Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are going to take a look
at the carbine versions of the Lee-Metford
and Lee-Enfield. The short version of the long rifle.
This is that period basically right up through the Boer War
where the British were issuing, like most people did, a long rifle for the infantry,
and a short carbine for the cavalry and the other auxiliary services.
The idea being the infantry need a longer rifle so that, first off, they can make a better use of a long bayonet
for hand to hand defence and fighting.
And so that they have a long rifle that allows them to fire safely in multiple ranks.
You don't want a short barrel for the third rank,
who are going to end up inevitably shooting the first rank in the back of the head.
So, in the aftermath of the Boer War the British would adopt a universal short rifle, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Now, when they first adopt the Lee-Metford, they start with a long rifle.
And they do some initial experimentation with carbines, but it doesn't go anywhere right away.
And part of this is the fact that they were doing a lot of
... continuous development on the Lee-Metford right off the bat.
There were a bunch of changes that they made, they were still experimenting with the cartridge.
When the Lee-Metford long rifle was introduced they were still issuing a black powder cartridge for it,
despite the fact that they had calibrated the sights for smokeless.
They just don't quite have the smokeless powder, the cordite cartridge, ready yet.
So they were doing that, and basically
the carbines are going to sit and wait for about 5 years before they get introduced,
so that they can work out some of these growing pains with the new system.
So, they start doing some carbine experiments around 1893.
In 1894 they formally ... accept this system, and it goes into production in 1895.
Now, this was specifically a cavalry carbine.
In most countries you would have a carbine for the cavalry and the artillery
and maybe the engineers as well. Everyone who had a primary role that wasn't just infantry.
In the case of the British, however, specifically the engineers and the artillery
were going to get converted Martini-Henry rifles. They were going to get .303 Martinis instead.
So that left the carbine only for the cavalry.
And so they were able to adapt the carbine features specifically for cavalry use.
So, let me show you what they did there.
So perhaps the most important general factor for a cavalry carbine is that it has to be handy and smooth.
Because this carbine is going to be stowed in what was called a cavalry bucket
on the ... side of the saddle, on the side of the horse.
And a trooper had to be able to draw the carbine quickly and smoothly and without it snagging on anything.
And he had to be able to dump the gun back into that scabbard easily, again without it snagging on anything.
So that leads to a form factor typically something like this
on cavalry carbines, and obviously in this case as well.
Where we have a stock coming all the way out to the nose, and a big solid nose cap.
We have built-in sight protector ears on the [front] sight.
And you'll notice these are nicely rounded so that this ... is less likely to catch on the edge of a cavalry scabbard.
Now these do have a ... clearing rod for knocking out a stuck case,
just as the early Metford rifles did.
This is threaded in place, so you can unscrew it and then the rod comes out.
So a short little rod, you can however thread multiple rods together,
so you and your buddies can team up and have a full-length [clearing] rod.
One of the notable features of the early Lee rifles in British service was the use of long range volley sights.
Those were not put on the cavalry carbines. They did consider it at first, but someone convinced them
that they were going to add some unnecessary weight and bulk and snagging hazards.
And frankly it's unlikely that the infantry are going to do a whole lot of 3,000 yard volley fire,
it's very unlikely the cavalry will doing that either.
So instead we just have a standard leaf sight there, this is calibrated out to 2,000 yards.
And these were originally calibrated for cordite smokeless ammunition.
Because by the time these were in service the black powder ammunition was gone,
and they had fully and properly developed the cordite ammunition.
Now, if we take a look at the action, we have the same basic system as the Lee-Metford rifles.
The bolt handle is swept forward a bit and the handle itself, the knob here at the end,
is flattened on the top to make it a little bit more slick sided.
We still have a dust cover over the whole action.
There is no charger or stripper clip guide because we are still
predating the ... adoption of those for the Lee system.
We do have a magazine cut off here, so just like the infantry
you can use this to effect ... well-disciplined volley fire, single loading,
you can keep the magazine loaded and in reserve for an emergency.
Now this magazine is a bit shorter than a standard rifle magazine, these only hold 6 rounds.
And that was again done to keep the gun handy and basically to have smooth lines to it.
We do have a little link here that connects the magazine to the rifle, so that you can't lose it.
That link kind of slides up into the trigger guard here when you lock the magazine in place.
Now when the carbines were developed,
the contemporary Lee-Metford rifles did not have any sort of manual safety.
They were originally developed with one here on the side, but that was removed
and that was not in service in 1894/1895 when these carbines were developed and went into production.
However, the cavalry were much more concerned about having
a manual safety on their guns than the infantry. They wanted something.
And so this was developed as a low profile, effective, very convenient safety for the cavalry carbines.
So ... you have a lever on the striker itself.
... Up is the safe position. And when that snaps down, then the action can fire.
This would go on to be adopted into the next pattern of ... early Lee-Enfield rifles.
So the ... bolt safety here was developed for the carbines,
and would then be applied afterwards to rifles.
We have a really cool feature here.
As originally developed these carbines were issued with basically a single-point bandoleer-style sling.
Not so much for carrying the rifle, but for ensuring that a cavalryman didn't drop his rifle and lose it.
This is the equivalent really of a lanyard on a pistol.
You'd wear a big sash that had a big snap hook on it,
and you could snap that hook into this D-ring on the side of the rifle.
Now, there were two sling attachments that were put on these in the first place.
One was the D-ring here on the left, the other was this
(ignore this little guy, sorry about that),
the other was this sling bar on the right side of the stock.
And they were both used with the same sling.
However, in 1896 a change order came down that this
was no longer considered useful or necessary or it got in the way too much,
and so these were ordered to be removed.
And it's really quite rare to find original Metford carbines that still have this D-ring.
So here's a second example, and this is what's much more common to encounter.
There was originally a pin in here that held the D-ring in place, and the order was
cut the thing off. These were supposed to be lacquered over to protect the finish.
But cut it off, grind it flat, and then lacquer it up.
And so this is the remnants of a D-ring that was removed in 1896.
You'll notice we have Enfield and a production date, this one is ... 1895, and a Mark I gun there.
You'll notice that normally that would be marked kind of in the middle on a regular Lee rifle.
They moved that up because the D-ring got in the way of the original marking position.
Now that's not the only thing that changed in 1896,
they also decided to add this leather sight protector to all of the guns.
You might notice that this looks a little bit like
totally full of sharp edges and square corners and that sort of thing,
for ... a gun that's supposed to be easy to drop into a scabbard.
... That is true, in addition to catching on things, it was also prone to damage, dirt, that sort of thing.
And so it makes sense to add this, just a simple contoured leather cover.
There are two screws that were added into the side of the stock.
And you can actually see the tan line here from having the cover over
when the rifle has been exposed to sunlight over the last 120 odd years.
But these two screws, one of them is fixed and holds the cover on,
and the other one is set a bit higher up,
and there is a larger hole in the cover that allows you to snap it on and off.
So, these became standard in 1896.
Now if that's not quite enough changes for you for a single year, we do in fact have one more.
That is in 1896 the Lee-Enfield carbine Mark I was adopted to replace the Lee-Metford carbine Mark I.
So the Enfield carbines are actually marked with a full abbreviation, "LEC" for Lee-Enfield Carbine, Mark I,
along with the Royal crest, the manufacture, they're all made at Enfield.
And the date of production, so this is an 1898 production carbine.
Just as a refresher for you here, the original Lee-Metford carbines
didn't have any sort of abbreviation because they were the first of their type,
so they were simply marked "I", along with a Royal crest, manufacturer, and date.
The difference here between Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield was in the pattern of the rifling.
Metford rifling is basically what we would consider today to be polygonal rifling.
Instead of having square cut lands and grooves in the barrel,
it has rounded lands and grooves, they're basically radiused.
If you look at the bore of a Lee-Metford, it looks like it's shot out.
It's not actually, it was just made with ... consider it smooth rifling.
And what they discovered is while that had worked well with the original black powder ammunition,
it wore excessively quickly with the new cordite ammunition.
And some of that may actually have been due to the ... early chemical composition of the cordite they were using,
because polygonal rifling was used later, the Japanese would use it in the Arisaka,
without seeing the same sort of heavy wear.
The Japanese weren't using cordite, that may have been more of the issue.
At any rate, the British replaced this with Enfield rifling, which is much more traditional looking rifling.
And so on these guns, if you see an "E" stamp that indicates that they are Enfield rifling.
Other than that, the carbine remained basically the same.
We still have the same forward swooped, flattened bolt handle. The same safety.
Still have a 6 round - sort of detachable, it's a detachable magazine that is chained to the gun.
Now they did get rid of the ... sling bar in the stock.
These were no longer intended to be used with one of those hook slings.
There were some patterns of basically sling that wrapped around
the wrist of the gun, as well as the front handguard.
But the original hook single-point slings were no longer being used.
There were equipped with the same sort of leather sight covers,
attached in the same way as on the Metfords.
And they still have the same nose cap configuration, sight protector wings, cleaning rod, etc.
We have one last pattern of Lee-Enfield carbine to look at here, and that is the Mark I*.
And this was introduced in 1899, and it ... brings really only one substantial change,
and that was removal of the cleaning rod.
They were removing the cleaning rods from the Lee-Enfield rifles at the same time.
They found that they tended to rattle, they could fall out,
they ... replaced the cleaning system with one of a pull-through instead of this cleaning rod.
So, in addition to getting rid of them on the rifles, they got rid of them on the carbines.
So there is a new nose cap that no longer has a provision for a cleaning rod in it.
And you can definitely see how this would in fact be a more convenient nose cap to deal with on the ... carbine
than one like this if you're trying to dump the thing quickly into a scabbard.
It's pretty hard to read here, but we do also have a roundel on the stock.
It says Enfield on the bottom, and it says I* indicating that this was a Mark I* Enfield carbine.
In total they made just under 60,000 of these carbines, of all three models put together. ...
And they are roughly split, so like 18,700 of the Lee-Metford carbines,
about ... 14,000 of the Lee-Enfield Mark Is,
and then about 26,650 of the Lee-Enfield Mark I* carbines.
And these would all be produced by ... the very beginning of the 1900s.
Because in 1902 the British would adopt the SMLE.
So, where this was ... in this case the MLM, the Magazine Lee-Metford,
the MLE was of course the Magazine Lee-Enfield,
and then the universal short rifle was the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield, or SMLE.
And the whole purpose there was to consolidate between the
two different branches of service and give everybody the same rifle.
Because what they realised was ... well, first off,
horses (they didn't realise this yet) but horses were kind of going out of favour,
and were going to be used less on the modern battlefield.
But the long rifles were frankly too long and too cumbersome,
and the volley firing was becoming less important.
The cavalry carbines were a little too short and kicked a lot.
And it made sense to just give everyone an intermediate [rifle] that balanced well,
had a good muzzle velocity, but wasn't overly bulky.
And so the SMLEs would replace both the long rifles and these carbines
in actual service use after the Boer War.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
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