On 4 May 1840, he bought a pair of pistols for £2, as well as a gunpowder flask, and began practising in various shooting galleries in Leicester Square, the Strand and the West End. A week before the attack, he went into a Lambeth shop owned by a former schoolmate named Gray and bought fifty copper percussion caps, and enquired where he could buy some bullets and three-pennies' worth of gunpowder. Gray sold him the powder, and told him where he could find the ammunition. On the evening of 9 June he showed several witnesses what appeared to be a loaded pistol; when he was asked what he planned to do with it, he refused to say, other than stating that he had been firing at a target.