[ Westley Richards Centrefire Monkey Tail Carbine ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a Westley Richards "Monkey Tail" carbine.
But not just any Monkey Tail carbine,
this is Westley Richards'
combustible self-contained cartridge centrefire
version of the Monkey Tail.
Now why is it called a "Monkey Tail"? Well that's fairly simple, it has
a locking mechanism that includes a long lever
that looks to some people a bit like a monkey's tail, and it just acquired that name.
Now Westley Richards developed this system in the late 1850s,
and it was originally a capping breech loader.
Which is to say you'd have a paper cartridge that was just powder and bullet.
You'd open the action, put that in, close the action,
you would then set a percussion cap on top on a percussion cap nipple.
And then you had a hammer that would hit the percussion cap,
fire would go through the breech block and ignite the paper cartridge inside.
In that form it eventually got adopted by the British military.
He submitted it to the British first in 1860,
and then like ... it was the fifth variation that was finally adopted by the British cavalry.
But they ended up getting more than 20,000 of them.
They licensed production at the RSAF Enfield plant.
And the Monkey Tail would actually see really quite good commercial success.
It became popular especially in frontier areas,
because the capping breech loader offered you a nice balance of
the rapidity of fire of a breech loader
without having to deal with standing up and ramming powder,
and all that sort of nonsense that you have with a muzzle loader.
But it was also simplistic, it didn't require metallic cases that could be hard to get.
It's easy enough to make a paper cartridge on your own, it's easy enough to cast bullets.
All you have to be able to do is get percussion caps and you can use the things.
And ... these were actually quite accurate.
One of the more interesting uses of them was by the Boers in the First Boer War.
It was Monkey Tail carbines in a similar configuration to this, although not centrefire,
that were a primary ... armament of the Boer fighters at Majuba Hill in 1881
where they issued a resounding defeat onto the British Army.
Anyway, Richards would go on to continue to develop this system.
And one of the things he did in 1868
was come up with this centrefire paper cartridge modification.
Well, not modification, these are made from scratch in this form.
So let me show you what that entails.
The basic action of the Monkey Tail system remained
pretty much the same through all of its various iterations.
We have a hammer on the side, which we will put at half-cock there.
You can then grab this lever, lift it up to open the breech.
Now on the original capping breech-loader versions,
you could put a percussion cap ... right up in here.
On this version things have been changed a bit
by the inclusion of essentially a separate firing pin running through the bolt.
Now when I open the action, this arm here (which is fixed to the barrel essentially)
is going to push the firing pin (which is this piece right here)
it's going to force it back just a little bit.
And that ensures that the firing pin is not protruding when the action is closed or opened.
Now I can lift this open about halfway, and then these pieces become more mobile.
You can see the firing pin, right there, protruding through.
Part of the system of the Westley Richards Monkey Tail was the use of a brass bolt face here.
That was combined with a greased felt wad
in the base of the cartridge for gas sealing - for obturation.
And it worked actually reasonably well enough.
It was also a fairly good system for converting to centrefire, as you can see this one has been.
Now at full opening this lever is once again holding the firing pin back,
so I have to put it at about halfway, right there.
The cartridge that Westley Richards designed for this rifle was essentially just
a paper cartridge with a fixture for a percussion cap in the base
along with, again, that same sort of greased felt wad for sealing.
So then the firing pin here in the centre of the ... bolt will protrude forward and fire the cartridge.
The paper, the spent remains of the percussion cap,
and the felt wad all get blown down the [barrel] when you fire.
So this is sort of a caseless cartridge,
in that everything exits the muzzle, there is no need for an extractor.
Anyway, you would then insert your cartridge,
make sure that it's at least flush with the breech there.
You can then close the action, lock that down, and then we have our firing pin here.
You would then ... pull the hammer back to full cock.
When you fire it, the hammer is going to do two things.
It is going to shove the firing pin forward, hitting the primer, firing the cartridge.
It is also going to lock the opening lever in place.
And that ensures that the breech doesn't bounce open upon firing.
So ... after you've fired you pull the hammer back to half-cock, open it up.
Because this is a paper combustible cartridge, there's nothing left that you have to extract.
You would just load your next round and continue.
The top of that lever is marked "Westley Richards Patent".
Here on the lock plate we have "Westley Richards" and a date, 1868.
This pattern of rifle was developed (and I think they were probably all manufactured) in 1868.
Interestingly, it is also marked "Whitworth Patent".
Now Westley Richards used octagonal Whitworth-style rifling in all of these guns,
including the original ones, the 20,000+ that were sold to the British.
But what's funny is his octagonal rifling actually didn't infringe
on Whitworth's patent for polygonal hexagonal rifling.
And so there was no legal necessity for Westley Richards to put Whitworth's name on these rifles.
There's no clear documentation, there's no proof, of whether Whitworth was actually paid or not.
This may have ... been a personal favour to the man,
to help promote his system, the two did know each other.
It could also have been just a marketing thing.
That people knew Whitworth rifles were very accurate,
and so they might react positively to seeing Whitworth's name stuck on a rifle like this.
Especially given that it did have the same basic style of polygonal rifling.
These are .45 calibre, you can see this one's actually marked .450.
General configuration of this is that of a standard cavalry carbine.
It actually has the attachment for an old-style cavalry single-point sling back here.
And then we have a 24 inch barrel, a single barrel band at the end.
The rear sight is calibrated for 100 through 400 (yards that would have been) in leaf configuration.
And then if you stand it up you can extend it out to up to 800.
There we go, like that.
The serial number on this one is 337, Westley Richards made approximately 600.
Probably actually a bit less than 600 of these self-contained paper cartridge
centrefire versions, we don't know exactly.
There were 12 known, not counting this one, so this makes number 13.
The highest known serial number is 505.
They did definitely have their own serial number range.
Now one of the interesting things, I mentioned that
the ... Monkey Tail was popular with the Boers in the 1870s and 1880s.
Of the 13 known guns, like 7 of them are either South African retail marked
or have other connections to South Africa.
It appears that a lot of these ... self-contained paper cartridge versions
were also sold in South Africa, which kind of makes sense.
This is again the sort of thing that made the system attractive to the Boers in the first place.
That you get a lot of the benefits of a breech loader,
but you can still make your own ammunition from really quite simple components
if you are, say, in the middle of the South African bush
and don't have access to some retailer's handy metallic cartridge cases.
This wasn't the final extent of Monkey Tail development.
Westley Richards did in fact continue to ... sort of the next logical step,
and made a version very similar to this, that used an actual metallic self-contained cartridge.
And that was submitted to 1868 British military trials.
Perhaps someday we'll have a chance to take a look at one of those and film it for you.
Ultimately it did fairly well in trials at first,
... it was capable of something like 20 rounds per minute of sustained fire,
which is quite remarkable for a single shot rifle.
But in the exposure tests, which was basically just
dunking the thing in salt water and leaving it for a couple of days,
it completely rusted up and was basically useless.
And it was at that point that Westley Richards pulled it out of the trials,
and ceased attempting to get new modifications of the system.
And he would go on to work on other systems instead.
So, very cool to get a chance to take a look at this sort of
intermediate development on the Monkey Tail system.
They were a cool popular breech loader of the period,
and survived a bit longer than most capping breech loaders.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.