Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National Firearms
Centre, part of the British Royal Armouries at Leeds.
And when I was looking through their collection
I happen to notice this, and it definitely caught my eye.
This is the first time I have ever seen a Bren gun barrel handle
used as a vertical front grip on a submachine gun.
And I wanted to get a closer look at this,
so let's show you this thing.
So this is a post-war manufacture, basically a Beretta 38/42,
that has been cut down, mainly the stock cut off, by the Cypriot terrorist group EOKA.
Obviously they did this to make it a concealable gun, something you could probably hang under a jacket.
And they wanted to add some way to hold onto the gun at the front, which makes sense because
if you have a shoulder stock this works as a nice front grip.
But if you don't have a shoulder stock you need something out here (and it doesn't have a barrel shroud).
So what they did was they went ahead and tacked on a Bren gun grip.
Now if you're familiar with the Bren gun you'll know that this handle actually has two positions,
and that functionality remains in place on this one. So you can lock it out vertically, like so,
or you can pull it down, bring it back and use it as sort of an angled front grip, like so.
Really, a neat little modification. I've seen a lot of goofy handmade grip assemblies.
I have not before ever seen one made out of a Bren gun grip.
At the back end the stock was simply chopped off, the whole thing's been painted black.
They chopped it off far enough back that you can actually still get a reasonable grip on the thing.
And then they have fitted that out with a little stubby 10 round magazine.
I'm pretty sure this is a factory magazine. If they cut it down themselves they did a really good job at it.
If this is cut down, whoever cut this down is not the same guy who cut that down, that's for sure.
At any rate, with that little magazine in it
the whole thing is certainly slim enough to hang under the arm under a jacket,
and I'm sure that's exactly what they intended it for.
Let's see the markings on there. Moschetto (submachine gun), Automatic, Beretta, Model 38A/44, Calibre 9, 1948.
So Beretta continued to make these guns after World War Two, they changed the model name a couple times to
kind of try and commercially conceal the fact that it was still a pre-World War Two design.
But they're great little submachine guns,
and they actually continued to sell fairly well after the war.
This particular one, we don't have any details on exactly where or when or how it was acquired by the British.
Unfortunately there isn't any data associated with that side of the story, but the gun itself is a really neat interesting one.
One of the cool things about the NFC here in Leeds is that in addition to being in some ways a museum collection,
they're also a working reference collection. And so guns like this that have specific ties to
international terrorism or criminal prosecution or various other interesting backstories will come through
and whenever they have the chance they add those guns to the collection here.
So in particular with the third party modified, shall we say, firearms like this one,
there's rather a substantial collection of them here.
... To me they're all very interesting to take a look at, so as I said, this is one modification that
when I first looked at it I thought, "Wow, that's really goofy." And then upon handling it's like, you know what?
That's actually not the worst thing I've ever seen, it's actually kind of growing on me.
So, really neat to get a chance to take a look at someone's unique creation like this.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. A big thanks to my Patreons who make it possible for me to
travel to places like the UK and bring guns like this to you guys.
And of course a bigger thanks to the National Firearms Centre, to the Royal Armouries,
for letting me pull a gun like this off the rack and bring it to you guys.
Their collection is not open to the general public, but it is available by appointment to serious researchers.
So if you're interested in something there drop them a line, their website is in the description below.
And in fact from that website you can take a look at everything that they have digitised in their collection,
which is a pretty substantial amount of stuff. Both guns and earlier arms and armour sorts of material. Anyway.
Thanks for watching.