One day as I was heading home from work in the city I happened to stop in at a newsagent and noticed a British shooting magazine on the rack. The The Mannlicher Schönauer M72 as you can see is a graceful blending of blued steel and walnut: the Steyr Mannlicher is a blend of blued steel, walnut and plastic that becomes one of the ugliest sporting rifles in existence. Top rifle is a The Mannlicher Schönauer M72, lower rifle is a Steyr-Mannlicher of the seventies with its plastic fittings. So I assumed my only chance of getting a real Mannlicher-Schönauer would be to find a second hand one. They had a plastic magazine, plastic trigger guard and were just about as plain ugly as you could make a rifle. I’d seen the new model Steyr-Mannlicher a few years earlier when I was in a gun shop in Jakarta in 1975. Mind you, at that stage I didn’t even know if one could still buy a Mannlicher-Schönauer like the ones I’d seen in Bland’s shop in London. But there came a moment when I thought “I haven’t bought my Mannlicher-Schönauer yet.” and I decided that, if I didn’t get one before our first child was born then just maybe the responsibilities of children and a mortgage might put paid to any chances I might have had of getting one. This was fantastic news and we were both blissfully happy. I got involved in the shooting sports seriously, then I got married, and a couple of years after my lovely wife and I tied the knot she told me she was expecting. The family moved away from Britain to Australia and that Bland’s catalog came with me and stayed with me for another decade or so.
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