels are available in lengths ranging from 29 to 32 inches either with fixed constrictions for screw-in chokes. The high-grade walnut stocks have a satin finish. Longthorne’s VIVO is adorned with engraved sideplates.
“I get a lot of complements on the appearance and the barrels,” Todd said about his Longthorne VIVO.
He also gets plenty of queries about the Longthorne VIVO compared to the off-the-shelf Beretta DT11 it replaced.
“The Longthorne is more agile than the Beretta,” he explained. “It has a smaller frame that gives me better target acquisition that doesn’t block my vision. I feel like the Longthorne has better balance, it has perfect balance, and it’s lighter for a quicker low-gun mount. It has one of the crispest triggers I ever shot.”
Expect to see the Longthorne-Hitch team increasingly more on the U.S. sporting-clays scene. “Americans are more acceptable to new technology,” Elaine observed. “We love Americans. They love to see something new in the market.”
Irwin Greenstein is the publisher of Shotgun Life. You can reach him at the Shotgun Life Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/shotgunlife
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Irwin Greenstein is Publisher of Shotgun Life. Please send your comments to letters@shotgunlife.com.
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