Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and last week we took a look at
the very first adopted British magazine rifle,
the Magazine Rifle Mark I, or as it would
become later redesignated, the Lee-Metford Mark I.
Now, between its adoption in 1889 and 1895
the British would go through a total of
six different variations of that basic rifle.
Four of the Lee-Metford, and then two variations
of what they called the Lee-Enfield.
What we're going to do today is look at all six of those variations,
or rather all five, the first one is the standard rifle we looked at last week.
We're going to go through all five of those and look at what actually changed,
because the British nomenclature system can be really confusing for these guns.
And it can seem like there's this bewildering array of variations and changes and different patterns.
In reality there are only a relatively small number of discrete features that changed,
and it's the British nomenclature that makes all of these changes seem more complicated than they really are.
So what I have here is one of the very first Lee-Metfords.
This is actually a Lee-Metford Mark I*, the very first of the variations.
And what we have down here is the last one of the Lee-Enfields.
So, let's go in up close, and take a look at some changing features.
Alright, so what I have here is the very first Mark I, and this is the Mark I*.
The Mark I* was made from 1892 until 1894, and there are two major changes ... that were made to it.
The first is they got rid of this manual safety.
They found that the safety could accidentally be engaged a little bit,
they decided it wasn't really necessary, and so the Mark I does not have it.
The Mark I also does not have any other safety, so they simply, kind of like the French,
decided that they just didn't need that manual safety thing. In large part, I expect, because
the magazine cut off made it relatively simple to operate the rifle
and ensure that there was not a round in the chamber when you didn't want there to be one.
The second change was to the sights.
The Mark I, the Lee-Metford, originally had what were called Lewes sights,
l-e-w-e-s, named after the officer who designed them.
And they're actually very similar to French Model 1916 sights,
where you have a very wide front post with a little notch in it, the notch is your precision aiming point,
and that was coupled with a wide square U notch in the rear sight.
The British got quite a lot of pushback against those sights from troops and officers in the field,
and so with the Mark I* they replaced them with a much more traditional barleycorn style sight,
which is to say a pointed front post.
And to go along with that they had a V notch for the rear sight.
So this is our Mark I*, that square notch is the original Mark I Lewes sight.
So for the Mark I* we have a V notch front and rear sight, and we have the omission of the safety.
I should also point out that with the new sight the range markings were ... corrected.
Originally the range markings had been done kind of speculatively,
based on what they thought the cordite cartridge would end up being.
They didn't quite get it right, so with this new pattern the sights are correct.
So you'll have up to 1,800 yards on the main rear sight.
And up to 2,900 on the volley sight.
Now this particular one is an 1891 production gun, which means
it was actually made as a standard Mark I and it was later updated to this pattern.
But rifles that survive in this configuration are extremely rare,
so we will take this one instead of a specifically ... built up from scratch as a Mark I*.
Now this Mark I* here would only last for two years, because even before this was being made
James Paris Lee was improving his box magazine. And he managed to figure out a way,
basically by turning it from a single-feed magazine into a double-feed magazine
and widening it a little bit, he was able to increase the capacity from 8 rounds to 10 rounds.
The British would adopt this formally in April of 1893.
And from '94 until 1896 they would produce the Mark II Lee-Metford.
This change to the magazine design was substantial enough to justify a whole new mark to the rifle,
and so what we see here is this is now a Mark II.
Again, because it's still the very first pattern of Magazine Rifle, there's no further identification.
So it doesn't say it's an Enfield or a Metford Mark II.
This was produced at Enfield.
And this is an 1893 production gun, so this is also a gun that was updated into this pattern.
But again, it's very hard to find rifles that survive in these intermediate stages, so we're going to run with it.
Once you know what to look for you can distinguish between
the Mark I and the Mark II magazines from the outside.
Note in particular this sharp corner that has changed to a nice smooth radius on the new 10 round magazine.
However if you take the magazine out it's really obvious.
My Mark II magazine here is chained to the rifle, so I can't take it very far.
But you can clearly see that this is a single feed magazine,
so only one cartridge presents, and it's in the same position every time.
Where the new magazine is double feed, so it'll feed alternating from the right and the left.
In addition at this time they made a couple of less substantial changes.
And one of them was to replace the cleaning rod
(with these serrations that will grab a cleaning patch) with a rod that is simply a clearing rod.
This is about half the length of the barrel. So it unthreads and comes out.
And you actually thread two of them together,
there's that. So it's threaded at this end, and it's also threaded up here at this end.
You run two of them together, and then you can use it to knock a stuck case out of the chamber.
And as of the Mark II that was its only purpose.
Cleaning the rifle was done with a pull through set.
Finally, the sling arrangements were changed. So on the Mark I Metfords, the Mark I and the I*,
the sling was carried much like on a Martini-Henry, running from the muzzle back to the trigger guard.
And you'll notice there are two swivels up here. One is for the sling, and the other is this piling or stacking swivel.
(And in fact the piling swivel should be on the outside.)
That would be used to stack multiple rifles together in a sort of a tripod or a pyramid,
so that you could bivouac without lying the rifles down in the dirt.
On the Mark II here, you'll see there is only one, we only have the stacking swivel at the front.
The front end of the sling is now attached to the middle barrel band on our Mark II, unlike the previous model.
And where the early rifles were slung right in front of the magazine,
as of the Mark II they're now in what we consider today to be a much more traditional position,
with the rear sling swivel right on the bottom of the stock.
Do they have the rifle all correct yet? Nope, nope, not yet.
In April of 1895 the British adopt the Mark II*, so a modification on the Mark II pattern.
Basically they decided that, "You know what? We really do kind of want a manual safety on the rifle."
And so they add a manual safety, which would be in production,
the Mark II* would be in production from 1895 until 1896, all of about one year.
Now, where the original safety on the Lee-Metford had been on the side here,
and this style of safety would return later on,
for the time being they decided to add a safety to the back of the striker,
or the cocking piece I should say.
And this is a design that was copied directly from the Lee-Metford carbines
that were being introduced right at this same time.
So, up is safe, down is fire.
We have that in the upward position, it locks the striker in place so it won't fire.
This is actually a pretty handy safety. I suppose it's actually handier for me as a lefty
than it would be for a right hander, but you get the idea.
So Mark II*, 1895, all they're doing is adding that safety.
So the Lee-Metford Mark II* would stick around for a long time because the British were ... ...
no - that's totally not true.
The Lee-Metford Mark II* would stick around for about a year, not even by 1896.
In fact in November of 1895 the British make yet another substantial change,
this time to the rifling of the barrel. And this is the change from the Lee-Metford to the Lee-Enfield.
And we now actually have that "LE" designation that's being marked on the receivers.
So this is an Enfield production gun, again Enfield is the factory here,
that does not refer to the pattern of the rifle. This one was made in 1896 and it is a Lee-Enfield Mark I rifle.
This is identical to the previous pattern of Lee-Metford, except the barrel is now rifled using Enfield rifling.
And that's indicated by this "E" stamp on the top of the Nock's form.
Enfield rifling is really basically traditional style cut rifling with nice sharp square corners to it,
where Metford rifling ... well, really what we would consider today we'd call polygonal rifling.
Where the lands and grooves were rounded, they were all heavily radiused.
So someone who's expecting modern rifling looks down the bore of a Metford rifled gun and
they often will think that it's totally shot out, all the rifling's worn out,
when in reality that's how it was actually designed.
Metford rifling worked really well for the black powder ammunition that the Lee-Enfield started with,
as well as for ... black powder cartridges that predated these rifles, predated the .303.
It was very easy to clean, often those bores are actually in really great condition today.
There are no sharp corners for powder fouling or rust to get stuck in.
At any rate, the problem was that rifling, good as it was for black powder,
didn't work so well with the brand new British cordite.
They found that barrel life was substantially degraded, and accuracy was actually also a little bit degraded,
and they needed something new.
So the one major test they did found that the Metford rifling with cordite ammo
had a barrel life of something like 4,200 rounds. And what they really wanted was more like 10,000.
So they change up the rifling and they start installing the new barrels on the new rifles.
There would be a lot of updates from Medford to Enfield, but
that's beyond the scope of this particular video.
If you see the "E", that means it's Enfield rifling.
And beyond that, the Lee-Enfield Mark I is identical to the Lee-Metford Mark II* that immediately preceded it.
Alright, we're on the home stretch, but we're not quite done yet.
The Lee-Enfield Mark I would be made from 1895 until 1900,
at which time it would be replaced by the Lee-Enfield Mark I*.
These were first developed in 1899, so there's a little overlap there,
and then ... production would run until 1905, when the whole long rifle pattern would be replaced,
but we'll get to that in a moment.
The difference with the Mark I*
is in the muzzle. The Mark I ... still had its clearing rod, the Mark I* they get rid of the clearing rod.
So they announced this change in 1899. Basically the rod, which originally was a cleaning tool,
they then decided they were going to use pull-throughs for cleaning instead,
and now cartridges have got good enough that they're not needing it for stuck cases nearly so much.
These things will come loose, they rattle sometimes, they just weren't necessary,
and they were more of a liability than a helpful tool.
And so in 1899 with the Mark I* the cleaning rods are got rid of.
Now this is part of the reason why you will often find earlier patterns of rifles that don't have rods,
because at this time rifles that were in service they simply discarded the rods.
And on all ongoing production the nose caps were not drilled for rods.
So there's no hole in here to take a cleaning rod,
you still have to have this lug because that's the bayonet lug, but the cleaning rods are now gone.
And they implemented this change on the carbine, the Lee-Enfield Mark I* carbine, at the same time.
Just to reiterate, in all other ways the Lee-Enfield Mark I* is identical to the models that preceded it.
So, for example, our sights haven't changed since the Metford Mark I* when they went to the
barleycorn sight, so that feature stays the same all the way forward through this process.
We still have the safety on the cocking piece that was introduced with ... Metford Mark II*.
So as we go through this, if I don't mention a feature it has stayed the same
through all preceding models back to the last time I did mention it.
So, in general, mechanically, this is exactly the same rifle as that which was originally introduced,
originally adopted back in 1899, just with a few incremental modifications.
Basically the sights, the magazine, the safety, and the cleaning or clearing rods.
Now, in addition to all of these standard patterns,
the British were also fairly constantly updating old versions to newer marks of these rifles.
So we really kind of have a very cool time capsule selection here,
showing each one of these guns as each iterative development happened, and that's really difficult to find.
So be aware if you're looking for these, or if you're looking at rifles,
just because the receiver ... markings say one thing, that doesn't necessarily mean
that that's what the gun started out as. It may very well have been updated to that configuration.
So a lot of times you'll find dates that don't necessarily fit with
the exact dates when each one of these patterns were being made,
because they're earlier guns that were updated to a later standard.
In addition, there is a whole set of these guns that were updated to be charger loading Lee-Metford rifles,
well, ... they all became charger loading Lee rifles.
That is because in the early 1900s all of these long rifles kind of became obsolete,
because the British would replace them with the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield, or SMLE.
And the idea there was to have one standard rifle for all branches of service,
the infantry, the cavalry, the artillery, the engineers: everybody got one intermediate length rifle.
... By the way, we'll get to the SMLE in a series of other videos because, oh boy,
there's a whole ton of different variations on those.
But it's also important to point out that you will find long Lee rifles like these
that have been modified and updated with charger bridges of a couple different kinds.
And that is to standardise them with the stripper clips, or charger clips,
that would come into use after all of the modifications that we're talking about here.
So we'll cover those in a separate video as well, because
that's too much, too many variations to hit you with all at once.
If you want to retain this information it's important, I think, to take it a bit at a time,
and understand what's actually happening. ... The British nomenclature will
fool you into thinking that this is a lot more complicated of a progression than it really is.
So anyway, if you're still around here, hopefully you learned
something useful from the video. Hopefully you enjoyed it.
Thanks for watching.
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