Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns
that they're going to be selling in their upcoming February of 2017 Regional Auction.
And today we're going to take a look at an Indian rifle.
Now let's just start out by acknowledging that British, and thus Indian,
rifle designations, especially the early ones, are a huge nightmare.
They are a mess, ... they have abbreviations, and stars, and marks.
And everything gets updated, and changed, and reworked, and refitted.
And it can be a real nightmare to try and make sense of.
So that's why I want to take a look at this one, because
we can elucidate one of the specific types and names.
And also share some information that a lot of people might not be aware of.
Now the Indian rifle factory was at Ishapore.
And a lot of people are going to be familiar with the Ishapore Enfield
as ... the 1960s production guns that are actually chambered in 7.62 NATO.
Because in fact India maintained production and use of the SMLE rifle
long past when everyone else had replaced it with other things.
So when the NATO cartridge was adopted India was still using this rifle.
And they tinkered around and realised they could improve the steels that they were using, and
just keep building the thing in 7.62 NATO. And they did, and they are cool rifles,
but that's something we're going to take a look at another day.
Today we have an India Pattern Short Lee-Enfield Mark I**.
So what is that?
Well, the SMLE was first adopted by the British in 1902.
... At that point it was the Short Lee-Enfield Mark I rifle.
And then in 1907 they updated it to the Short Lee-Enfield Mark III rifle.
And to make all of this more confusing, in 1926 they went back
and retroactively changed the designation to "Rifle, Number 1".
So it became the Number 1 Mark I and the Number 1 Mark III.
When these were first introduced they had a feature that
you very rarely see today, which is the charging guide.
So where we are used to seeing a stripper clip guide across the back of the receiver,
easy, solid, familiar,
the first ones, the Mark I SMLEs, actually had a two-part charger guide.
The left side was fixed to the receiver,
but the right side was actually attached to the bolt head.
So when you had the bolt closed there was no stripper clip guide.
And only when the bolt was all the way open
did you actually have the two pieces line up where you could use a stripper clip.
Which is fine, ... when the bolt's closed you can't use a stripper clip anyway.
But that pattern turned out to be a bit fragile and unreliable,
and having tinkered with one myself, I will totally agree it is not optimal.
And so in 1907 the British adopted the Mark III rifle,
which replaced that contraption with a solid charger guide over the receiver.
Now back to India. The Ishapore factory didn't actually open for production until 1905.
So at this point the British had adopted the Number 1 Mark I rifle.
India took a little bit longer getting up into production.
... It's interesting, the Indian Army has always been derided as sort of second-class,
and ... that was true in this time period for sure.
But that's not necessarily the case, and the Indian Army deserves a closer look.
For example, the Indian Army actually adopted smokeless powder
before the mainland English British Army did.
Things are not always exactly what they appear.
And case in point, the Ishapore factory had a shortage of skilled workers.
And a lot of people are going to kind of look at that go,
"Well of course they did, it was India, no one knows how to do anything over there [mechanically]."
What that actually led to in Ishapore was a more automated factory
than they had at the British factories back in England.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. They made up for the shortage of skilled labour
by actually building machines that would do a better and
more efficient job of manufacturing the rifles.
So ultimately they didn't start manufacture of the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield
until the 1908/1909 year. And in that year they produced 3,000 of them.
And this is actually one of those 3,000 rifles, or it started life as that.
So let's take a closer look and I'll show you how we know what it started as,
and we can see what it turned into.
So as is typical with Enfields, we're going to look at the socket here
for the primary manufacturing information.
Alright, and this is faded but still legible,
at the top we have the Crown cipher, we have GRI, King George.
And then right down here we have the word Ishapore, where it was manufactured.
Obviously I should point out, when this rifle was brand new
these markings were much more legible, it's only been with,
oy, ... almost 110 years of wear and tear that they've got worn down like this.
The next line here is s-ht-l-e, and that's Short Lee-Enfield.
The "short" indicates that this is a short rifle pattern,
as opposed to a full-length rifle or a carbine.
That was the ... biggest change to the SMLE from the previous rifles that the British used.
Then below that we have, ... these are hard to read again,
but that's a Roman numeral one, two stars, and then the letters "IP".
The IP stands for India Pattern.
While we have all the varieties of British rifle,
the guns in India were always just a little bit different.
And that could be things like an aluminium solid butt plate,
instead of a brass butt plate with a trap in this particular case.
So the British added that IP suffix just to kind of designate
what rifles were going to have some Indian variation as opposed to the standard British.
The Indian Army was in many ways quasi-independent from the British,
and that's what led to some of this variety.
So this rifle is not actually dated, but we know they were only manufactured in 1908 and 1909.
And they would have originally had one half of the charger bridge right here, kind of like that,
and the other half of the charger bridge attached to the bolt head.
Now all of those rifles were updated ... during World War One, pretty much,
to this standard pattern, which is the Number 1 Mark III pattern.
This was a much more reliable and durable system for using chargers.
When they made that update, they helpfully recorded
the date here on the left side of the socket.
We have a broad arrow proof, RFI, Rifle Factory Ishapore, and the date of 1916.
So during World War One they needed to get all the rifles they could up to the current standard,
and updated all of these old Short Lee Mark Is.
Since we're talking about India here, I want to take a moment and touch on this bayonet as well.
... Just one of the elements of noting that the Indian military
maybe was a little more on the ball than the British is in the bayonet.
So the British in 1903 adopted a bayonet like this, it had a 12 inch blade.
And then they very quickly decided that it was too short,
and so they adopted a replacement in 1907.
And that 1907 pattern bayonet would go on to be used for quite a long time.
And the Indians looked at that 1907 bayonet a little bit incredulously,
"Like, this thing - a 12 inch blade is kind of long already, that 16 inch blade is just
... frankly guys, that's stupid, we don't want that long of a bayonet.
It makes the rifles really unhandy, cumbersome, awkward.
And we here in the Indian Army have been doing a lot of small-scale fighting,
especially in the northwest of the country, and
we recognise that that stupidly long bayonet is kind of stupid."
So the Indians actually stuck with this shorter bayonet for quite some time.
Now this particular one was manufactured during World War Two, it's a later pattern
but the same basic design and same length.
Ishapore Indian production .303 calibre SMLEs aren't exactly all that difficult to find.
But it was really cool to be able to take a look at this one
that started off as one of the very first Mark I rifles produced in Ishapore.
They only made 3,000, cool to find this one, albeit updated.
But I think a lot of people are much more familiar with the 7.62 calibre version
that came later. Those are a lot more common on the market today.
I think it's interesting to look at a little bit of the history of this factory, and how
your preconceptions about the Indian military may not be entirely correct.
If you would like to own this particular one,
if you have, for example, one of those 2A1 7.62mm rifles
and you'd like a .303 calibre companion for it,
take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page for this rifle.
It is actually part of a batch, so there are a couple of other guns being sold as a package with it.
At that link you can see the pictures and the description for all of them,
and the price estimate for the lot.
And if you decide you'd like to make a play at owning it yourself,
you can place a bid right there through Rock Island's website,
or over the phone during the auction.
Thanks for watching.