[ Ethiopian M 1871 Beaumont ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today
we are taking a look at a Dutch Beaumont rifle.
This is actually a rather unusual version of a Beaumont to find for a couple of reasons.
First off, this is an 1871/79 pattern, and it is a single-shot rifle.
That's how virtually all the Beaumonts were originally made,
but it's very difficult to find one in that configuration today,
because ... almost all of them were converted to box magazine feeding.
So we'll talk about that at the end of the video, but that's part of the reason
that I'm really excited to have this one here is because it's still in its single-shot configuration.
The other thing that makes it really neat is that it has this
very cool Lion of Judah stamping on it, which I will also show you in a moment,
which is indicative of ownership by the Kingdom of Ethiopia.
This is in fact a rifle that ... was imported into the US by InterOrdnance / Royal Tiger Imports.
It came out of Ethiopia, and is actually in remarkably good condition.
I did spend a little time cleaning this up,
these rifles were originally ... made and adopted in the white.
When they were converted to magazine feeding, then they were blued,
but this one never was, and so it never was.
And it remains in remarkably good shape for being approximately 150 years old,
and having spent much of its life, probably 120 years of its life, in Ethiopia.
So, let's start with the basics of the rifle itself.
This is the first Dutch breech-loading, metallic-cartridge standard-issue rifle.
The Dutch government started looking for a more modern firearm,
a breech-loading arm, in 1867.
By the beginning of 1868 ... their Inventory and Marine Services had
started trials on a series of various foreign available rifles.
They were looking at the Werndl. They were looking at the Peabody, which is essentially a Martini.
They were looking at the Remington-Kerr. And none of these quite did it.
And the trial started in January, in March of 1868 a new rifle is presented to them
by a Dutch citizen, a gentleman by the name of Edouard de Beaumont, and that is this rifle.
This would of course end up winning the contract.
I should say, the Dutch actually kind of used the Snider [conversion] as a stand-in,
... they didn't really like it.
It had a big downside of being the same bore diameter
as the original muzzle-loading rifles that it was converted from.
And we're talking 17.5mm, which is a massive bullet,
which means it's not going to be going very fast, and it's not ballistically all that great.
They wanted something high velocity and smoothbore for the day.
Anyway, the rifle that Edouard de Beaumont presented to them
has elements of a couple of different designs to it.
It's got elements of the Chassepot. It's got elements, interestingly, of the Mauser-Norris,
which was the first rifle ... presented by the Mauser brothers.
I actually have a video on one of the very first prototype Mauser-Norris rifles.
And if you go take a look at that one after seeing this
you'll definitely see some of those similarities.
And then the third major element to this rifle is an interesting and kind of unique
mainspring system that was invented by a guy named Jean Cloes of Liège, Belgium.
So there was some patent argument, litigation, back and forth about this rifle.
Ultimately Beaumont was an arms dealer, he was a facilitator,
he was the guy who put the deal together.
Cloes, yes, patented and invented the mainspring system that went into the rifle.
So skip forward a little bit, this goes through testing, it does well.
In 1870 King Willem II of ... the Netherlands
formally adopts it as their new standard infantry rifle, and it is the Model of 1871.
Now when they formally adopted it, they then went back to Beaumont and said,
"OK, we like it, we're adopting it, please give us 64,000 of them."
Beaumont is a deal maker, he doesn't have a factory.
So he turns around and he sends an order for 64,000 Beaumont rifles to
one of the big effective, efficient, standard arms manufacturing conglomerates of the day.
He sends it to the Saint-Étienne Arsenal in France.
Well, we're talking 1871 now, the Saint-Étienne Arsenal is
not particularly in a good position to be making rifles for export
thanks to the Franco-Prussian War. That doesn't work out so well.
So Beaumont ends up [giving] his order to ... a consortium of gunsmiths in Suhl in Germany.
They would end up providing about 31,500 rifles to the Dutch government through Beaumont.
... Further production then takes place in ... the Netherlands.
The primary producer was a company called P. Stevens that made about 86,000 of these rifles,
including this particular one, which you'll see in just a moment.
And then there was another producer in the Netherlands by the name of J.F.J. Bar,
who made about 28,000 more of them.
So, let's go ahead and take a closer look at what this rifle is,
and also the interesting markings on it that indicate its Ethiopian heritage.
So here is our basic action: single shot, bolt action.
It has one locking lug which is the root of the bolt handle, very much like a Chassepot.
It cocks on open, as you just saw.
So this is your striker, when it's cocked it's back there, when it's fired it moves forward.
(Re-cock it.) Notice that there is no grasping surface here.
If you have a failure to fire you can't just re-cock the striker,
you have to actually open the bolt handle to do that.
If we open that up we have just a flat loading tray, really nothing going on in there.
Now I mentioned that this is an 1871/79 modification or update.
... There are two main elements of that update.
And one of them is the removal of the original safety mechanism.
So there is no safety on this, it's just a matter of
if you're not ready to fire, well, don't put a cartridge in it.
However the very first 1871 Beaumonts, up until 1878,
were made with sort of a trigger-looking hook right here on this spring,
And ... you could rotate that hook up, and it would lock the bolt
sort of in a half open, half closed position in which it was sealed up from dirt.
So ... you could have a cartridge in there and it would protect it,
but it was impossible to release the striker.
And so that was the safety system, but ... honestly I don't know the exact motivation,
they decided it was unnecessary, or overly complicated,
or had some other problem that I'm not aware of, and they deleted it.
After 1878 new production guns wouldn't have this spring on the receiver at all.
The fact that this is here indicates that this was an earlier production gun
that has been updated to the new pattern.
Now the other modification that was made at that time was a redesign of the rear sight,
because they actually adopted a new version of the cartridge.
So ... the original 1871s fired an 11.3x50mm rimmed cartridge,
and it's a bottlenecked cartridge, relatively high velocity for its day.
It fired a 375 grain bullet at about 1,330 feet per second.
For you Europeans, that's 24.3 grams at about 405 metres per second.
Well in 1878 they designed a new version of the cartridge
that ... had a lighter bullet and fired at higher velocity.
So the new version, they lengthened the case by 2mm, so it became 11.3x52.
And they also changed the profile of the case, they changed the ... shoulder of the cartridge.
That new one, the velocity bumped up about 100 feet per second, it was 1,425 feet per second,
but the bullet weight dropped to 336 grains.
That's 21.8 grams at 435 metres per second.
And that made the gun a ... lot flatter shooting, so they had to redesign the rear sight.
This goes from 150 metres at the very bottom,
out to (when you put it all the way up like this) 1,800.
And it is just a friction-based sight, ... there are no notches, there are no catches,
there's no spring, it's just this outside piece rubbing on this centre bar.
I mentioned that this has indications of being a pre-1878 manufacture rifle.
Well, here's one of them, this is a roundel stamp in the stock
that was put on there when the gun was actually accepted into Dutch military service.
So it has the "W" for King Willem, it is dated 1876.
And it is marked Maastricht, which is the city
where the gun was actually inspected and approved for military service.
If we look back here at the receiver, we can see another Maastricht marking.
This was made by P. Stevens, as I mentioned, of Maastricht.
And we have a date of 1876 on the barrel.
And we also have that really cool Lion of Judah, which is a national emblem of Ethiopia
that can be found on a variety of Ethiopian firearms, most of them much more modern than this.
Like SIG KE-7 ... machine guns can be found with that Lion of Judah marking on them.
So it's a really well-stamped mark, this isn't some crude field armourer marking.
And this stamp was uniform on all of the examples of these rifles that I saw.
Really the only other marking of note is the serial number, right there on top of the receiver.
These were done in batches of a thousand guns with letter prefixes, so this is K 864.
And then lots of the other parts are also serialised, including both pieces of the bolt.
You'll notice on this one the bolt head is mismatched,
so this had the bolt head replaced at some point.
Taking a quick glance down the rest of the barrel,
we have a single barrel band with a bottom-mounted sling swivel.
And then we have a nose cap out at the front.
This is the correct Beaumont cleaning rod.
Up until 1875 they had a slot in them, after 1875 they were solid.
And they are also serialised, and this one unfortunately has a mismatched cleaning rod.
But the cleaning rods are actually kind of unusual to find at all,
so it's nice that this one actually has one.
Now, what makes the Beaumont mechanically interesting is its mainspring.
So let's go ahead and take this apart.
First step is to remove the bolt head.
This is a fairly common thing in the first generation black-powder military cartridge rifles,
where you had a screw that held the bolt and bolt head together.
The ... Chassepot and Gras are like that, the Mauser 1871 is like that, the Beaumont is like that.
So there's our bolt head, and I can just pull the rest of the bolt assembly out.
There's that. This, by the way, has our extractor.
The extractor is dovetailed into the bolt head, and it runs in that track right there.
So the bolt head never rotates, it just sits there and runs back and forth.
We've got a good hefty firing pin there.
You can see there the single sear notch on the back of the striker, right there.
And we have a sear right there in the back of the receiver.
So that's what actually does the firing.
And then we have a screw in the bolt handle, so I can take that out.
What's cool here is the Beaumont bolt has a V-spring in it to run the firing pin.
The front of the bolt is a separate piece there.
There is the V-spring that powers ... the firing pin.
This whole thing is one solid assembly.
If you look up close, there's a semi-circular cutout there,
that sits
right here around the circumference of the firing pin behind this collar.
And when the gun is cocked this V-spring gets compressed,
and when it's released that leg of the V-spring kicks forward,
pushes the firing pin forward with it, and fires the rifle.
The bolt assembly here is open to hold it, so it's going to go in basically like that.
Notice that the second piece of the bolt handle has this little wedge,
so that I can
put that wedge right in there to help in reassembling the rifle,
and compressing that spring back down.
So this is rather unusual in that it is a bolt action rifle with no coil springs in it anywhere.
Now that ... has a couple of downsides to it.
A bunch of countries tested the Beaumont and decided not to adopt it
because they were concerned that the V-spring was potentially fragile
or would lose some of its strength over time.
It was a system that was used by a couple of other countries,
most notably the Japanese Muratas have a bolt system just like this.
(Put the bolt head in there as well.)
The other downside to it is the Dutch actually could not make
a bent bolt [handle] cavalry carbine version of the Beaumont,
because you can't bend this bolt handle down because you've got a spring in it.
So instead the Dutch actually purchased Remington rolling block carbines for their cavalry,
and relegated this to just the infantry.
Now I want to talk about this rifle's use in Ethiopia as well as in the Netherlands.
So we'll start with the Netherlands.
... This is the 1879 pattern. In 1888 there was a major upgrade done to most of these rifles.
And that is the conversion to a Vitali box magazine system.
This held 4 cartridges, and it's kind of funky looking, not your typical square magazine.
It's got some interesting curvature to it.
You may recognise Vitali from Vetterli-Vitali,
because the Italians also used Vitali's patented magazine system
to convert their single-shot Vetterlis into repeating rifles.
So you have the Beaumont and the Vetterli,
and then you have the Beaumont-Vitali and the Vetterli-Vitali.
The Italians would ... continue on further
to convert their Vetterli-Vitalis into Vetterli Carcanos in 1915.
The Dutch did no such thing, ... there was no further upgrade of these after 1888.
Anyway, that's what happened to them in the Netherlands.
Now, as far as this rifle ending up in Ethiopia, we know that this particular example,
and by extension all of the ones that went to Ethiopia, were Dutch surplus guns
because they have that ... stamp in the stock
that indicates that they were accepted into Dutch military service.
However, they were sent down there prior to, or in lieu of, any conversion to Vitali box magazines.
And it appears that because of the quality and the uniform nature of that Lion of Judah stamp,
this almost certainly was a deal that was done by a professional arms dealer.
In probably Belgium would be my guess, possibly in the Netherlands,
but a lot of this sort of business took place in Belgium.
This is probably a dealer who bought the guns surplus from the Dutch Army,
and then resold them to any client that he could find, in this case Ethiopia.
Menelik in particular in Ethiopia.
Now I found a totally unsourced, and thus totally unsubstantiated, reference
to a major purchase of arms by Ethiopia right after the Battle of Adwa, which was 1896,
specifically referencing both ... obsolete at that point arms, as well as modern arms.
And what that in theory should reference would be the "modern arms"
being smokeless powder things, probably Mausers and Mannlichers.
The antique obsolete guns would have been the single-shot black powder type rifles like this.
So there's no specific indication that this was sold to Ethiopia specifically in 1896 or 1897,
but that seems to be the implication.
And it would certainly fit with all the rest of the context
surrounding Ethiopia and surrounding these guns.
That would certainly be a period when these rifles would be on their way out of the Dutch military.
In the 1890s the Dutch military would adopt
a smokeless-powder, turn-bolt Mannlicher rifle instead.
So that's when they started getting rid of Beaumonts.
A little other contextual information, the ... 1871 pattern Beaumont like this
was never actually used in a major European conflict.
The Dutch didn't actually use it in any war themselves.
They did use some Beaumonts, there were 1873 pattern Beaumonts
that are slightly different that we'll cover on another day,
that were used in Dutch colonial service
in the ... Dutch East Indies, those saw combat use, but these never did.
The Dutch didn't find themselves in a war during their
... period of being armed with 1871/79 Beaumonts.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.