Hi, I'm Jonathan I'm one of curators here at the Royal Armouries Museum and I have a
couple of things to show you today. Firstly, quite run-of-the-mill, maybe not
for us every day in the UK but this is a STEN submachine gun, world war two
getting into the opening years of the Second World War
Britain had acquired Thompson submachine guns from America but couldn't get
enough and the cost was extremely high it was something like forty five old
pounds far too expensive to turn out enough of these little compact automatic
weapons to equip everybody that needed equipping be that at the Home Guard or
frontline commando soldiers. So the solution in Britain was what's called
the Sten gun invented by two guys Shepherd and Turpin as the st in Sten
gun and en actually doesn't stand for Enfield
or at least we don't think it does. It stands for England so Shepherd Turpin
and England: STEN. This is the mark II which was simplified over the mark I
which has wooden furniture on it, that might be a subject for another day. I'm
mainly showing you this to compare it with another thing that I'm about to
show you. So it's got, this is common to this as well, the 32 round stick or box
magazine is attached here everything is made out of sheet metal tubing or simple
bar stock very very basic materials to make it as quick and easy possible to
make. You could make one of these for two old pounds which is about a hundred
pounds today something like that versus the Thompson gun which is much nicer
much better made and finished gun at forty five pounds so the obvious solution
was this at least for Britain and even Germany ended up copying these at
the end of the war. Now this was not simple enough for some people so
you had the mark 3 which was specifically for companies like Lines
brothers in the UK who had experience making sheet metal toys and it would
be easy for them to tool up to make something made out of a continuous
folded sheet. That was the basic idea there. That was probably a bridge too far
made the gun a bit too cheap and a bit too unreliable but nonetheless they made
almost as many mark 3 STEN's as they did the mark 2 here. Another solution
was this gun. Now you probably think I've just picked up the same gun in fact this
is different and I will compare them side by side for you. So this tube, traditionally
this was a single drawn steel tube, very strong, very circular, perfectly circular
which it has to be for reliable functioning as a big metal bolt moves
back and forth in here and if the body is not perfectly circular it's going to
encounter friction, it's going to slow down you're going to get a stoppage
which is exactly the problem with this solution because what we did here was
instead of drawing out of steel tube which is expensive and time consuming
they wrapped a sheet of steel over a form and basically beat it until it was
that shape, the shape of a keyhole basically which if I just show you
this in cross-section let's take the butt off and do that that's exactly what
that is so it's the this is all one metal sheet wrapped around nice and
cheap, nice and easy - problem is you're going to start
creating: slowing, tight spots, basically and unless your quality control is really
good which it wasn't always you're gonna have problems so this is this was a
recall there was essentially a factory recall of these things in 1943
so this gun shouldn't exist. They were nearly all destroyed, this is a very rare
survival of this specific bit of the British World War 2 manufacturing
story. Just going to use this sten bayonet as a pointing device, being
very careful not to touch anything so the difference in construction that I'm
talking about is: on the top we've got the mark 2 standard Sten and you can see
there's a join between the sheet metal here of the trigger mechanism housing and
the steel tube of the actual body or receiver - they're two separate things
steel tube, sheet metal, welded on. That's how most Stens were
made and you've got two tack welds there holding the whole thing together
and a proper weld at the back. On the rare and unusual recalled gun this is
all one piece, you'll see there's no join between the sheet metal of the trigger
mechanism housing and the body because it's all one piece of folded metal so
that's a little bit specialist little bit technical but this is also very
interesting for another reason. I first encountered this several years ago
sitting talking to colleagues in our education department. They have
deactivated firearms to allow them to do the the job that they do handling with
the public, not reenactment per se but doing impressions, dressing and holding
the appropriate equipment when they do their gallery talks and their events
and one of the guns they had was this one deactivated. So though it's got moving
parts this is an old spec deactivated firearm. No one had noticed the
technically interesting aspect - why should they? Even harder to notice
was what I happen to notice as I was looking at it and the light fell just
right on the side and there's writing on the side of the gun - wow, what what does
that say maybe it's not writing because I can't read it but the reason I
couldn't read it, it's not because it's faint (which it is, we're gonna struggle
to pick this up for you on the camera in fact) but because it's Greek. So
there's several lines here of Greek lettering, so my mind is instantly
thinking where has this been, what has it done because these mass-produced
military firearms typically have no story to tell, not individually. They
very rarely come to a museum from their users because they don't own
the gun so what was going on? So we start looking at the gun, we start trying to
read the markings and we discover a couple of interesting things. So first of
all, we've got the markings on the magazine, Sten mark 2 - that doesn't
help much. On the other side, a little bit more helpful, is a serial number and a
prefix for Fazakerley which was Royal Ordinance factory making these guns near
Liverpool. Ok, so it's a British made Sten that doesn't really narrow
it down much either as most of them were, or a lot of them were, but on the trigger
guard here we've actually got a 'U' with an arrow in it now that is the
Broad Arrow is a symbol of the board of ordinance, or the War Office at this point.
and the U is actually indicator for the government of South
Africa so within the Empire Commonwealth at the time this shows the
gun was issued to South Africa okay so we've gone from Britain to South
Africa 1942, 1943 it's gone out to South Africa well we don't know what it
was used for there precisely but then we've got this
Greek writing
so we've now got to connect Britain to South Africa to Greece. So with much digging,
well I say digging, a very helpful Greek contact of mine with a lot of playing
around with the camera we were able to translate this writing here. We're trying
here to show you these very faint scratches which would have been more
visible when the weapon still had it's blued finish intact but there are
actually four lines of information here: two words at the top, hopefully that's
catching a bit of light, there's only so much we can do here, we've then got
another two but the second word is so faint, then a single word, and then a
longer or rather more stretched out, he's
taken more space (this is not neat work he's done here
but it is there nonetheless) and this actually says Christóforos Elias, I hope
is the correct pronunciation of this of this Greek name which is actually
surname, first name so it's Elias Christóforos is what turns out to be
Greek Cypriot soldier who used this gun then you've got the next line down:
headquarters company, showing you where he was based, or what sort of unit
he was based with. We've then got the Greek acronym which I won't even attempt
to spell out for the Hellenic force in Cyprus so we're not talking World War
two here we're talking 1972 the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the conflict
between Greece and Turkey - suddenly very interesting. Clearer on this side has been
scratched in upside-down strangely, hopefully you can see there A K again
these are Greek letters, Greek versions of these letters and then a separate
word and we believe this is a little bit more tentative but the Greeks tell us
that this is probably artillery squadron and the implication is it's based at
Syors. So we've got quite a lot of information here there's almost
encoded into the gun it's that faint that hard to see and it's thanks to our
colleagues in Greece that we were even able to work out what this said and then
finally the last one bit of information Nicosia, the physical
place where this headquarters company was based where Elias Christóforos
actually served. So although we couldn't trace the
individual soldier's service history we did try and the Greek forces were very
helpful in trying to trace him down it turns out that's quite a generic name we
weren't able to pin him down. Despite that we've got quite a
lot of history wrapped up in this gun from the British
manufacturing effort at the beginning of World War two to the South African
military's use of Sten guns to the conflict in Cyprus and a Greek Cypriot
soldier who physically scratched his name into this gun so that we can tell
you this story and I think that's that's quite wonderful for a bit of sheet metal
and tubing