Tribute

This website is also a tribute to William Jover who was a London inventor and gunsmith from the 18^th century and who died in the mid-19th century.

His armoury was on the 337 Oxford street in London. His flintlock guns are still valued nowadays due to its design, accuracy and elegance. His shop in Oxford Street was called Jover & Sons even though it was managed together with her daughter Mary Jove, also legally recognized as a gunsmith, based in 26^th Mortimer Street, where it is believed that family and business moved to around 1810.

Man of his time, tenacious and engaged with his society, his inventor’s streak was more powerful than the custom made weapon manufacturer’s one, especially Dueling pistols, products where his delicate signature appears. Signature that we have recovered in the logo of this website. He pawned possessions and family to follow his dream, that weapons could fire more than one shot. He was a visionary and a pioneer.

With his new partners (Nock, Jiver & Green) (775) he registered a kind of seven-barrelled carbine, that was manufactured as a limited production for the English Navy. They were also suppliers of high-quality and accurate muskets to the English troops fighting in the colonies for Her Majesty’s Artillery Board.

Some years later, their company was purchased by their competitor, Wilkinson, and it specialized in swords, steels that the English army officers wore until the 1980s… and also in razors.

It seemed that his son, Joshep, Mary’s brother, continued their father’s work in the new colonies, once the American independence war was over, manufacturing real jewels for the new American bourgeois, using the name “jover&son-London”. Some of them are in the best museums and reproductions of them have appeared in various films such as “El Alamo”.

The surname “jover” (from the Latin iugárius), means “manufacturer of yokes“, “the one who bears the yoke with the pair of oxen (muleteer)“, or “farmer“. All of them working people, land artisans. By the way, our father and grandfather, Pedro Jover, born in Roda de Ter, following tradition, was a mechanic and lorry driver in Terrassa.