Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian McCollum, and today we are going to take a look at
the first repeating rifle formally adopted by the British Empire.
This is Magazine Rifle Mark I. It would later become
retroactively renamed to the Lee-Metford Mark I,
named after the designers of its two key components,
its Metford barrel and its Lee action and magazine.
However, when it was first adopted just Magazine Rifle.
So the British of course had been armed with the Martini-Henry,
a single-shot, falling-block rifle.
A very stout and sturdy rifle, it was dependable, it was well liked.
And they were in the process of adopting a new version of it in a slightly smaller calibre,
.402 calibre instead of .455,
and with, not quite a magazine, but with a hopper of readily available ammunition on the side of the gun.
And this was going to be the Enfield-Martini rifle.
However, in 1883 the British government set up a Small Arms Committee to look into
the question of whether we actually need a repeating magazine rifle instead.
And it's interesting, they got a variety of responses from different officers in different service branches.
The Navy tended to be particularly interested in a repeating rifle.
Some elements of the Army much less so. There were some comments that came back to the effect of,
"The Martini-Henry is the best rifle ever, and why would we need anything else?
And by the way, we hear that the German Mauser is not a very good gun anyway."
So, that guy obviously would be proven well and truly wrong.
At any rate, the committee comes to the conclusion that, yes, they do need a magazine rifle.
And in the next couple of years it had more than 40 different designs submitted to it.
Some of them pretty good, some of them not so great.
Ultimately by about 1886 they'd narrowed the field down to just three,
three guns that had actually passed all the basic endurance and function tests.
And those three were actually two different Lee rifles,
so James Lee developed the box magazine, first marketed by Remington in the United States,
and he also developed the bolt action system that this rifle would use.
Of the three guns the British were actually testing out,
one was a Lee kind of like this with a detachable box magazine,
one was a Lee with a Bethel Burton magazine which is basically a hopper magazine on the side,
and one was the Owen Jones rifle.
Owen Jones was an American inventor, and what he designed was kind of like an upgraded Martini-Henry.
It was a falling block rifle that had a hopper magazine on it.
And remarkably it actually did well enough in preliminary testing to get into this final phase of testing.
There was certainly some prejudice working in its favour because it was an adaptation of the Martini-Henry system.
So you had a little bit of that, "Well, we can already make some of the parts and it'll be cheaper."
And you had a lot of,
"Well, we like the Martini-Henry, and now we can have a magazine rifle that is a Martini-Henry. What could go wrong?"
So 1886, actually, this comes down to a contest between the Lee-Burton hopper magazine and the Owen Jones.
And the Owen Jones rifle is removed from competition.
I should say at this point by the way, the Lee ... magazine rifles are being ... purchased directly
from Remington and they're in .43 Spanish calibre,
while the Owen Jones and the Lee-Burtons are in .402 calibre,
which is what the British think they're going to adopt because that will fit
with the new Enfield-Martini rifles as a territorial and reserve weapon.
This all kind of comes to a little bit of a screeching halt because smokeless powder gets invented.
And in 1887 the Small Arms Committee takes a kind of a side track,
and they start looking at this basically .30 calibre Swiss cartridge developed by Colonel Rubin in Switzerland.
And they do some quick testing and they discover, "You know what?
This high-velocity .30 calibre small-bore cartridge is actually kind of better in all ways than our .402.
The ammunition weighs a lot less, it has a flatter shooting trajectory,
it actually has better penetration.
We kind of actually have to go with this new cartridge."
And ... that's the immediate thing that leads to the development of the .303 cartridge.
Which is by the way the end of the Enfield-Martini. Because if you're adopting a .303 calibre magazine rifle
there's no point in having a .402 calibre Martini as a reserve weapon when ... that's a brand new cartridge as well.
It doesn't make any logistical sense anymore, and that gun just kind of, poof,
goes away in the wake of this decision to adopt a .30 calibre cartridge.
They would end up converting Martinis to .303, but that's kind of a separate deal.
Anyway, once they made the decision on this small-bore cartridge,
they're left with just a Lee action. And they have basically one final set of trials
to determine whether they want the Bethel Burton side-mounted hopper magazine,
or the Lee ... detachable underside box magazine.
They build a couple hundred trials rifles of both types, send them out, and the box magazine wins.
Now, we're used to thinking of the Lee-Enfield as a 10 round box magazine,
at this stage this was actually an 8 round magazine.
The early trials rifles in .43 Spanish held 5 rounds,
and once ... they changed up to what would become .303 this magazine was capable of holding 8.
And hey, even better, the ammo is lighter, you get to carry more of it in the gun. Excellent.
So in 1888 they formally approve the Lee Magazine Rifle,
and start ... building pre-production guns, sending them out for troop trials.
And they send these things out to basically all corners of the British Empire.
They go to Egypt, they go to India, they go to Ireland, they go to Canada.
They ... had a pretty good empire in terms of small arms testing,
because they get to send some to the wintry north, and some to the desert sands,
and some to the jungle in India ...
Anyway, the rifle came back well liked, and in 1889 it was formally adopted.
It had already been basically type adopted in 1888 when they did the field trials, but ...
it's all official and done as of 1889. This is the new service rifle.
So let's take a look at it up close.
So what we have here is a Lee action with a Lee magazine,
and a number of unique features that would go away on later iterations of the gun.
So first off, it's worth noting that there is a full dust cover over the bolt.
We have a rather unique style of bolt head on the very first pattern here.
There is no stripper clip guide, ... or as the British would say, no charger guide.
This predates the use of the stripper clip.
In order to reload the magazine you had to do so either through the top here,
or take the magazine out.
These rifles originally had a chain connecting the magazine to the action.
The chain is missing on this particular one.
But if you look at this up close it's not quite the same,
it's a little narrower than the Lee-Enfield magazines we're familiar with today.
For comparison's sake here is our early Lee-Metford magazine, and here is a later SMLE magazine.
This was redesigned and able to accept 10 rounds, and so you can see a very clear difference in the follower.
The 10 round version was actually a double feed magazine, where the 8 round version
the rounds compressed into a single presentation here at the top.
So the ... Lee-Metford magazine is a little bit narrower,
and has a number of slightly different ... profile areas to it.
Now the magazine release lever here just in front of the trigger
will remain functionally identical for the life of the entire Lee-Enfield series,
all the way until after World War Two.
We have a magazine cut off, which was a fundamental component of the design for the British.
This allowed for a number of things. That allowed drill practice to be conducted to keep the rifle unloaded.
You could have a loaded magazine, and the magazine cut off would prevent
a round from being chambered during drill practice.
It also allowed the magazine to be kept loaded in case of emergency,
and volley fire to be done one round at a time, single loading on top of the magazine cut off.
So there is a little divot cut out in the stock here
so you can get your finger or thumb in to manipulate that magazine cut off.
These rifles would start the British ... pattern of marking
rifle dates and designations and everything on this receiver socket back here.
This is actually an integral part of the receiver that the buttstock bolts into.
So this one was made at Enfield, and we have a date there of 1889, which is the first year of serial production.
These were made at two different factories, both Enfield and Sparkbrook.
Now there will also be a roundel in the buttstock.
At some point in this rifle's life it was actually given a replacement buttstock,
so the roundel here and the markings are not relevant to this particular rifle.
For what it's worth the buttstock came off of a slightly differently dated rifle
... I believe that's an 1896 rifle made at Birmingham, and it was a Mark I* rifle.
That two indicates that ... the rifle the buttstock was on was at some point downgraded to a second class arm.
Most likely when the Mark II rifles were adopted, this kind of went back a step.
Then we also have a disc here that identifies the unit, and date of issuance.
But that of course isn't relevant to the rifle we have.
There are a couple aspects of this rifle that are incredibly rare to find.
And one of them is the safety.
This looks kind of just like the safety that you would find on basically all later patterns of the Enfield.
However, the very first Lee-Metfords had this safety, but it was occasionally possible for it to get bumped on.
And they decided that the safety was more of a liability than a help,
and the safeties were actually removed from the rifles, and removed from virtually all intact examples.
So finding a Mark I Lee-Metford or Mark I Magazine Rifle with the intact safety is very rare today.
So it's pretty cool to see it there. The shape is slightly different than you will see on later iterations of the Enfield.
While we're here, we'll point out that this is the rear volley sight.
(There's ... perhaps an issue with the safety right there.)
To use the volley sight you lift it up, and then this acts as your rear aperture.
And then this little pin on the front disc volley sight, that little pin acts as your front sight.
So you move this until the pointer is at the range that you want,
and on these the volley sights go from 1,800 out to 3,500 yards,
which is really, really long.
So, of course your rear sight is lifted up and your front sight is lifted down,
and that causes the rifle to sit at a very steep angle.
Now the regular sights are another ... element that's very difficult to find in the actual original configuration.
If you look at this, you'll notice that the sight has a rather large square notch.
And this was a design of sight called the Lewes sight, named for the officer who ... designed it.
You can see that the regular sight, right here, also has a very large square notch.
The sight is actually pretty darn similar to what the French would adopt in 1916.
But the British did it here much earlier, and they decided they didn't like it.
So the idea is you have a very large square front sight with a small notch cut in it,
and that notch is your precision aiming point.
You actually put your target inside that notch, and line the whole block up inside the rear sight.
In theory, ... this allows for quicker snap shooting, and it still gives you a nice precise alignment.
The British didn't like it, and so these were actually removed pretty darn quickly from the Lee-Metford rifles.
And once again, finding an intact, original Lewes sight is very rare.
The rear leaf sight here is graduated up to 1,900 yards,
and this is another interesting element that changed relatively quickly once again.
Because when these rifles were adopted the British hadn't adopted a smokeless
(or what they would eventually get as cordite, a specific type of smokeless powder),
but the British hadn't adopted a smokeless powder cartridge.
When these first were adopted they were still using a black powder cartridge, and so
they graduated the sights based on what they expected the smokeless version to be.
Because they knew it was coming, it was in development, it just wasn't quite ready yet,
and they didn't want to delay production of the rifles or adoption of the rifles to wait on this ammunition.
And it turns out they got the smokeless powder velocity a little bit wrong,
so they would have to go back later and re-calibrate the sights.
So ... if you find one that has a Lewes sight, it's almost certainly going to have the original calibrations.
But that's another rare aspect to a very early Mark I Lee-Metford.
Now one other series of changes that happened quickly enough that we can see
... the final version even here on such an early rifle, is the design of the rear handguard.
This originally had a squared off front ... edge.
And they discovered once the rifles got into the field that the handguards were cracking quite a lot.
And so what they did is actually just made the handguard a little bit thicker,
and then they cut a groove down the middle to ensure that you still had a good line of sight.
And only after they had done that did they realise that the reason the handguards had been cracking
is because they're held on by a little metal tension ring that just clamps them onto the barrel.
And troops were trying to get the handguard off to clean the rifles,
and they didn't have any way to grasp it and so they'd stick like a bayonet or something
underneath the front [of the handguard] to pry it up, and that was causing them to crack.
So the solution that they adopted was to undercut them at a curve like this,
so you can just bring your fingers in here and pop the [handguard] up, and that actually fixed the problem.
So they were able to go back to a lower, thinner [handguard] that they didn't have to cut a sighting notch in.
The other markings we have on here are on the receiver. That's our serial number.
That big number 2 indicates that this rifle, as with its buttstock,
was downgraded to a second class rifle, so second tier of service.
You may notice that the sling configuration here, and the sling itself, are very much like the Martini-Henrys.
There is a stacking, or as the British will call it, a piling swivel here, so that you can hook
several rifles together and stand them up. So you can bivouac without having to lay the rifles on the ground.
The rear sling swivel is attached just forward of the magazine.
So you have a sling for carrying the rifles over the shoulder,
but relatively low, so they're not sticking way up in the air.
Along with the new rifles, the British adopted a new pattern 1888 bayonet.
And this is actually a remarkably short bayonet for the time, the French and the Germans were
kind of going all out on bayonet length. And the British didn't do that,
they adopted something that was really a bit more sensible.
This has a big hollow section in it here so that it can sit over the cleaning rod here and bayonet lug.
That is just going to slide on.
There's your fixed bayonet. Note that we have the white leather frog matches the sling.
All was not exactly perfect with the Magazine Rifle Mark I.
In fact there were a lot of little changes that would start to be made,
and ultimately we would end up with a Mark I* with a few modifications.
And then there would be a Mark II, and then there would be a Mark II*, all of this long Lee rifle.
So, we will have a separate video going into all of the changes that were made.
I thought it was worth taking a look at this particular example, because it is a very rare example of
a Mark 1 Lee-Metford all in its original early configuration before they started making all of the changes.
And, by the way, British small arms development is, to be frank, a total nightmare
of minute little changes, and designation changes, and then conversion versions,
to take the old stuff and make it like the new stuff.
So this is clean and pure and simple, Mark I Lee-Metford.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, a very cool thing to take a look at.
Stick around and we will look at where this rifle went.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]