With the world at war, sporting arms weren't selling, and more importantly the
demand for military arms was nearly limitless. Many commercial manufacturers
would turn to support the war industry and we'll see plenty of gun makers
expanding rapidly in this period. This includes the sporting rifle and shotgun
concern Becker & Hollander.
[music]
Hi, I'm Othais, and this is the Becker & Hollander "Beholla" pistol.
It's a little small so let's get into the light box so you can actually see the thing.
At a length of only 5.5 inches it's rather surprising
that this gun still weighs in 1.4 pounds unloaded. It has a magazine capacity of 7 rounds,
and chambers the .32 ACP cartridge.
While we've seen this cartridge before and we're going to see it again, I'm gonna
tell you now, you're only gonna get a peek at it until we get around to the
Browning 1900 that introduced it. Now we're calling this the Beholla, but honestly,
that's up for debate. There's a lot of controversy around just where this little pistol
came from the reason we refer to it as the Becker & Hollander Beholla is
because Becker & Hollander would be the largest manufacturer of this pistol
during WW1, or really ever. So the name sort of sticks. It's just
how we identify it. But if we're gonna talk about just where it came from,
let's look at its most likely parent. This is the Little Tom by Alois Tomiška.
It was a pocket pistol with several unique qualities: it featured a double-action
trigger and top loading magazine. Interestingly many features of this gun
were patented before the outbreak of WW1, but it was not popular until after.
If you're curious about this gun, a friend of the show,
LifeSizePotato, actually has a video on YouTube that shows a lot of its unique
features. We'll put a link down in the comments. If we take a closer look at the Beholla,
we'll actually see that it resembles the Little Tom. It's overall very compact. It shares
the same sort of profile. It has an open top slide. It has a barrel fitted in same way.
But this gun is actually a fair simplification of the Little Tom in that
it's a single action striker fire and if we take a look real quick, we can see - oops lemme lock here open,
We can see that our firing pin is acting as our ejector, so you know, not just the High Point,
people, this goes back a long way.
Alright, while I have the gun right here, lemme
go ahead and do quick field strip 'cause everybody's been been asking for these. Unique to this
pistol though, is that we have to drift out a pin
in order to get into it. So you wouldn't actually want to "field" field strip this gun.
It's a small part, you'll see in just a moment. Alright so, like we were saying, we have a pin to drift out.
So we'll take a punch and we'll place it in the right side and pop her out. It takes a
little bit of poking and you gotta make sure you capture it so you don't lose it, because it
is quite small, with my dumb fingers. Alright, now I'll use the safety to lock open the
slide. You can see it on this side, and then I'm going to push back on that barrel.
Oops, magazine out would help. Push back on that barrel, and lift her out. There we go.
Now, retain the slide, release it forward. This is important and it's hard to show on camera,
but I'm gonna try to cover the striker and spring 'cause its gonna try to fly.
So, I just want to make sure that I get that spring out safely. There we go. Release that slide
forward. There's our recoil spring, our slide, our frame. All this is what came out of there.
Should be good to go now. So that's a field strip. The problem with that,
obviously, is that you have one spring that wants to go flying and you have a very
tiny pin that you need to keep control of. Also just for anybody's information, that
little guy right there? Gained from messing around with this thing. The firing pin projecting, when trying to
reassemble, I slipped the slide and it gave me a good poke, so that firing pin's not my best friend in the world.
Alright, while I reassemble this pistol, lemme go through a couple of things
with you, which is that we're not 100% sure of who invented it at this moment.
If somebody knows a better resource than I have, great let me know. I've seen
claims from all three of the major manufacturers. I have a theory though, and
we'll get to in just a moment. But let's just go down the line of who produced
this pistol and how. Becker & Hollander were sporting rifle and shotgun
manufacturers before the war. While they very well could have designed a pistol
of this nature, it seems to have been an unlikely pairing.They would produce
nearly all of the Beholla pistols for the war effort,
roughly 40,000. They can be found with either hard rubber or wood grips.
These were offered for sale by the German army arsenal for 41 marks.
Becker & Hollander would be bought out by Stenda after the war, ending the
"Beholla" name. August Menz also produced the gun during a war, albeit in very
small numbers, perhaps only a few hundred. Menz remained in pistol manufacturing
postwar and many of his designs favour Little Tom features. To us, he is the
most likely candidate for the actual creation of this pistol.
Under Menz' production it was branded the "Menta" and would be produced until 1927.
During the war, the Menta was a deal at 35 marks. Postwar, Stenda Werke purchased Becker & Hollander,
and so the "Beholla" became the "Stenda" from 1918 until
production ended in 1925. This pistol is unique in that they added
a takedown lever. Perhaps rarest of the variants is the Leonhardt made by HM Gering.
This model has been a point of confusion as it appears to be their only
pistol model produced.
It would imply it was made for wartime use, but no German acceptance marked models
have ever been noted.
Additionally, a postwar advertisement for their sale has been found. Perhaps the
factory geared up before the armistice and was left holding a new product?
Alright, let's just get a look inside this thing.
We're dealing with a fairly simple pistol here. It's blowback single-action striker fired.
Note the unique sear set up though. The trigger bar pushes down an arm which tilts the sear,
creating a smooth break.
The safety simply blocks that sear arm from dropping, which locks up the sear.
Also note the disconnector resetting the action.
That's about it really. Not much else unique on this one so we'll finish up
the mag and hand it over to Mae.
Let's load up our seven round magazine.
Take aim, and... pew!
The left side safety is pretty simple,
A few more...
And let's see how I did.
Alright, nerd alert!
I hate to say it but service life for the Beholla isn't very
interesting, with about 40,000 made for the war effort, that really ended their use.
And again, even then, these are rear, rear, line pistols they don't even have the same
capacity of .32 ACP as the other ones do, but they're really compact and handy and
they stay out of your way if you're not actually on the front line, which is a
lot of what officers wanted in those days. Now after the war, Germany kinda had
to fish through their inventory and pick the best of the best because they
weren't allowed to keep everything, and these guys kind of got kicked out.
You don't see a lot of them with postwar police markings and things like that,
although I'm sure there are exceptions. So they sort of go in the civilian
market. They're fairly common to find out there, despite their low numbers and they're
nice little pistols. They're just unremarkable in a lot of ways. So,
unfortunately there's not a big deep story to this gun. However we thought it
was worth an episode because there is so little written about them and they're so
poorly recognized. To be honest with you their fascinating just in the fact
they're so dang small and so dang heavy. They're fantastic the shoot given their
size. However like we said there's some of the things fit a little bit better in
your hand in this. Especially for someone like me, where I'm lucky to get three fingers
on the thing. But I'm not our designated markswoman, so let's go ahead and get Mae's
opinion on this pistol.
Alright, we made room for Mae once again and she's sort
of our field reporter on this. So let's get her opinion of shooting the Beholla.
Now, will you start us off on the handling?
Sure. So even just now when you pass it
to me, it instantly came back of how dense and heavy this gun is for how small it is.
Compared to the other .32s that I've shot in the past that have an inch or two on this
little guy, this one weighs just as much, which is insane to me. And notice by the
way, I'm having to hold my little teacup grip when actually handling this. I can't
actually get all fingers on this gun comfortably. As far as actual function,
handling, the slide a bit heavy to pull back, but it was still pretty smooth.
It's got a heel release for the mag, which everyone knows I don't like, but this one's actually
really easy to handle. Like, I could probably do this heel release
all day and my thumb would never get tired. The safety: easy to one-hand pretty simple.
Overall, I'm not a fan of this teacup grip that I've gotta have. It's not a bad...
it's not a bad handle for a .32.
Yeah, you know it's a tiny gun, but it's fairly
well thought out. I mean, this is not sort of a slap-together, and it certainly
feels pretty polished. While you were shooting it, did you happen to notice any
problems with functioning, having to do with that firing pin acting as an ejector?
By the way because there is no ejector in this
gun, like we said, the firing pin acts as the ejector.
You know we had a failure -
a couple of failure to feeds on this gun, but we really didn't have any failure to
eject, so obviously that wasn't a problem there for us.
Right now, this gun has a unique trigger, so I wanna your perspective on it. Remember from our
animation, the sear is being tilted by an internal arm that's connected to the
trigger bar. How did that play out for you actually shooting the gun?
As far as the trigger goes on this one, it was as smooth as a 1914. It was like glass the entire way
through, and I couldn't even tell when it was about to break. However it was as
heavy as a double action revolver, but I actually tend to like heavier triggers, that is
my thing. So for me this is one of the nicest triggers I've ever handled.
Yeah, it's kind of odd. There's no grit, there's no lope, there's no hang up. It's smooth, but it is heavy.
I mean it is... I'm not saying like twelve pounds heavy, but you know for these little .32s
that we've been shooting, we expect, you know,
she's like four pounds maybe, and this thing is closing on seven or eight. I'm not sure I'm
not great at these things. We should probably take a measurement but we're not quite
that active. The point being though is, it is a firm, almost no take up smooth pull all
the way through, and then it pops, which is fine for shooting, but you gotta put a
little muscle behind it. Alright the rest of the thing, recoil, sight, how to go for you?
So for the recoil, I thought it was a little bit snappy, but honestly I think the weight
was what saved it in on this one. It brought it down a little bit for me. But other than
that it was nice, it was ok, it was manageable. The sights, as far as this gun goes,
they're short but easy to read. I don't think I drilled a hole with this one,
like perfect, but I'm still fairly accurate with it.
Yeah, that shorter length is gonna give you a poor sight radius, so, I mean you can stay on paper fine,
you can even start to group well if you practice with it, but it's not as natural
as some of the longer barrel pistols we've shot and I would agree: I felt like to me it
was a little snappier than some of the other .32s, but not as bad as I
expected. Anything else, final thoughts? Would you take it into battle, I guess?
That's our big question, right?
Actually, I would not take this one into battle.
There were enough little things about it that I just didn't feel comfortable with it.
Like I mentioned before, I don't have a full finger grip. It's got a heel mag
release. Limited capacity. The short barrel on it. I wasn't nearly as accurate with it,
like we mentioned before, so no, actually, this was not one of my favorite guns we've shot
and I would not take it into battle. It's just, I don't think I'd be as accurate with it.
Would you say that it's sort of a good commercial pocket pistol for the time, but a bad field pistol?
Exactly, yeah, I just felt that it would not hold up the standards in
battle that the others that we have shot so far would.
To be fair, honestly, most of the users of the Beholla were probably not using it for real defense. It honestly is just one of
those pistols that ends up being an icon of rank and it's convenient and out of the way.
It fares pretty well against other .32 ACP pistols that are in that sort of
ultra compact category of the time, but I just can't
see any enthusiasm for running into war with one of these. Alright, well I guess
that wraps up the Beholla, so go ahead and leave your comments below that you
might have about this. Let us know your questions and as always thanks for tuning it.
Yeah, thank you so much everyone.
[music]
Just another late night catch-up.
I'm actually still editing the Beholla right now, but I thought I'd get ahead.
Patreon I believe is at $765 as I'm recording this, and important to that: past couple weeks
I've been seeing a lot of $1 and $5 donations coming through. I actually
really like seen those. We currently have over seven thousand subscribers.
If they were to give $1 each,
the show would be a massive success. I'd be able to bring in some extra
help and we'd have a lot more to show you. So that $1 if you haven't given it, it really helps.
And if you don't feel like giving it, that's fine too I really don't mean
to build any guilt there. On top of that, I need to think very personally Dr. Evans
for providing a number of .32 ACP's, which include today's Beholla. It's great to
have people from across the nation sending us things that we can use to
film, because it saves us money and it gives us a chance to really interact and share
with the collectors. In addition to that I need to point out that this episode
featured a new little song segment during the shooting portion.
That was provided again by the recently married "The Moon and You".
We're huge fans and we're so thankful for their support as well.
Last thing, lemme think here... Oh, I need to kind of apologize for this being sort of a episode,
and go ahead and inform you that next week's is... well, next two weeks is
gonna be a light episode as well. This is done very much on purpose. I'm sorry
if it represents kind of a lull for your interest, but we are going to be
restructuring our schedule here, because right now it's sort of ad hoc and I keep
having to break down the equipment and rebuild it to film one thing at a time
and I realized how of a waste it is.
I think I'm burn like 60 hours a week on this, when I really don't need to be.
Instead I'm going to start bulk recording everything that I possibly can, not just
the filming outdoors. So, while it may be a little disjointed it's going to mean
that we can really get ahead on filming. We won't be missing any deadlines.
Not that we have so far, but by the skin of our teeth, and it'll give me more time
to do side projects. Those of you that are $5 and $10 Patrons probably
have noticed that I've fallen behind on the behind the scenes footage and bug of the month.
I promise promise promise to catch up and I'm so so sorry. The flood put us
real far behind on top of already trying to catch up. The new schedule should
permit me about four days out of the month that I can really just work on
doing the extra sideline stuff.
Alright, thank you all again for your support and we're really glad to have you.
Till next time.