It's spelled "Chichester", but because it's British it is pronounced Chichester.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at RIA with
a Pocket Shotgun. This isn't really a pocket-sized gun,
but that's what it was actually called.
This was manufactured by Hopkins & Allen
for the Chichester Rifle Company.
They made a lot more of the Pocket Rifles.
... Let me back up a bit, Hopkins & Allen
manufactured guns for a lot of small retailers.
Most of the time what they would do is take whatever brand name you wanted
to put on a gun and they would just put it onto one of their existing gun designs.
Something like, for example, their XL series, which were all marketed as Hopkins & Allen guns.
But, hey, if you run Bob's Gun Shop, and you want to order enough guns from them,
they'll call it the Bob Special revolver.
It'll be an XL number whatever, but it'll be marked "Bob's Special".
That was a lot of Hopkins & Allen's business.
Now, they did a very small number of guns that were actually specifically made for a single individual retailer,
and this is one of them. These guns were made for the Chichester Rifle Company,
and most of them were basically long-barrelled, shoulder-stock revolvers.
This is a detachable shoulder stock, we'll take a look at that in a moment.
The action itself is in fact a Hopkins & Allen XL Number 5, but what they would do is pair that with
an extra-long rifled barrel, typically between 8 and 16 inches, going off of some of the old catalogues.
By the way, I should give a big thank you here to the folks at Cornell Publications.
They sell reproductions of a lot of interesting old firearms catalogues, manuals, and other reference data.
And the folks there were very helpful in trying to help me find some information on these,
which turns out to be very scant, but what little there is came from them,
and also from Mike Carrick of Arms Heritage Magazine.
Anyway, the rifles, like I said 8 to 16 inch barrels typically, this is a good sort of target gun.
Gives you extra stability from having the stock, an extra- long sight radius for better practical effective accuracy.
And it appears that they did a very small number of shotguns as well,
intended for rimfire pistol shot cartridges.
This is going to be a gun of pretty limited utility, it's going to be
I would expect sort of in the same purpose as the 9mm smoothbore Flobert ... rifles,
intended for basically shooting pests in your vegetable garden, that sort of thing.
And what's interesting here is they have actually paired a .38 calibre revolver with .38 calibre shells,
to what appears to be a 28 gauge shotgun barrel, if we measure that from the bore.
Why they wouldn't use a .38 calibre barrel, I'm not entirely sure.
Perhaps they had a cheap access to 28 bore shotgun barrels
because they were being made for actual shotguns.
And that was easier to do than reaming out a .38 calibre barrel to be smoothbore, I'm not entirely sure.
But what we do know is that ... there are a couple extra little neat additions to this.
So let me show you those up close.
Alright, let's start with the stock here, this is a pretty simple sort of contraption.
We have a thumb screw here, if we loosen that up
(loosen it a lot more, there we go), it comes out and the stock comes off.
There are two holes in the bottom of the [grip], the back one is threaded for that bolt,
and the front one is for a locating pin to keep the stock from wobbling around.
So that's the shoulder stock, not really anything else going on there.
Now before we get to the barrel, I want to show you what is the most unique part of this I think,
and certainly one of the most creative ones, and that is this sort of recoil shield that is screwed onto the gun.
So there's an extra screw on the side of the frame here that holds it in place.
It has a little hinged piece here on the right side, ... which you can open up so that you can
actually get access to the chambers to load and unload the thing, like so.
And then that flips back down.
Now you might be wondering what's the point, why is this thing even there?
Well, according to the Chichester Rifle Company's catalogue it does two things.
First off, it acts as an eye shield, and I think that's actually remarkably foresighted of them.
This is based on a Hopkins & Allen XL Number 5 revolver, which was not a terrible revolver,
but it wasn't a Colt or a Smith & Wesson.
And it was also a black powder revolver, and so there's going to be a lot of debris coming out of this thing.
And if the timing's not perfect you're going to get lead shaving at the front,
and ... if you had a ruptured cartridge, you might have gas coming out the back.
And with a regular revolver that's not that big of a deal, because you're holding the thing at arm's length.
Well, when you put a shoulder stock on this
and you want to actually shoot it as a rifle, your face is now right up here, way closer to this action
than it would be as a pistol. And at that point it becomes actually a really comforting idea
to have a little bit of a protective shield there in case something comes back out of the gun.
In addition this acts as your rear sight.
So the original rear sight on one of these revolvers was just a trough on the top of the frame,
coupled with whatever sort of blade front sight you have out at the muzzle.
And interestingly, despite having a smoothbore barrel,
this has a rifle or pistol style blade, instead ... of a bead.
But according to the company catalogue, this acts as a peep sight. And you know what? It actually sort of does.
With your eye this close, once again this is necessitated because
your face is a lot closer to the gun than is intended for a pistol.
And with your eye up really close, that trough on the frame is not really visible,
like it's way out of focus if you're trying to focus on the front sight.
And it's pretty much impossible to use as a rear sight.
However, this little rounded section here does actually appear to work as a pretty reasonable peep sight.
So there's the front sight. This is going to be a little tricky to show you because ...
the camera can't focus quite the same way the human eye can, but there's your front sight right there,
and if I bring the focus back so you can get a clearer idea of ... what is sort of the rear aperture.
That's what you've got there. So you can't really see the front sight out there anymore,
but if you trust me, this I think actually would make a decent sight.
You can certainly see that trough in the ... frame of the revolver which would make a lousy rear sight
at this sort of distance, when you've got your face right up next to the gun because you're firing with a shoulder stock.
This is actually certainly better than the available alternatives.
And it's kind of interesting that none of the other manufacturers of shoulder-fired revolvers came up with something like this.
Now there was some thought when doing the research on this, that maybe it's just a put together sort of gun.
Which I suspect it is not, I think this is actually a factory production thing
that was made in very small numbers, probably because it didn't sell well at all.
And there are a couple of reasons that I say that.
So first off as a comparison here is a ... fancy engraved XL Number 5.
But something I want to point out here is that on the cylinder axis pin,
this pin is completely round and it fits nicely under the barrel.
On the shotgun, because the barrel is larger in diameter than the original barrel would have been,
it's actually going to impinge on that cylinder access pin if you use a standard round pin.
So if I pull this pin out, you will notice that the top of the pin is actually flattened
so that it has a little more clearance.
And it's a little hard to see here, but I think you can see it with the reflected light
the bottom of the barrel is also just slightly flattened,
again to give clearance for that cylinder access pin so that it doesn't jam.
We have a serial number here on the bottom of the barrel which is exactly
... where you would expect the serial number to be on a regular XL Number 5 revolver,
or any of the XL revolvers, or any of the Pocket Rifles.
There it is on our engraved example, right there.
And we also have a second example of this. In fact there are actually three here at RIA,
I have pulled out two of them to show you, but this has the same set of modified features,
in exactly the same way. We have a serial number there, and ... just a subtle flattening of
the barrel on the underside, and flattening of the cylinder axis pin so that it will fit.
Now the other interesting thing about this second example
(you'll notice by the way it doesn't have the recoil shield, but it does have the screw here to hold it in place,
which is something that is not present on the standard model of the revolver),
however this example is in centrefire, so our first one is a rimfire, second one is centrefire.
And this is actually marked "centrefire" on the top strap.
There you go, .38 cal centrefire, and patent dates.
The finish on the rimfire one is a lot poorer, and so it's hard to see the markings,
but, because it is rimfire, and that would have been the default at the time,
it has patent markings there and then nothing else marked on the other side of the top strap.
So it doesn't say it's rimfire, it's just taken for granted that obviously it's rimfire because it's a revolver,
and it was centrefire that would become the exception.
Production data is pretty scarce for pretty much all of the Hopkins & Allen guns.
Because these were cheap guns, they weren't necessarily low quality
but they definitely weren't top quality either, and there wasn't a whole lot of incentive
for people to keep really detailed records that would survive 140 years later.
So I have no idea how many of these were made, I don't know how many of the Pocket Rifles were made either.
But they're pretty cool.
I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I think this is a pretty unique and interesting gun,
and that's the sort of thing that I enjoy taking a look at. So clearly you do too if you're still here.
Thanks for watching.
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