Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at Bear Arms, a cool little
family owned shop in Scottsdale, taking a look
at one of the pieces of their reference collection.
This is a surplused German Gewehr 88
that was used by the Ulster Volunteer Forces, and the fact that it's
actually marked and provable to have been connected to the UVF
makes this a really interesting, cool piece of history.
So our video today is mostly about the interesting way that this gun got into Ireland and why,
because mechanically, this is ... just a straight, stock, standard Gewehr 88.
What we have going on in Ireland that is relevant to this is Home Rule.
So Ireland of course was one of the United Kingdoms of Great Britain, and dating back to the 1880s
there had been movements to institute ... Home Rule in Ireland, to give it a measure of independence.
The third such bill came up in 1912, and that's the one that ... is relevant to us today.
So there was a lot of support for Home Rule in most of Ireland,
but particularly not in the northern several counties of Ireland, Ulster.
And the British government at the time was very much in favour of Irish Home Rule,
but there was a minority of the government, of MPs, that very actively supported the Ulster
Unionist or Ulster loyalist forces or groups.
There were about 500,000 Northern Irish folks, men and women, who signed
a Covenant of support for loyalism and the union with England around this time, 1912 or 1913.
This was a substantial group of people in the northern part of Ireland.
Now at this time the shooting sports were very popular in the whole of the UK, and Ireland was no exception.
They had a very good and successful national rifle team that competed, and often won, at the Bisley matches.
Pubs: it was not uncommon for ... small town pubs to have gallery shooting ranges or tube ranges,
where you bury a long piece of tube in the ground and you can shoot indoors and have a 50 foot range.
... This was kind of a pub activity like billiards or darts, shooting was a common and accepted thing.
And so the idea that a lot of these Ulster loyalists would decide to put together a militia
wasn't that far out of the normal realm of experience. A lot of these guys had access to firearms, they understood firearms.
What they needed perhaps in order to do this was military pattern firearms, instead of
.22s, gallery guns, the sort of recreational firearms that they probably had in more quantity.
So around 1912, 1913 the leadership of the Ulster Unionist or loyalist forces decides to put into action
a plan to bring a bunch of arms into the country to arm what is effectively a loyalist militia.
It becomes known as the Ulster Volunteer Force, or Forces.
And ... there are a number of small scale imports, smuggling runs, that they manage to do.
But the really big one was a batch purchase of guns out of Hamburg, Germany.
They purchased almost 25,000 surplus rifles, and these consisted of 10,100 1904 Steyr-Mannlicher rifles,
9,100 of these Gewehr 88s, and like 4,600 Vetterli-Vitali surplus Italian rifles, along with 3 million rounds of ammunition.
And the plan is these are going to be loaded onto a ship in Hamburg, and they're gonna come up through the Baltic,
you know, over Denmark, and come down and they're going to be smuggled into Ireland.
So they put together a pretty serious scheme to make sure that this all goes off as planned,
which almost immediately runs into problems. So the guns are loaded onto a ship named the SS Fanny ... in Hamburg,
and pretty quickly into their journey in the Baltic they get stopped by Danish customs authorities
at an island called Langeland (whose name I'm almost certainly mispronouncing).
The really funny thing ... here is the Danish customs authorities
stop the ship because they are concerned that it's carrying guns for militants,
except they think that these might be guns for militant Icelandic independence movement folks.
Which they were not.
... I had not honestly realised there was such a thing as a militant Icelandic independence movement,
but apparently there was, or potentially was at the time.
At any rate, the ship manages to get out from under Danish impoundment, continues its journey.
Off the coast of Ireland they meet up with a second ship, which is the SS Clyde Valley
that has been purchased by ... one of the loyalist organisations.
These people, remember, had substantial social support in Northern Ireland and they also had substantial political
support in the UK, as well as elsewhere, and they had substantial funds at their disposal.
You know, 25,000 surplus rifles is not the sort of thing that you can just pick up with pocket change.
Anyway, they have this second ship, the Clyde Valley, and the two ships meet up off the coast of Ireland,
and they transfer all the guns and ammo onto the Clyde Valley.
Which they then paint a new name on, they name it the SS Mountjoy II.
And they proceeded to Larne where they're going to disembark all the guns.
Irish authorities have some inkling that something's going on,
and they know that this militia is attempting to arm itself with guns brought in.
So what the UVF does is they arrange with another ship, whose name I don't have unfortunately,
that was just carrying a load of coal. But the captain and the crew are sympathetic to the Ulster loyalist movement,
and ... they start spreading rumours that this ship is full of guns.
They send some conspicuous trucks to the dock ... you know, maybe they're there to pick up the guns.
And the ship captain deliberately acts as sketchy and suspicious as he can,
and so he comes into port, the police are all over that ship.
And the captain delays them as best he can, acting again super-suspicious,
and this really convinces the police that this is the ship full of guns that they heard is coming.
And so they spend all their time and eventually they finally get on board and discover that in fact
it's a ship carrying coal, and all of it's papers are perfectly in order.
And the captain presumably does some kind of,
"Wah Wah. I guess that didn't work out so well for you did it, copper?"
Anyway, while this is going on, the actual ship full of guns, the Clyde Valley renamed the Mountjoy II, is docking at Larne.
It offloads a bunch of guns there, it offloads a bunch more while it's there onto speedboats.
Ultimately these guns are are brought on shore at three different ports, three different towns or villages in Ireland,
Larne is the main one, but then also Donaghadee and Bangor.
(Whose names I'm also probably mispronouncing.)
But from there there is a substantial infrastructure put in place to transport the guns,
distribute them out to different centres, get them out to the militia, and interestingly, to actually mark them.
And we know that this is one of the guns that they had, because this is one of the guns they marked.
So let's take a closer look at it.
So this is specifically a Steyr manufactured Gewehr 1888, OEWG is Steyr's factory marking there,
and of course it's marked Steyr, manufactured in 1890, it has been updated for the "S" cartridge.
It did see service in the German military. We have the remnants of a unit mark there which was from original German service.
The rifle went through multiple German units, we have a second unit mark here on the barrel band.
And the stock is in pretty nice shape, you can still see all the original proof mark stamps in the stock.
And then here on the side of the stock is the marking that is of particular interest to us today.
UVF, Ulster Volunteer Force, For God and Ulster and the [Red Hand] sort of little emblem.
And this is the one piece of evidence on this rifle that tells us that it was in fact part of this batch.
As far as I know there ... were no serial number tables or records that were kept
to identify exactly what guns came into Ireland as part of this shipment.
Although you will find Mannlichers, Gewehr 88s and also Vetterli-Vitalis stamped with this mark, and that's what it indicates.
Apparently, especially in the UK today, the Vetterli-Vitalis are the most common of these,
which is a little unusual given that they were numerically the smallest group of ... rifles that were in this import.
Despite all of the pent-up tension and bad feelings and ill-will over this issue,
nothing really came of it, it really fizzled out at this point in time.
And the reason is the Home Rule bill was ultimately passed in May of 1914.
It included an exception, at that time the details were left unspecified, it included
an exception for counties in Northern Ireland who would remain part of the Union, which mollified a lot of them.
But it's May 1914. A couple months later World War One breaks out.
And ... probably the majority of the UVF volunteers who are being armed,
well, they are of prime age to be joining the British military, these are loyalists,
they are by definition loyal to the Union, loyal to the British Crown.
And a great many of them end up enlisting in the British army and going to fight in World War One.
The guns, ironically, end up kind of being cared for by some of the Ulster authorities,
some of the same people they were trying to hide them from in the first place.
But World War One basically dissolves this issue, not for long.
And we don't have time in this video to get into the further history of Irish nationalism
and Irish civil war and rebellion and uprising, so we will stick with just this element.
I should point out there was also an ... Ulster Volunteer Force in the 1960s
that used the exact same logo as we have on this rifle, and claimed
heritage to ... the original group, although as far as I can tell there's actually no
tangible connection between the two, except they were both armed groups in Ulster.
So, that is, I think, the very cool story of how this German 1888 Commission Gewehr,
Commission rifle, got its way into Ireland marked "For God and Ulster".
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. A big thanks to Bear Arms up here in Scottsdale
for giving me a chance to take a look at one of the guns in their reference collection and bring it to you guys.
Thanks for watching.
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