Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at two examples,
kind of a regular gun and a very fancy cased gun, two examples of the Silver & Fletcher "Expert".
And this is a, like, this is basically an 1884 extra-tactical modification
to increase the speed of the gun handling on your Webley New Model RIC revolver.
This sort of thing, you know developing those special extra "tacticool" features for firearms.
This is nothing new. This has been going on since, well, 1884.
So the actual function of this is to allow you to quickly eject cases from the revolver,
instead of having to use that glacially slow manually operated ejector rod.
So, I'll show you exactly how that works in just a moment.
But to start with I do want to mention that this was patented by two guys, Hugh Silver and Walter Fletcher,
in the UK in 1884. And then Webley integrated their patent into its guns.
So what you see here are a couple of guns that are only marked Silver & Fletcher, but they're actually Webley production revolvers.
I'm gonna demonstrate this on the basic version of the gun here instead of the really fancy one. We'll start with the markings.
This is S.W. Silver and Company, 22 Old Bond Street [and] Cornhill, London.
And on the barrel is the full proper name, Silver & Fletcher's Patent
"The Expert". And see, just like today, you're not really an expert unless the gun actually says expert on it.
Now we have some typical Webley markings here on the left side. That .450 is the calibre.
And then this is the serial number, Webley's serial number. You'll find these guns mostly in the 33,000 to 36,000 range.
There probably will be some exceptions, but that's where the bulk of them were actually produced.
On the other side we're going to see a little bit more crudely stamped second serial number, and that is the Silver & Fletcher number.
So this is number 303 of probably about 350 manufactured.
Nowhere on here will you see a Webley marking. It is part of the licencing agreement for this extra system
was that the guns will only be marked with Silver & Fletcher's information.
Alright, a lot of people when they see these guns, or pictures of them,
they they kind of focus on this little doodle on the hammer.
And that's important, but it's secondary, that's not the main thing going on here.
So there are two ways that you can use this system,
and I'll give you the practical one first and then the less practical one second.
The practical version is it's to quickly eject six empty cases.
So let's say you've gone through and you fired all the ammo, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Now the cylinder is full of empty cases. ... Like with a normal Webley RIC, to unload it
you're going to open the loading gate, and you're going to pull the ejector lever out,
and flip it over to here, and then you have to line up the cylinder and there we go, there's one empty case,
(and then I need to cock the hammer, I don't know, something here),
we're gonna eject the next empty case. OK, that's really glacially slow.
So what Silver & Fletcher came up with is instead you open the loading gate
and then you've got this extra lever on the back of the gun,
and the very edge of the cylinder has been milled off
so that the edge of the rim of the cartridge is going to be accessible now.
So this lever on top is spring-loaded, and when I cock the hammer this is now going to push inward.
So that's spring-loaded.
And the inside of this has a little ridge on it ... right at that open bit of the chamber.
So what happens now is when I cycle the action
(if I can do this without getting my thumb in the way of the camera),
I'm going to drop the hammer, and then when I re-cock the hammer
the next ... empty case is going to line up. ... The rim is actually going to be over the top of this little wedge,
little bar, on the lever. And when I drop the hammer this pops
back out that way,
like that.
And because there's a lot of force on the hammer when it drops so it can properly fire a cartridge when there's live ammo,
there's enough force for this to give the empty case a nice little fling out the back of the cylinder.
And so basically the idea is it's kind of like one step beyond an Abadie loading gate.
Instead of pulling the trigger and then running your ejector rod, you just pull the trigger six times,
and every time you do it flings one of the cases out. So you don't have to mess with the rod at all.
Just, you know, open the loading gate and go to town on the trigger. Now that is where this thing comes into play.
The problem you might run into is what if you've accidentally only fired five rounds out of six?
You don't want to be pointing the gun in some random direction
whaling away on the trigger because you think you're just unloading it, only to have ... it hit a live round and fire.
So the safety mechanism for that is to rotate this about 45 degrees, and what it actually does is retract the firing pin.
So in this state if you look through there, you can see through the cylinder gap and
no firing pin. When I drop this down there's the firing pin.
Goes far enough forward to hit a cartridge and detonate it.
Back here, doesn't matter if you have a live cartridge in there, dropping ... the hammer on it isn't going to actually fire a round.
So when you go to unload this using your, you know, your fancy Silver & Fletcher mechanism,
you engage the safety on the hammer, and then it's flawless. Then you don't have to worry about discharging a round.
Now the other hypothetical option, and this is actually mentioned in the patent,
is you can just leave the loading gate open while you're actually firing.
It's a little bit awkward because you got this kind of potentially flimsy thing sticking out here,
but if you do that every time you fire it's going to throw the empty case out after you shoot.
So like auto-ejecting, and by the time you're out of ammo, well, the guns already empty for you, you can just reload it right here.
You know, ... is that really practical? Is that really something that people would do?
I don't know, it does sound still a lot to me like the modern tacticool stuff of, you know,
here's something that's maybe sketchy, but maybe it sounds pretty cool.
The idea that cartridges are just going to be flying out of the gun as you're shooting like a semi-auto - except it's 1884,
and there really are no functional semi- autos yet. So, that is your other option.
I will point out, when the loading gate is closed, the loading gate stops this lever from actually doing anything.
So as long as the loading gate's closed, your auto-ejector system isn't going to interfere with normal operation of the gun.
So overall, this thing's actually pretty well designed.
Since we've got it here, we really need to take a look at the fancy version, because this one's really nice.
Comes in a case. Used to have oil, now it has 100 year old dried out remnants of oil.
Then we got this guy.
That is just really kind of pretty. It's kind of too bad they didn't do anything to the barrel, I guess.
But you see what would have originally been a nice deep solid blue on the barrel.
And then this texturing on the cylinder and the receiver.
Worth pointing out we have our Webley serial number here.
33,000 on this one, so right at the bottom end of the typical range.
Because there's some nice embellished texturing up here, they didn't put the Silver & Fletcher number there where they normally do.
Instead it's on the front of the frame here. So this one's number 167.
And even the little pads that they left blank for W.S. Silver & Company of London, they look kind of nice up there.
Same barrel marking, and they went and put the calibre marking on the barrel.
Again because there was already some embellishment on the frame.
Otherwise, this is functionally the same as the standard pattern,
it's the same patent mechanism that they've put in place.
Pop that up,
retract the firing pin, extend the firing pin.
And by the way, just to get even more tacticool,
you know, you think some of these things are modern ideas, but they just aren't.
They have white dots in the front sight to make them both more eye-catching and more visible in low light.
So there's your full sight picture with a focus on the front,
and focus on the back.
And this sort of thing wasn't just for you know commercial wannabe sort of sale, or people who fancy themselves gunfighters.
These were actually purchased in limited but real quantities by both the London Metropolitan Police and also the Royal Irish Constabulary.
So the guys whose job really did involve carrying pistols, they saw some merit in these ideas as well.
As with fancy tacticool gadgetry today that is relatively expensive, these didn't sell all that well back in the 1880s.
From the numbers I've seen, probably about 350 of them were made.
So of course Silver & Fletcher never made a gun strictly of their own, these were integrated into Webley production guns.
It's really cool to have examples of two different ones here because they are so scarce.
One just standard production version and one nice embellished cased version. That thing's,
frankly, I really like the patterning on that cylinder and frame. Some of this stuff just appeals to me a little more than others.
Anyway, if you are interested in either of these, of course they are both in the most recent Rock Island Auction catalogue.
You can check them out there, see all their high-res pictures, and estimates, and everything else.
Or you can check out their YouTube channel or Instagram pages,
which I have links to both of those down in the description text below.
Thanks for watching.