[ Webley-Fosbery History ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at
Colonel Fosbery's automatic revolver.
Specifically this is a Model of 1901
Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver in calibre .455.
This was originally the idea of one George Fosbery VC.
He did in fact win the Victoria Cross
for some of his military service in India.
He actually retired from the British military in 1877,
became pretty well renowned as ... a small-arms expert.
He had made some previous inventions in small arms, he invented the "Paradox"
which was a rifled choke to allow shotguns to shoot slugs accurately.
Actually kind of a pretty cool thing, that's something I ought to cover later on.
But he invented an exploding bullet that was used for range estimation in India.
And then he went on to come up with this idea.
Now, what this idea is is a way to harness the energy from firing a revolver
to rotate the cylinder and cock the hammer,
and absorb some of the recoil energy instead of transmitting it all to the shooter.
So when you fire, the whole upper receiver of this gun slides backwards,
the cylinder indexes, the hammer is re-cocked,
and it's left ready to fire with a single-action trigger pull.
It's pretty cool. ...
Obviously the question that arises is why this instead of a semi-automatic pistol?
And the answer is because Fosbery came up with this in 1895,
and there weren't a whole lot of functional semi-auto pistols on the market at that point.
Remember, this is a year before the Broomhandle Mauser was even out there.
So the reason why this is because the semi-auto pistols were not that great at this point.
So, Fosbery first developed this idea on a Colt 1873, a Single Action Army.
And built an experimental model and kind of got the details sort of worked out.
He patented it in the UK in 1895,
he then went on to file patents in the US, Germany and Italy in 1896.
I think three different patents in the UK, various features. ...
Unfortunately the lockwork in the Colt revolver was kind of weak.
Now, not as it stands alone, but when adapted in this way
with the parts sliding and banging together the Colt didn't work out all that well.
So Fosbery changed up and went to a British Webley pattern revolver,
something he would have been quite intimately familiar with at the time I'm sure.
And the lockwork on the Webley was stouter and better suited to this sort of adaptation.
... Oh, and I should also point out, in the process he got the advantage
of the Webley's faster loading and unloading compared to the Single Action Army,
because this is a break-action revolver.
Pop it open, it automatically ejects all 6 cartridges,
and then it's a lot faster to load than a gate-loading revolver like the Colt.
In the late 1890s Fosbery went and approached the Webley Company.
They were one of the premier manufacturers of handguns in Britain at the time,
and, well, Fosbery needed a manufacturer to build his cool neat guns.
So Webley was interested, they saw the growing popularity
of self-loading pistols in Europe and in the United States.
And of course militaries are starting to adopt these,
the Swiss would adopt the Luger in 1900.
And the only other self-loading pistol that Webley had going on at that point
was the Mars pistol by Sir Hugh Gabbet-Fairfax.
And this thing is this gigantic behemoth of a magnum pistol.
And Webley is looking at this and going,
"This isn't really looking like it's going all that well, maybe we should have a second option."
And the Webley-Fosbery became a second option for them.
So Fosbery doesn't appear to have had much direct influence working at Webley.
Instead he licenced the idea to Webley.
Webley turned it over to one of their shop foreman, a guy named William Whiting,
who would go on to design pretty much all of Webley's domestic self-loading pistols.
But that's a later story.
Whiting takes over this, and they start ironing some of the last bits of the problems out.
And the first public demonstrations of these pistols
were ... in June 1900 at the Bisley Shooting Matches.
This ... was a big national shooting event at Bisley in England,
and it ... was the equivalent to the US National Matches really, like Camp Perry.
All of the best shots in the country came out, there was a big competition, prizes, the works.
And so Webley premiered this gun there.
And they had what were presumably some hand-fitted kind of prototypes
that they let a whole bunch of shooters play with, basically, shoot.
They had a couple of sponsored shooters in the event who were using Webley-Fosberys.
And everyone actually came away really impressed with the gun.
Now these are target shooters, not military mind you.
And the elements they liked were, especially in rapid-fire stages,
it was a lot faster to work than a double-action revolver
because it automatically cycled and left you with the hammer cocked
ready for a single action, very short, very crisp, trigger pull.
They really liked the recoil absorption of the action of the gun.
And these proved to be very accurate guns as well.
They were well made, the sights are both fitted directly to the barrel.
So there's not a whole lot of ... potential for changes in alignment
between the sights and the barrel, like there can be in a self-loading pistol.
Anyway, they came away very impressed, a lot of good PR from the 1900 Bisley Matches.
They went ahead and finalised production, got tooled up,
and the first guns came on the market for sale in 1901.
Now at this point they were chambered in the .455 Webley cartridge,
which was the standard British service cartridge of the time.
And while the initial ... PR had been at the Bisley Target Matches,
the sales were primarily to military officers.
Of course, at that point in the British military as an officer you had to provide your own sidearm.
And ... they didn't tell you what sidearm it had to be,
but it did have to use the standard .455 service ammunition.
So there were a lot of different models of standard revolvers you could get.
You could buy a ... call it a custom shop version of the service revolver from Webley.
But this was also an option, and especially for the guys who wanted the newest,
coolest, high-tech, awesome, whizz-bang gun,
hey, a Webley-Fosbery revolver worked great as a military sidearm.
They didn't sell all that many. In total about 5,000 of these were made,
but that would go through several later models.
And the sales didn't really pick up until World War One,
when of course at that point you have a lot of new officers coming into the army looking for sidearms.
So this particular one is number 1004, it was manufactured in 1902.
In 1902/1903 they manufactured a big batch of these which would then hold them for many years.
Unfortunately they never really sold as well as I'm sure Webley hoped they would be.
And by the time they were really getting into people's hands,
we're talking several years into the 1900s,
... true semi-automatic pistols really improved quickly.
And you did get to the point of,
"Well, why would I buy this, which is half revolver and half semi-auto,
when I can go to a real semi-auto (like say the Colt Model of 1911 only a few years later),
I can just get that, and it does everything better than this does."
So that was the big problem for Webley with these guns.
Cool idea, but they didn't sell well enough right off the bat, and they quickly became obsolescent.
So from Webley you could get this with a 4, a 6, or a 7.5 inch barrel,
prices went from 105 to 115 shillings respectively (105, 110 and 115).
If you wanted nickel plated instead of polished and blued,
that would add an extra 5 shillings to the price.
And they were tested by the British military in 1901 and 1902, never actually formally adopted.
They were actually substantially heavier than a standard pattern Webley revolver of the time,
just under 44 ounces, which is kind of a heavy pistol.
Although I'm sure that is part of what makes them very comfortable to shoot.
Now I'm going to find out myself how comfortable to shoot these are
because we are going to take this out on the range.
But before we do that I want to take a look at a couple of the features,
and show you a couple of the mechanical elements of this gun.
Now these guns would go on to be manufactured in .38 ACP as well as .455.
And so those of you who recognise this gun from the "Maltese Falcon" may know,
or may not, that the gun in the Dashiell Hammett detective story, "The Maltese Falcon",
is in fact a .38 calibre Webley-Fosbery which was an 8-shot gun.
As opposed to the 6-shot version here in .455.
One other element you may recognise from that story is that this gun has a safety on it.
Safeties on revolvers are a thing, but they're not super common.
And in most cases, in my opinion anyway, they are redundant and kind of goofy and unnecessary.
On the Webley-Fosbery however, they do make good sense.
And the reason for that is this does have a fixed firing pin.
Now it does have a half-cock notch,
but a lot of people don't really want to trust the half-cock notch
for carry on a revolver with a fixed firing pin.
Because if you have a cartridge in the chamber under the hammer
and you strike a sharp blow to the back of the hammer,
you do risk potentially detonating that cartridge and firing it unintentionally.
So the better way to do this with single-action guns is typically to carry them cocked and locked.
So cock the hammer, then you need a safety
or else all that's stopping it from firing is the very nice, light, crisp, trigger pull.
So on the Webley-Fosbery when you engage the safety
you can see that it actually slides the frame slightly backward.
The trigger is completely disconnected,
the hammer is locked in place, the gun is now quite safe.
Then when you're ready to fire it, as a right-hander
the safety sits right underneath your thumb.
All you have to do is flick it down, and you're ready to fire.
When you do fire, there is a stud operating in the bottom of the frame here
that cycles the cylinder back and forth.
And that's what the zigzag pattern is, it is actually a track for this little stud to run in.
So if I open this up you can see this diamond-shaped little stud.
Interestingly this started as a round stud on the very early guns.
They found that when it was round it would occasionally not quite pick up the grooves properly,
and the cylinder would rotate partway, and then rotate back onto a previously fired cartridge.
Changing it to a diamond shape made it more reliable in tracking in these grooves.
There's another interesting feature here in this little tab
which I can push in, it's a little spring-loaded tab, right there.
Operates inside the top of the frame.
And what it does is it actually has a little stud that locks the cylinder in position.
So if I push it out, I can then rotate the cylinder out of alignment.
Now it was very important, when you open this,
... this is actually kind of like the top cover in a machine gun, like an MG 42.
These grooves in the cylinder have to line up with this stud, or else the gun can't close.
When you open it to eject empty cases and reload new ones,
if you didn't have a locking mechanism it would ... really be quite obnoxious
to try and have to position the cylinder in just the right place before you could close the gun.
It would make it very difficult to reload the gun quickly.
So this little stud in the top of the frame locks the cylinder in position for you.
When you close the ... frame,
that little tab gets pushed onto the locking surface, up and out of engagement.
So now it has handed off responsibility for controlling the cylinder
from this stud up here to the operating one down here in the frame.
Now, I can take the right grip panel off
and we can see the actual recoiling mechanism down in here.
We have this lever which is going to cycle back,
and a compression spring in there that provides the force
to slow it down, and then cycle it forward.
Now this is a 1901 pattern of Webley-Fosbery.
In later years they would change this to a V spring,
much like Webley's later self-loading pistols.
So that's one way to distinguish between the models.
But really pretty simple down here.
The finicky part of getting these guns working right was really the cylinder.
Getting the cylinder to properly track and index reliably,
that was really the biggest issue that they had.
And I should say with production guns they pretty well accomplished that.
But you will see a wide variety of changes to the cylinders
with the style of the grooves and fluting, or in this case lack of fluting, in the cylinder.
I do want to take a look at a couple of the markings on here, there aren't a whole lot.
Up on the top of the frame we have "Webley Fosbery Automatic".
And then down on the bottom they note that it is .455 cordite only.
Don't use black powder in this because you'll just foul the gun up.
And there is a Webley & Scott little winged bullet logo down there.
When the safety is engaged, we have a little line here that says that it is safe when it's on.
When the safety is disengaged, there's nothing and you just have to know that you're ready to shoot.
The serial number is located here on the side of the frame.
This is 1004, these did start at serial number 1, so this isn't like one of the very, very first ones.
So lastly, it's a little hard to see, but up on top of the barrel here
we have a marking that says "Army & Navy C.S.L.".
And ... the Army & Navy Cooperative was kind of like a commissary type of store.
They had a catalogue and as an officer you could order guns, or various other types of stuff,
through the Army & Navy CSL and have them shipped out to you
in whatever colonial outpost you might be in.
So a lot of Webley-Fosbery sales,
as well as Webley commercial revolver sales, went through the cooperative.
Last, but not least, we have this engraving on the back strap
which identifies the officer who ... owned this particular gun.
This was Captain Norman Fraser of the Cameron Highlanders.
Now we happen to know a bit about Captain Fraser,
but that is the subject for another video.
Right now it's time to take this out to the range,
and see if we can shoot it as well as Captain Fraser could.
[Stay tuned for the shooting footage tomorrow!]
As I'm sure you will have guessed,
these are not exactly easy guns to come across in the US these days.
They are fairly rare and quite expensive.
There were only, like I said, less than ... 5,000 of them made,
and then a lot of those were lost in World War One or were sent overseas.
These were popular, probably more so with
colonial British officers than with ones in the UK itself.
So a lot of them ended up in places like India.
And while they may still exist today, they are not the kind of guns
I can get my hands on here in the United States.
I'd like to give a big thank you to Mike Carrick from Arms Heritage Magazine
for letting me take a look at this revolver and take it out and shoot it.
Definitely check out Arms Heritage if you're looking for
a good print magazine (still!) on interesting historical firearms.
And of course don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and Full30.
Check back in tomorrow or next week for more semi-automatic revolvers.
Thanks for watching.