Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction Company
taking a look at some of the guns they're going to be selling
in their upcoming April of 2019 Premiere Firearms Auction.
Today we're taking a look at a Bren gun.
Not just any Bren gun, this is a John Inglis,
so a Canadian manufactured Bren gun, in 8mm Mauser.
You may notice the straight-walled magazine.
This was a really interesting project.
Now in total Inglis would manufacture something like 186,000 Bren guns, and most of those were in .303 calibre.
The Inglis company had existed in Toronto since about the 1860s.
However in the aftermath of World War One, where of course they did a lot of ordnance work,
You know, a big metal fabrication company, they did a lot of ordnance work in World War One.
But then the Great Depression kind of did them in in the 1930s.
All of the principal family members passed away in '35 or '36.
The company went into receivership and it was purchased about that time by a Canadian military officer,
a Major James Hahn, and some associates. Because what they saw in this was
a ... large manufacturing facility, and they knew that the Canadian Army was going to be interested in buying machine guns.
Hahn was in the Army, of course, he had some inside knowledge in this,
and they figured this would be a really good opportunity.
And so they got together and were able to buy up the factory relatively inexpensively because
no one else one wanted it at the time, it wasn't actually producing anything.
And they managed to get themselves in 1938 a contract to manufacture Bren guns.
And they would ... manufacture them first for the British, and then for the Canadians, and then expand out.
By the time we really got into the heat of World War Two, Inglis became a massive complex.
They had over a million square feet of covered manufacturing space.
They had something like 15,000 employees. It was a huge operation.
And they got in an interest in 8mm Bren guns from the Chinese.
Now the Nationalist Chinese were ... an allied power to the United States,
the United Kingdom and the other Allies.
And ... their standard cartridge was 8mm Mauser and they were looking for ordnance kind of desperately.
In fact interestingly, before World War Two they had actually ... contracted to purchase
LS/26 light machine guns from Finland in 8mm Mauser.
They ordered something like 30,000 of them. Only 800 were actually delivered before supplies were cut off.
But just a little background, they were very much interested in firearms. And what they ended up finding was
they were able to use basically the Lend-Lease program to acquire small arms and other equipment from Canada.
And this would manifest itself primarily in two firearms, as well as other equipment.
One of them being 8mm Bren guns and the other being Hi Power pistols.
So the Hi Power pistol side is pretty well documented, the Bren gun side much less so.
What we do know is that in early 1941 the British brought in, I believe, 189 ZB-30 machine guns in 8mm Mauser.
Now the Bren gun was developed from the ZB-26 which became the ZB-30. It was designed in Czechoslovakia.
And the British government was looking for a light machine gun in the '30s, and they
had a trial, and one of the guns that was submitted to them was ... a ZBG-33.
Which is basically the ZB-26 with some updates and chambered for the .303 cartridge for the British.
So ... and this would eventually be adopted as the Bren gun.
Knowing that the Bren gun evolved from the ZB-26 and ZB-30, if you want to make the Bren gun in 8mm,
the natural way to go is to go back to the 8mm ancestor of the gun and use that to reverse-engineer it to redesign the Bren.
So take the ZB-30 and give it the same sort of upgrade structure sort of that the Bren gun had gotten.
And so that's exactly what they did.
For that reason the magazines that the 8mm Bren gun uses are identical to those of the ZB-26 and the ZB-30.
And Inglis would manufacture hundreds of thousands of these magazines as well as the guns.
So there are in fact three different versions of the 8mm Bren gun, and they differ basically just in markings.
So let me go ahead and show you the markings and a couple other interesting elements to this gun.
And then we'll come back and talk about ... what the long term implications of this gun were.
Going to go ahead and start with the markings here. Nice big letters right on the side, 7.92 Bren Mark I.
Now, if you are familiar with the Bren guns, you are immediately going to notice the rear sight,
and this is a Mark II rear sight, the Mark I guns had a ... drum style rear sight dovetailed into the side of the receiver.
And one of the major changes to the Mark II pattern of the Bren was to replace that with this style of ladder sight that flips up.
So you might be wondering why is this ... marked Mark I? Well the answer is
this is a Mark I 7.92 Bren, which is not the same thing as a Mark I .303 Bren.
That's ... just a little detail of British nomenclature systems there.
Because this was in 7.92 it was its own series of guns, and thus this is the Mark I version of the 7.92 Bren.
There were, by the way, no other versions of it.
Now there are three different types of markings that can be found on 7.92 Brens. The guns themselves are all the same.
But you have this, which is commonly referred to as the "Sterile" type, because the only marking it has
is this one here on the receiver, ... there's nowhere on there does it say who made it or when.
There is a second version which is commonly called the "Resistance" 8mm Bren,
which will also have a marking up here of Inglis and a year date, typically '43 or '44.
Those ... allegedly ... they were made to be dropped to mainland European resistance movements
where 8mm Mauser ammunition was easily available.
It is not well documented how much, if any, of that was ever actually done.
But there are guns out there that have the date markings on as well.
And then the best documented of the whole bunch are ones that actually have a long pantograph
series of Chinese characters here, which basically read, "7.92mm Bren Gun, Made In Canada".
And those are the ones that were made specifically under contract for Chiang Kai-shek.
And a lot of those were in fact undoubtedly shipped to China. It took a while, it wasn't until basically mid-1945
before many of them had arrived. It took some time to figure out how to get them there.
This is pretty well documented with the Inglis Hi Powers, ... and I actually have a video on the Inglis Hi Power.
So if you're interested in more about the Chinese side of this story, I would recommend taking a look at that video.
Now this gun, despite being called sterile, it is in fact serialised,
and it has a serial number up here on the back of the receiver, as you would expect for a 7.92 Bren.
And in this case the ... "Sterile" guns have a serial number pattern that is
a single digit and then a hyphen and then a four digit number.
The ones that came into the US run from approximately 15,000 through approximately 28,000,
if we assume that this front digit is simply the ten thousands place, which I think makes sense.
The Chinese contract ones had a CH serial number prefix, so ... the very first one would be 0CH-0001.
And when they hit 10,000 they would go from 0CH to 1CH and then continue iterating the four digit number.
And then the European "Resistance" ones ... have a T prefix serial number.
And those, the T and the CH, those match with the Inglis Hi Power serial numbers.
This is also serialised down here, which is the lower assembly,
and on the barrel locking lever,
and on the barrel itself.
So for being a sterile gun it certainly is very nicely matching and numbered.
That is it for markings though, except for their selector settings which
have a 0 for safe, a 1 for semi-auto and a 20 for full-auto.
This does use a 20 round magazine, as opposed to the .303 guns which had a 30 round magazine.
The reason for that is simply to continue using the existing pattern of ZB-26 and ZB-30 magazines, which were 20 rounds.
When they designed this gun in the 1920s, Brno did a great job on the magazines.
ZB-26 magazines are high-quality, reliable and just in general very nice. And so this was an excellent magazine to continue using.
You'll find these manufactured by the Czechs, you'll find them Nazi proofed, you'll find John Inglis ones,
you know, one of the very interesting magazines that was made by both sides of the war, kind of like the Hi Power.
Disassembly is really simple because this is a Bren gun. Just punch this pin through,
got that out, and then our lower assembly is going to slide off. There we go, that's the lower.
Then we can pull out our bolt carrier and bolt assembly,
pull off the bolt.
The barrel is a quick release type. There's a button on the bottom here, push the button, lift that up,
and the barrel comes out.
The bolt is not numbered, but it is marked as a 7.92 I X.
I'm not entirely sure what the X indicates there. If you need to identify these without markings,
the ... the bolt face and the extractor of the 7.92 guns is distinctively different from the .303 ones,
simply because with its rim the .303 has a larger bolt face opening there and a different extractor.
It may well be possible that Inglis was actually making Bren guns through 1947.
There is very little documentation on this, a lot of the story is kind of hazy,
and there are strong and well reasoned opinions on all sides of it.
However, it appears that the 8mm Bren guns were used for a number of different covert operations,
ways to supply what are on one hand theoretically sterile guns,
although the idea of a sterile Bren gun is kind of goofy.
Like ... if someone runs into a Bren gun and knows anything about small arms,
they're immediately going to know that it comes from the UK or the Commonwealth.
So what's the point of making it super sterile? I don't know,
I don't have a good answer to that, and it's a valid argument in this case.
However, these guns have been documented, in fact this is one that was specifically
documented as ... being registered in the United States between '63 and '65,
... with connections to US government owned shell companies. And it looks like they may have been experimenting with
some particular plan that they had for some of these guns, and some of them became
superfluous and ended up being registered and just sold off, including this one.
Now the Chinese guns would go on to have their own interesting fate.
A lot of, well, I don't know about a lot, a substantial number of the ones that were in Nationalist Chinese hands,
of course fell into Communist Chinese forces possession at the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War.
And a bunch of those were actually re-barrelled and modified to use the 7.62x39mm cartridge firing from AK magazines.
And that's a really cool, interesting variation on these guns.
In Britain a bunch of the 8mm Bren guns did come back into the UK, and they were actually
... part of the basis for the development of the L4 Bren gun, which is the Bren in 7.62 NATO,
where of course a lot of the same issues, a lot of the same challenges of
going from a rimmed cartridge to a rimless cartridge like 8mm, like 7.62 NATO.
Those challenges would be similar and so a lot of the developmental guns were based on 8mm Bren guns.
And apparently to this day, some of the spare parts for the L4 guns
(or not I suppose today, because they're not using it any more),
but the spare parts for the L4s included a lot of basically reworked, or reused, or just interchangeable 8mm parts.
So these 8mm Bren guns have very poor documentation. But there are three very well
... I want to say documented but that's not quite the word,
clearly existing three different types of variations on these guns.
And they all have interesting provenance and stories surrounding them.
So this one of course is in gorgeous, basically mint, condition.
And it's pretty cool, it's a very rare example of a very interesting firearm.
So if you're interested in having it yourself, it is of course coming up for sale here at Morphy's.
If you take a look at the description text, you'll find a link to ForgottenWeapons.com,
from there you can click over to the Morphy auction catalogue page on this firearm,
take a look at their pictures and description, and their price estimates
and everything like that. And if you're interested you can place a bid for it.
And thanks for watching.