Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the National Firearms
Centre, part of the British Royal Armouries in Leeds,
and we are taking a look at three quite
unusual looking submachine guns today.
These are experimental lightened Lanchester machine guns,
despite the fact that they don't really look at all like
Lanchester submachine guns.
So, a little bit of backstory on this, George Lanchester
... was an engineer who was tasked with basically
reverse engineering the German MP28
and turning it into a ... submachine gun that the British could
make very quickly right at the beginning of World War Two.
And he did this, and the gun became known by his name, the Lanchester.
It was successful, it was fairly quickly replaced by the Sten which was,
like, an order of magnitude cheaper to manufacture.
The Lanchester was heavy, it was very finely made, lot of brass parts, lot of milled,
forged parts. It was a very expensive gun. So
the Lanchester was ultimately actually manufactured by the Sterling engineering company.
And so George Lanchester ended up working at Sterling.
And once the gun got into production, he started tinkering with lightened models, because
... anyone who's picked up a Lanchester will understand that a lightened model ... really would be a pretty good idea.
So, he went through these three experimental guns, just tinkering apparently. Now,
all three of these are built on very early, unmarked Lanchester receiver tubes.
Which is most likely because by the time he was doing this work, that's what was kind of lying around,
left over, too early to actually be used in a standard production line, but
they didn't really need them any more and so he could just use them to tinker on.
So, this is actually the first one here, this is the second one and this guy over here is the third one.
So, let's go ahead and take a look at all of those in sequence and see what was George Lanchester tinkering with?
So this is the very first one, and there are a couple of interesting things to go on here.
So first off, this is built on what was originally a very early Lanchester receiver.
Too early to be in the production.
It uses standard Sten magazines, all three of these do in fact.
The barrel has actually been flipped around back to front. So on the original
Lanchester barrels there was a section at the front that had a big full diameter flange,
the same diameter as the cooling jacket. And the whole barrel threaded into place.
And, it's not entirely clear to me why, but that was flipped around and that threaded section was used
to actually thread into the front of the receiver here, a new chamber was cut
and the end of the barrel was cut down just enough to get rid of basically the ... original cut chamber.
A P14-like front sight protector assembly was pinned on or riveted onto the barrel there.
Now, of course the whole cooling jacket has been removed. Originally the Lanchester had
... the same diameter as the receiver tube that continued out here as a perforated cooling jacket.
And that was kind of ... either that or the wooden stock here was what you held onto.
Well, on this gun there is nothing for you to hold onto, so
this very odd sort of handgrip has been added. And to be honest it's not actually totally horrible.
It's very unusual looking, but it does work.
... Furthering the interests of lightening the gun,
the magazine well has been lightened with a couple of additional holes here on the front and the back.
We retain the button magazine release. There aren't any markings on any of these, so I don't have any of that to show you.
This is actually a Mark 1* Lanchester rear sight,
because by the time these were actually being made the Lanchester was in full-on production,
and so George Lanchester was able to snag a few of the little ancillary parts like that to use on these experimental guns.
He did go ahead and fully seal up the fire control group with a couple of plates on either side.
That's important because on the original guns, of course, this would have been covered by a wooden stock.
And we still have the selector lever down here.
The safety on this gun is just the locked open position, right there, cut into the receiver tube.
And on this particular one, the receiver end cap here is actually threaded on.
So, this little latch locks it in place, you lift that up to open it for the first revolution,
and then we can just unscrew this
(lot of threads, there we go). Very simple main spring,
and, on this one, we are able to pull the bolt straight out the back.
And we have a ... Lanchester bolt here,
so, long extractor and the internal firing pin component.
Our second gun here is similar, but different in a number of ways.
So first off, of course it has this metal sort of tubular buttstock. Now,
the first gun had a hole in the back of the grip that appears to accommodate the same stock.
This has a little spring-loaded release button.
So if I push that in, I can remove the stock here, and I think there is a decent chance
that Lanchester only made one stock, and when he went from the first experimental gun
to the second one, he just pulled the stock off and reused it on the second gun.
Interesting to note that it's a rifle butt plate (or actually it's probably a Lanchester butt plate),
with a butt trap still in it. ... and he's got that going into the actual tube of the stock.
The front end has been changed up as well. I believe he did the same thing with the barrel, again reversing the barrel.
Maybe it was just because the threading there was more suitable to what he was putting together without a barrel jacket.
At any rate, the front sight protectors are a little bit nicer on this one, they seem to be a little bit less custom made.
And obviously the hand grip has changed. So where the first one was basically a finely polished cylinder,
this one is like the world's first Magpul angled front grip, complete with finger grooves in both sides.
And again I will say that this ... looks really goofy, but it actually handles reasonably well.
This isn't terrible. So, props to Lanchester.
Now he did go ahead and swap around the charging handles, so
the charging handle on this guy is on the left side, where the first and third ones are on the right side.
This is a modified Sten bolt instead of a Lanchester bolt.
The magazine well has not been lightened on this one, just a standard magazine well.
You can see that the ... horizontal angled front grip here is held on by basically a pair of hose clamps.
The fire control group is again sealed up with a couple of plates.
This is basically the fire control selector from a Lanchester.
And on this one we have a safe, a semi and a full-auto position.
This is again a threaded on receiver [end cap],
although the threads are actually different, they are a wider pitched, square thread on this one.
Pull this back and out.
And this one as well has the sort of Lanchester pattern two part bolt
with the firing pin on the rear part here, but a different extractor right there.
And of course, a much different style of cocking handle.
And lastly, we have what is definitely the best of the bunch for a couple of reasons.
On this third one he has left the barrel shroud intact,
and I think that makes for a much better front grip than either of the sort of awkward
horizontal / angled grips that he had on previously. This also has a much better stock.
In general this gun is starting to look very much like a Sterling submachine gun.
Well, Lanchester was at the Sterling company, of course,
at the same time that George Patchett was at the Sterling company.
Patchett is the guy who actually developed what became known as the Sterling submachine gun.
And so it's not surprising that Lanchester would have been seeing what he was working on and perhaps
snagged some of those ideas. Now the stock here, when it's folded up, it looks a lot like a
Sterling folding stock, however it's actually a different design, because rather than have
basically one long leg here and then a diagonal brace, it has two legs coming out to the butt plate,
and some rather clever geometry. So when this locks in place
it wobbles up and down a bit, but this is actually a much simpler and easier stock to snap open
than the Sterling, and I kind of like it.
Sterling would actually go on to ... basically copy this stock in an experimental
improvement to the Sterling that they would make in the 1960s.
I have a video coming on that one, but ... it hasn't published at this point. But if you are not watching
this on it's release day, I will link to that video once it's published in the description at the end.
Anyway, in addition to the improved stock, this gun has a,
instead of being threaded, it is just kind of a keyed rear end cap.
We now have moved the charging handle back to the right side of the gun.
The charging handle actually has to come out of the bolt
(see if we can get this in here, there we go),
Charging handle comes out here in order to remove the bolt from the gun.
And there is no manual safety lock slot here on the handle, because the safety is built into
the three position selector on the front of the ... trigger.
This is another modified Sten bolt. This one ... needs the internal piece like a Lanchester,
but it's missing on this particular gun.
We have a slightly differently made rear sight here. It's still the same idea, a two position flip
notch, like that, but this one is not an actual Lanchester part.
The front sight is much nicer, of course it's mounted on the barrel shroud instead of directly on the barrel.
We have a little spring-loaded detent here, which is what holds the stock in the folded position.
There is no button to release the stock, you just grab and pull, which is nice.
And, as with all three of these guns, this uses a Sten magazine.
This one's quite tight, the other two are really nice fitting magazine wells.
Ultimately, none of these would go anywhere. In fact in 1942 when the British Ministy of Supply
found out that Lanchester was working on this project,
they basically prohibited him from having the resources to really pursue it.
Because at that point they are building Sten guns. Like, they have this worked out,
they've got the very economical, mass production gun on line, and they don't want to waste
engineering time trying to follow some, what they see as a wild goose chase
on a new type of gun that's not necessary.
So, these are the only three that have survived, probably the only three that Lanchester actually built.
Because he was working for Sterling at that time, these ended up in the Sterling company's
basically reference collection, their company vault. And when Sterling shut down
in the late '80s, these were transferred to the British Ministry of Defence Pattern Room collection,
and that collection was amalgamated into what is today the National Firearms Centre.
So that is how these three guns survived and honestly that's kind of how we know exactly what they are.
Because without having that specific provenance it would be really hard to really determine
where these things came from and what their actual history was.
So a big thank you to the Royal Armouries for giving me the chance to take a look at these three,
and bring them to you. A very cool bit of weird Lanchester history here that we got to take a look at.
The ... NFC collection at the Royal Armouries is not open to the public,
unlike the main museum, which is free and open to the public,
but the NFC collection is available by appointment to serious researchers. So if there's something that
you are looking for ... send them an email, there's a link to their website in the description below.
And they're pretty cool people, they'll hook you up with an opportunity to come and get a look at whatever it is you need.
Also thanks to my patrons who make it possible for me to travel to places like this and bring you guys guns like these.
Thanks for watching.