Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look
at the third and final major iteration of the Ross rifle.
Today it's the Ross Mark III, or Model of 1910.
Work developing this would begin as early as really, like, 1907.
As is typical for Ross the developmental work on this was done
beginning with sporting rifles and then
integrate it into military pattern rifles later.
In 1910 the action was formalised, it was submitted to the military,
they approved it in 1911, and starting in 1912 production began.
In total some 236,000 M-10 Ross rifles would be manufactured for the Canadian military,
and this would be the initial armament for the Canadian soldiers who went over to Europe for World War One.
With a few minor exceptions. Now,
let's start by taking a look at what these changes actually were,
because they were pretty substantial changes from all the previous Ross patterns.
So I mentioned that Ross began his developmental work for the M-10 with sporting rifles,
and we actually have an example of them here.
So this is a 1905 action, but if we look at the bolt head it has
3 basically interrupted thread style of locking lugs on the top, and another three on the bottom.
This is the bolt style that would be used in the model of 1910.
Now in a 1905 action the locking lugs actually travel in the vertical position,
when he finalised the 1910 action that would change by 90 degrees.
So on the standard production M-10s you have bolt lugs on the left and right.
And when the the bolt goes into battery and locks, those rotate to be vertical.
This would actually aid in feeding as the cartridge is able ... to be held higher in the magazine
because the bolt lugs don't reach down so far.
Anyway, in conjunction with this new bolt design Ross also added a new magazine design.
This is a 5 round single-stack magazine used in conjunction with a stripper clip guide, right here.
It is offset to the side just slightly, but that doesn't really make a difference when using stripper clips.
Of course the military really wanted that native stripper clip ability.
Now the magazine would ... be the source of a few issues in general over the service life of the M-10.
This was prone to damage. It was in fact beefed up a little bit during the production of the gun,
but if this got dented, ... basically it was not super easy to replace and it could prevent the rifle from functioning.
A good rear mounted aperture sight was used.
This has actually an open notch for quick shooting, and then for precision shooting you can lift it up and use that aperture.
One of the cool things we have here to show you is a 1914 production Ross presented to Lieutenant-Colonel Farquhar,
... About a dozen of these presentation Ross rifles were made and given to various people of influence.
What's interesting about them is they are the very first pattern of the 1910,
they allow us to see a few of the design elements that changed over the production of the 1910.
... Ross was changing rifles kind of on a constant basis almost.
So here, for example, we have a stamped nose cap. Relatively light construction compared to a later milled style.
You can see that this is drilled and screwed instead of having a hole punched in it.
This was the result of the nose cap being not quite strong enough,
leading to breakage when used with bayonets, and it was reinforced later on.
There was a similar issue with the magazines,
you can see that this magazine has been reinforced right above my finger there. Where the early 1910 has not.
Now the markings remain basically the same in pattern as the earlier versions. So we have a Mark III gun here.
Our serial number is 467 ME, these continued in the same serial number range as the earlier ones.
It is rather interesting that this is a 1917 dated gun, given that the rifles were pulled from service in Europe in 1916.
We don't know the exact chronology of when production fully stopped, or exactly how ... factory production
related to military acceptance. There are some guns dated 1918 even.
How exactly that correlates to production we're not sure, but this is a standard style of marking for the 1910s.
On the top of the receiver we have pretty much standard markings for these, although there's some interesting stuff here.
Ross Rifle Company, Canada, M-10, we have British proofs here.
This appears to be a rifle that went to Britain in the commercial trade at some point.
But we also have this "LC". That stands for large chamber, and this was indicative of one of the attempts
to rectify the Ross production for British ammunition.
This was an armourer task done in the field by units where they basically just reamed out the chamber
slightly larger to better accommodate the British pattern, British toleranced ammunition.
Interestingly, in 1916 Ross was actually able to convince the British to take an interest in the Ross rifle.
And he got it added as a formal British service rifle to the British list of changes in 1916.
And the British placed an order, or orders, for what would ultimately be something like 66,000 rifles.
Now, it doesn't appear that all of those were actually produced, it seems maybe more like 10,000 were actually shipped.
But these were designated the Ross M-10 B, and they used a different style of rear sight.
This was per British preference, like they didn't see a need to have a windage adjustable rear sight,
they wanted something that was more in line with the Pattern of 1914 rifle and so they got this.
Interestingly, you'll notice this is very similar to what you would later have on the Number 1 Mark V Enfields in the '20s.
But, that lifts up and is adjustable for elevation.
(See that right there.)
And it has a slightly different front sight as well, also taken from the Pattern 1914 rifles.
Now interestingly these would actually see some notable service in Britain in World War Two
when they were issued out as Home Guard rifles, as were a number of M-10s that were left in Britain after World War One.
Alright, having looked at the design and development and the service history of these, there's something that we need to talk about,
and that is the collective understanding, kind of the collective consciousness, of what were the problems with the Ross.
Like why did this rifle get pulled out of service?
And it was in fact formally, officially, pulled out of service by Douglas Haig in 1916.
Canadian troops were re-equipped with Lee-Enfields.
Well, ... as is typical for real world problems like this, there are a number of contributing factors.
Many of them political, a few of them ... mechanical.
So looking at this from the political side, of course, there was a tremendous amount of politics involved in
repercussions over guns that were or weren't ideal. Not necessarily in reality so much, as ... in the public
realm, what was public opinion?
Well, if you're on the losing side of a public opinion battle, that spells danger for you politically.
Sam Hughes was the Minister of War in Canada and he was ultimately thrown out of office,
largely over his defence and support of the Ross rifle once it became a political hot potato.
However, mechanically speaking there were a couple of issues that came to light.
So, the most commonly known one is probably this idea that the bolt can be reassembled
incorrectly and then the rifle can be fired with the locking lugs actually out of battery.
Now, I actually have a video from years and years ago where I tested this, and I was able to do it.
However, the rifle I did that with is a pretty well-worn one, and it's much harder to do that
on a brand new production rifle like the Canadian troopers actually had.
The major problems, and I should say even if we accept all of those problems as someone reassembled the bolt wrong,
there are actually very few of those documented. Maybe a half a dozen total, both military and civilian, going up into the 1960s.
What was much more significant were ammunition supply problems.
So the ammunition that the Ross was designed for and initially used with, was made by Dominion Arsenal in Canada.
And it was made to substantially tighter tolerances than the British supplied
ammunition that was primarily used in World War One at the front. So,
the British ammunition worked in the Lee, it caused problems in the Ross.
Cartridges stretched more than they should have, the brass wasn't made to quite the same standard,
head spacing became an issue.
And all of these things combined to get rifles that would jam up and have trouble extracting.
Because one of the limitations of most straight-pull rifles, including the Ross,
is that you don't have nearly as much leverage to extract a cartridge if it gets stuck. So.
Once the problem happens it becomes harder to fix with a Ross than it would have been with a Lee.
So what you get are guys doing things like stomping bolts open when they have stuck cases,
or using their entrenching tool to hit the bolt until you can get it open.
This compounds the problem because the bolt stop on the Ross was really smaller than it should have been.
In addition there were issues with under-hardened bolts.
This one appears to be legitimately not really Ross's fault, it was a material supply issue.
But the result was the same, you get an overly soft bolt lug impacting heavily
on a not quite large enough bolt stop, and you had issues of bolt lugs chipping or bending.
And once that happens, then it becomes very difficult to put the bolt back into battery.
And now you have a rifle that you have to hammer open and you have to hammer closed.
All of this stemming originally from poor quality ammunition.
So as early as the Battle of Ypres, where Germans pioneered the use of poison gas on Canadian troops,
these problems start to manifest. And when they do Canadian troops do the sensible thing, if the rifle doesn't work
they throw it out and they find one that does. And so you started to get thousands of Lee-Enfields
being used by Canadian troops against regulations. They weren't supposed to be.
In fact there were actually specific orders put out to stop this, but they weren't really enforced.
And ultimately this problem would snowball, even while Ross was attempting to resolve the issues,
even while they're looking at things like drilling out the Ross chambers to be larger
to better accommodate the British ammunition.
Even as this is happening it's probably too late to stop the actual problem, and it would ultimately
end when Douglas Haig in 1916 ordered the ... Canadian troops to simply be rearmed with Lee-Enfields.
By the fall of 1916 the Ross had been pulled from field service in Europe,
and it was not long after that production shut down. The Ross factory was actually nationalised,
they paid Ross two million dollars cash basically just to cancel the contract and walk away.
Various things were tried with that factory afterwards, but those are subjects for another video, so.
... Hopefully you've enjoyed all three of these these history videos here,
the Ross is a really interesting example of a rifle that was developed and manufactured in Canada.
And kind of an outlier, a rifle that had the potential to be something better than the standard, better than the Lee-Enfield.
And in fact the Ross, despite being pulled as an infantry rifle, would go on in service
as a sniping rifle until after World War One, and truly excelled at that role.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, hopefully we have shed a little bit of light on all the different patterns of the Ross.
Thanks for watching.