Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at RIA
taking a look at a Webley-Kaufman (or "Kaufman") revolver.
This is from that period in the 1880s when Webley was
attempting to develop its revolver into what would eventually
become a ubiquitous military standard pattern gun.
But at this time while these were being privately
purchased by British officers, who did that sort of thing,
the official standard issue revolver of the British military was the Enfield Mark I or Mark II,
depending on exactly what date.
And the Webley company had a lot of work to go through to try and meet that standard.
Now the Enfield was a revolver that, let's say, gave Webley plenty of opportunity to provide a better product.
But Webley would have to work at it to make that happen.
Now this particular model comes into existence in 1882,
and it's based on a patent by a guy named Michael Kaufman
(or Kaufman, I'm not sure exactly what his pronunciation was),
who joined the Webley company in 1878, and would work for them until 1881.
And in particular he patented a substantial improvement to the lockwork in the revolver.
He was able to eliminate five parts out of the trigger mechanism,
and give it a better trigger press in the process.
Keep in mind of course Webley, at this point being not a standard issue military arm,
has to appeal to, say, competitive target shooters as well as military personnel.
Those two groups having a lot of overlap.
And a better trigger pull was a really good selling point for the revolver.
At the same time Webley was also ... continuously and quickly improving methods for locking the gun together.
This is a top-break revolver, and a lot of its strength is dependent on
how good of a system you can put together to keep that gun locked so that it doesn't pop open when it fires.
So, this is a third pattern of Webley-Kaufman, which was also known as a Webley Improved Government Model.
Don't let that confuse you, it wasn't actually purchased by the government, but that's what they called it.
Anyway, let me show you exactly what they did to this, because this is a very small production model
that has a very significant improvement in the overall Webley design.
I will actually start here by pointing out that this is in fact
a cased revolver with a nice velvet case to it there.
The gun was purchased from E.M. Reilly and Company.
It says gun manufacturers. Mmm, yeah. They didn't actually manufacture this,
but they did sell guns and they probably worked on them.
It's interesting that the case is marked 502 New Oxford Street, London,
because the gun is also marked E.M. Reilly & Co. But on the gun the address is 277 Oxford Street, London.
Anyway, there's not much of the original accoutrements left.
Although interestingly, this does come with a matching serial numbered spare cylinder.
So you originally would have had probably some tools, and a space for some cartridges in the case.
But to look at the gun specifically, what we see here,
what was introduced in this third pattern of Webley-Kaufman ... was this really iconic stirrup latch.
So if you think about the military pattern Webleys, you think of this latch.
And that's how you open the gun, push that back
and it allows these two pieces to separate when the lever is forward.
And it's powered by a little V spring right there on that side of the ... frame.
This is a fundamental aspect of the Webley revolver, and that first appeared on this pattern of gun.
So before this, the previous major pattern of the Webley was what's called the Webley-Pryse.
And on it, the top here is held together by a pair of long levers.
And you push both levers in down at the bottom, and there are two little pins
that run in and out right up here to lock the two parts of the frame together.
Now the first and second pattern Webley-Kaufmans would have
increasingly less bad systems.
That Webley-Pryse was OK, but it was liable to wear, and not nearly as strong as this system.
So they improved it iteratively a couple of times before they finally got to this system.
Now, this interestingly is actually not a patent from Kaufman himself,
this is Webley's own, Henry Webley's patent.
What we have for Kaufman is the lockwork internally primarily,
which you can't see through the outside of the gun.
One of the interesting aspects here is that all of the Kaufman guns are marked with this "MK"
(there we go), MK in a triangle and a number.
And that is a number that was used basically to track royalty payments to Kaufman.
He had this patent in his own name and he licenced it to Webley for payment of royalties on it.
And this is just about the very last, it was about 1250 that these marks will disappear from Webley revolvers.
It's also important to point out that this is not the serial number,
and it doesn't bear any direct connection to the serial number.
So obviously as the serial numbers go up the MK numbers tended to also go up,
but there's no direct correlation between them.
One of the other interesting aspects of the Webley-Kaufman is the cylinder release,
which is a spring-loaded pin. It goes in from that side, right there.
Previous versions of the gun had ... like a screw knob,
and you would rotate it 180 degrees and it would unlock the cylinder, and allow you to remove the cylinder.
They replaced that with a spring-loaded pin.
So I push that in, and then I can pull it out.
And you can see what's going on there. There's a cross pin, this, that locks into the cylinder.
And when I push it forward ... this lines up with a couple of cuts and allows this to come right back out.
So the spring-loaded version here was not liable to be accidentally left in the disassembly position,
which you could kind of do with the manually operated one.
However, this would not prove to be strong enough in the field,
and ultimately after the Webley-Kaufmans, Webley himself would patent a much stronger system
that involves basically a sort of a collar on the base of the cylinder stem there.
And that ... combined with the stirrup latch here,
are the two biggest elements, in my mind, of the finalised military pattern Webley revolvers.
And by the way, the actual serial number of the gun is here on the inside.
So this one is Webley serial number 1219,
and Kaufman number 1236.
We do have two other interesting marks on this particular gun.
L6020, the meaning of this is not 100% sure, but it is probably a South African registration number.
Dating to probably 1902, with the "L" standing for Lindenburg.
These revolvers made their way all over the world, and it would not be in any way surprising
to see them show up in British colonies like South Africa.
There is also a smaller "1.SF" down on the left side of the frame,
and nobody that I'm aware of seems to know exactly what that is.
And I'm not in a position to try and figure it out myself, I do not know.
So that's kind of an interesting mystery to this gun.
As I'm sure you will have noticed, this is a nickel-plated example.
That was an option that Webley offered for generally something like 5 shillings extra.
You'd be looking at something like 105 shillings for the gun blued, or 110 shillings for it nickel plated.
And nickel plating, if you could afford it, was a popular option because it made the guns a lot more corrosion resistant.
You could get the gun wet with less risk of it rusting before you had a chance to clean it up.
There were some Webley owners who were dedicated target shooters,
and that's what they purchased the guns for.
And there were some who were military officers, and often the two groups overlapped, but not always.
If we look at the sights on this one, we see a pretty typical round front blade there,
but our rear sight is actually this V notch, very wide V notch, in the locking ... stirrup.
And if you look at the sight picture that that gives you, it is very quick, that is very much a combat style of sight.
Not hugely precise. It'd be a little tricky getting an exact
repeatable sight picture for precision bullseye shooting at long range.
But if you need to line this up and take a shot quickly,
that shallow V notch is going to do a pretty darn good job of getting you mostly on target,
you know, onto a pretty decent target very quickly. So that's an interesting thing to notice.
The Webley models that were intended more for target shooting would often have an adjustable
square or U shaped notch for a rear sight.
Something that was much more effective as a target specific sight, but a lot slower to make use of.
Less than 100 of these third pattern Webley-Kaufmans would be manufactured
before Webley went back to the drawing board a little bit,
and moved on to the Model of 1886 Improved Government Pattern.
One of the primary things they did there is increase the hinge size to make this a fundamentally stronger gun.
Something that they couldn't easily retrofit, so they went back and started a new model designation.
And they would do that a bunch: the 1886 was followed by the 1889, and then the 1891, and you get the idea.
Because this is a commercial project, a commercial revolver at this point,
not limited by a government contract that calls for a very specific pattern,
they were able to continuously update, and iterate, and improve on the design.
And that's what eventually would lead them to a revolver that was durable enough
and high quality enough in all aspects to become something that would be adopted by the British military,
and go on to be a really iconic service firearm.
So, it's very cool to look at the early commercial patterns of these.
I think they're really neat because they have so many variations and different features,
and so many of the guns were private purchased by officers who could
choose between all sorts of different features.
And so you get this gun by gun impression of what different people
thought would be the best configuration for a service revolver.
And on top of that, of course, you have things like retailer marks,
and military inventory marks on them as well. So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
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