Gunn & Moore is the oldest name in this round, and the only one founded by an England player.

Gunn & Moore was founded in Nottingham in 1885 by William Gunn, a Nottinghamshire and England batsman, and Thomas James Moore, a local businessman. Its first premises were at 49 Carrington Street; it now works from Trent Lane in Colwick, on the eastern edge of the city. The company’s own pages still lead with the year and the city.

That makes it the oldest bat brand in this round, and the only one whose founding name belonged to an international cricketer. Kookaburra in Melbourne is five years younger as a company, but by its own account only added bats around 1984. SG began in Sialkot in 1931. Even the oldest English willow supplier is younger: J.S. Wright & Sons of Essex dates itself to 1894 and says it began when its founder was asked to supply willow for W.G. Grace’s bats.

The register adds a wrinkle. The company actually called Gunn & Moore, Limited was incorporated on 4 August 1921, not 1885, and today it is classified as a non-trading company. The brand is from 1885; its namesake company is a dormant shell from 1921; and the bats are sold by another company altogether.

The bats are sold by the company that also owns Unicorn darts. In November 2025 it moved under a new holding company.

Gunn & Moore joined the Unicorn group in 1968. The trading company today is Unicorn Products Limited, incorporated in 1941, which the register classifies as a manufacturer of sports goods and which is the controlling shareholder of the dormant Gunn & Moore company. The shop that sells GM bats carries the footer “© Unicorn Products Ltd,” and it sells them alongside Unicorn darts, PowerGlide, Molten and Net1 equipment. A cricket buyer and a darts player can end up paying the same company — less odd than it sounds, since both sports sell precisely weighted objects to people who care about balance.

Ownership changed form recently. From 2016 the register showed Edward and Richard Lowy as Unicorn Products’ persons with significant control. On 11 November 2025 they ceased, and a new company, Unicorn Products Holdings Limited, incorporated in September 2025, took control. Its own controlling interest is held through a trust, with a professional trust company and two named individuals recorded as exercising control over its trustees, and both Lowys among its directors. We describe this simply as a move under a new holding company; the register does not show a sale to an outside buyer, and we do not suggest one.

None of that changes the bats. But it is a reminder of where the name lives. “Gunn & Moore” is a brand on a blade; the business behind it is a sports-goods group with a darts heritage, and since 2025 a trust-held one.

GM says its DXM English-willow bats are made in its own Nottingham factory. It does not say where its Kashmir range is made.

The origin claim is precise and limited. GM’s English-willow page says: “All GM DXM English Willow Bats are made by our own craftsmen and women in our own factory in Nottingham, England. The GM Factory is the largest in the UK and the most advanced in the World.” The first sentence is a clear statement about one family of bats. The second is the company’s own superlative, which we report as its claim.

GM also sells a Kashmir-willow range — the Diamond 202, Diamond 101 and Rival. We found no statement on its pages about where those are made, and we draw no conclusion either way. The careful reading is the one the company invites: “DXM English Willow Bats,” made in Nottingham; everything else, unstated.

The willow it uses is governed in its own way. English cricket-bat willow, Salix alba caerulea, grows mainly in the eastern counties; a 1974 order gave councils there power to have trees with watermark disease felled and burned. The bat it becomes is governed by MCC’s Law 5: the blade “shall consist solely of wood,” no more than 10.8 centimetres wide, 6.7 deep and four at the edges. The width limit is older than the firm by more than a century — four and a quarter inches, written into the Laws in 1774.

The material rule is more recent, and it has a story. In December 1979 Dennis Lillee walked out at Perth with an aluminium bat, the ComBat, made by a business partner of his; the umpires upheld England captain Mike Brearley’s complaint that it was damaging the ball, and Wisden records that the episode “led to another rewriting of the Laws: the bat’s blade must be made of wood.” A Nottingham maker that had been shaping willow for ninety-four years by then had the principle written down for it. The tree, meanwhile, takes its own time: J.S. Wright says cricket-bat willow needs twelve to twenty years to mature and is felled at a girth of about 58 inches, and that it plants about 30,000 trees a year across Britain.

GM’s player roster is current and broad: the 2025–26 player editions include Ben Stokes, whose BS55 range carries his initials, Ben Duckett, Aiden Markram, James Vince and Saim Ayub, and its team lists Matt Short, Georgia Wareham, Dawid Malan and Dani Gibson. In 2013 the company recorded Shane Watson visiting its factory to collect his Ashes bat. In this round, where so many bats went out under other labels, GM is a maker whose players carry its own.

Two letters do the work of two surnames.

On the bat, Gunn & Moore is GM — a monogram that compresses two Victorian surnames into something legible from the boundary. The full name survives on the company’s pages and in the history; the blade carries the initials. It is the same compression SG and SS use, for the same reason: a bat sticker is a small, narrow, moving surface.

Player initials have joined the system. A range named BS55 puts Ben Stokes’s initials and shirt number beside the maker’s — two monograms on one blade, maker and player, in a trade where the maker’s name has often been the hidden one.

For this guide we use a Trent navy and a pale blue with a confident Victorian serif. These are an unofficial interpretation, not Gunn & Moore’s own colour values, and nothing of its monogram is reproduced.

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