Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
James Julia Auction House up in Maine
taking a look at some of the guns
they are going to be selling in their upcoming
spring of 2018 Firearms Auction.
And today we are taking a look at a
very early British bolt-action rifle.
This is a Lee-Metford Mark I*.
So it's almost the very first pattern of repeating rifle adopted by the British military.
Almost, but not quite.
Now, when I say Lee-Metford, what we have here is a combination of
... the names of two different elements of the rifle.
Lee refers to the action, and Metford to the rifling.
Now the Lee system was the bolt action.
A cock on close, magazine fed, and that's ... particularly a detachable magazine fed, system.
This was invented by a guy named James Paris Lee who was born in Scotland,
moved to Canada when he was a small child, and then emigrated into the US later in life.
And he developed this system and ... tried to market it pretty widely.
He actually had versions of the rifle that were manufactured by both Remington and Winchester.
His first pattern was in 1879, it was commercially developed in the 1880s.
The British decided to give it some consideration
when they were looking for a repeating replacement for the Martini rifle and carbine system.
And the British ultimately ended up adopting this in 1888 or 1889.
That was the Lee-Metford Mark I.
Now Metford was the pattern of the rifling,
and this was a pattern that had been used in earlier black powder rifles.
It's notable for having basically rounded lands and grooves.
There are no sharp edges in Metford rifling.
And so when you actually look down the barrel, they always kind of look like they are shot out.
Because people expect to see crisp, sharp, squared off lands and grooves in the barrel.
Well, as a matter of practicality, having rounded off lands and grooves made these guns
much easier to clean with black powder.
And that's why the British had been using ... that rifling pattern.
... Oh, and I should point out, when they first adopted the Lee-Metford rifles
they were still using black powder ammunition.
They knew smokeless was available, and they knew ... they were going to adopt it,
but in 1889 they still didn't have an adopted smokeless powder .303 cartridge.
So, they ... engineered these rifles to be capable of firing smokeless powder,
you know, the higher pressures that it gives.
However, the first pattern of guns ... had they been issued at that time when they were first ... adopted,
they would have been issued with black powder ammunition.
And so the Metford rifling made sense.
What they discovered, however, was that once they adopted smokeless powder
they did so in the form of something called Cordite.
Which was a particularly hot-burning form of smokeless powder.
And that very high combustion temperature meant that
it tended to wear out the throats of the Metford pattern ... barrels.
And so the lifespan of the barrel went from something like
10,000 rounds down to something like 4,000.
And that was an unacceptable loss of performance.
So, they went back to the drawing board and looked at other options,
and ended up using the Enfield system of rifling
which does have those squared-off, sharp lands and grooves that we are used to.
And that did solve the problem of premature throat erosion on the guns.
So that was the primary difference, when they went from Metford to [Enfield] rifling
you changed from the Lee-Metford rifle to the Lee-Enfield rifle.
Now, of course the first thing to look at on an Enfield is the stock socket here.
Because the British were really good about
recording exactly what model of firearm you had right in here.
So, what you will see here is this is BSA & Co.
So this was a rifle manufactured by Birmingham Small Arms.
It is dated 1891, that's the manufacture date of the gun.
And it is a Mark I*.
And given the production date, and the fact that that star is stamped through the finish,
where the "I" is stamped under the finish,
this is a rifle that was originally manufactured as a Mark I,
and then updated to Mark I* configuration.
If we look at the action of the rifle, a few things to point out here.
There is a dust cover over the whole thing,
that's going to help, presumably, to keep debris out of the action.
It ... is attached by a couple of screws.
This would be updated to a simpler kind of self-tensioning couple of lugs
holding the dust cover on on the later Mark II pattern.
It has a magazine cut off, along with a little cutout in the stock
so that you can get your finger under that easily to manipulate it in the field.
That, of course, when it's out allows you to feed from the magazine.
And when it's in, cuts the magazine off.
If you're interested in the exact tactical application of this,
I would recommend a video by the channel Britishmuzzleloaders.
He has a great one explaining exactly how and why they used this magazine cut off,
and how it's really not so much of an anachronism as you might suspect.
Lee-Metfords were equipped with volley sights,
so here we have the front post of the volley sight system.
And to set this what you would do is rotate it out until this pointer
is indicating the desired range, so let's say 23 hundred yards.
You then have a rear aperture for the volley sight system (which is a bit stiff there), that lifts up.
And then in order to use these you sight through this hole onto this post.
And that, as you can see, gives you a line of sight at a really substantial angle.
This, of course, was not used for individual aimed shots, this was so that an entire unit
could deliver volley fire onto an area target quite some distance away.
This is fairly similar to some of the early use of machine guns actually.
These early Lees also had cleaning rods fitted to them.
So that slides in through the bayonet lug and down the stock.
You can see it right here. And then it is threaded in to lock it in place.
These were actually abandoned relatively quickly.
You might think that that's a weird choice, but in fact
the cleaning rod made a lot of sense for a black powder rifle,
it was in fact essential to be able to clean the powder fouling out.
But one of the real improvements of smokeless powder was that
... there was no longer nearly as much debris left in the barrel.
And you really didn't need to clean the bore as an urgent matter like you did with black powder.
So cleaning would be done in encampments and such,
and carrying around a rod on every rifle was no longer necessary.
One other very interesting feature of the early Lee-Metfords is the magazine.
This looks like a standard Enfield magazine, as you might see on, say, an SMLE or a Number 4.
It is, however, substantially different in that it is a single feed magazine,
and it holds 8 rounds instead of 10.
The Lee-Metfords were actually issued with a spare magazine,
and the primary magazine was chained to the rifle so that it wouldn't get lost.
And if we take a look at it from the top here, you can see that it's only got space for one cartridge.
I have a standard SMLE magazine here, and
in comparison you can really obviously see the difference.
This guy has two cartridges presented on the top, alternating right and left.
This is a single feed magazine.
... They do also look a bit different in profile,
there is basically a squared corner here, where it's rounded on the later magazine.
But this can be a little difficult to distinguish in photographs,
especially photographs from the side, because they look very similar.
When you see them from the top is when they are really obviously different.
Now when the British moved from the Mark I to the Mark I* Lee-Metford,
they made a number of fairly substantial changes.
The first one is that they actually omitted the safety,
and that has to do a bit with the magazine cut off.
So I'll let Britishmuzzleloader explain the rationale behind that.
And in fact the safety would come back a few years later.
But originally the Mark I Lee-Metford had a safety lever right here inside the volley sight
that operated ... basically identically to that of an SMLE.
In the rearward position it was safe, and in the forward position the rifle could fire.
It would only be a few years before they re-introduced the safety,
only they put it on the cocking piece for several models,
before returning it to the side of the receiver.
The sights also underwent a substantial change.
The Mark I* has a pretty typical barleycorn style of sight, there's the rear.
And there's the front sight, with its distinctive little triangular barleycorn front post.
Now what's interesting is the very early Mark Is had what were called Lewes sights.
Which are very similar to late World War One pattern French rifle sights
in that they had a very wide front post with a notch cut in the centre.
And a correspondingly wide square rear notch in the rear sight.
The idea with those was that they were very quick to acquire, especially in low light conditions.
And it's interesting that the British started with those,
and then abandoned them in favour of something like this.
Where the French started with a very fine front post like this,
and then later abandoned it in favour of a wider sight.
Another just fairly practical, kind of a field rough and tumble sort of update
was putting this curved undercut on the top handguard.
On the original Mark I version of the gun ... the end of this upper handguard was square
just at the end of the rear sight.
And the problem was when troops went to take these top handguards off for maintenance
(they are held on by a C-clamp sort of spring around the barrel),
the problem was there was no easy way to grip it.
And so what they ended up doing, being soldiers in the field, was
prying underneath this square corner with something,
and often as not they would end up cracking the upper handguards.
So this cut was made so that you have a gripping surface to grab with your fingers
and pry that top handguard off.
One last element to point out on these rifles is that
you'll notice that there is no sling swivel down on the buttstock.
Instead the rear sling swivel is located just in front of the magazine.
There are then two swivels attached at the front of the rifle.
This one is for the sling, and this one is a stacking swivel. Note that it has this cutout in it.
If you are curious about how these were used, I have a short little video on rifle stacking.
But the point here is that the sling went from basically the muzzle of the rifle
back to the front of the magazine. And that makes it pretty distinctive.
It's easy to spot these in photographs when they have slings on them,
because by the time they got to the Mark II rifles they would have moved this sling swivel
down to the buttstock where we would normally expect to see something like that.
And at that same time they removed this brass disc, which is there for a unit marking.
And unit markings would henceforth be put on the butt plate.
In fact, specifically they increased the length of this top tang, and put the unit markings up there.
The early British bolt-action rifles
are really quite scarce to find today in their original condition.
They made a lot of them. The total production of Lee-Metfords was something like 350,000 rifles.
However, in addition to simple combat losses over the course of the Boer War,
and a great number of small colonial wars, and World War One, and
anything that was still left as of World War Two,
in addition to all of that, the British military tended not to throw away functional firearms.
Instead it would upgrade them, so Mark I rifles became Mark I*s, which became Mark IIs.
Whenever possible they would continue to improve the existing guns,
and bring them up to the new specs so they weren't wasting anything.
And guns which couldn't have that done were often converted into .22 calibre training rifles.
So, finding older patterns of Lee rifles in their original configurations is quite difficult.
And that's why it's so cool to find this Lee-Metford Mark I* in fantastic original condition.
It's also worth pointing out that the changes in these rifles
kind of came on pretty fast and furious.
So, in 1888 or 1889 they adopted the Mark I, by 1892 they had the Mark I*,
by 1893 they had the Lee-Metford Mark II.
1895 they would go to ... Enfield pattern rifling.
1907 they ... added charger loading to the guns, that was the SMLE rifles.
So there were a lot of changes over a fairly short period of time.
Which can lead to a lot of confusion in trying to identify and understand
exactly what all of these different variations really are.
If you have a British rifle collection and would like to add this particularly nice example to it,
take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to Julia's catalogue page on this rifle.
You can find their pictures, their description, their value estimate.
All the information that you need to know to place a bid on it
right through their web site, and hopefully make it yours.
Thanks for watching.