Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and we have the privilege today
of taking a look at a 1931 pattern
of a
This is the gun that would become the FN High Power.
And this is a pistol from approximately the point
in High Power development where the High Power
separated from pistols being developed for French military trial.
So let's go back to the beginning of the story.
In 1921 the French army requests a new pistol, they put out a series of requirements.
They need a gun that has a capacity of 15 rounds,
they want a round counter on it, they want a bunch of stuff.
FN looks at this request and figures, "Yeah, we can make this happen, not a big deal."
They don't even need to send it to the master, Mr Browning, who's off in the US at the moment.
They give it to one of their young talented designers,
a gentleman by the name of Dieudonné Saive.
Now Saive essentially takes the FN Model of 1903 pistol,
modifies it to accept a 15 round double-stack magazine that he has designed.
... Well, then they discover that this isn't quite going to meet the French requirements,
because ... this pistol is in 9x20 Browning, ... it's a simple blowback gun.
The French want something a little more powerful, it's going to require a locked breech.
At that point they take Saive's gun and magazine, and they do send them over to Browning.
Like, "This has now become a problem that requires the attention of the master."
Browning takes the magazine in particular and the gun, and does some modification.
And he comes up with two separate versions of a pistol to submit to French trials.
One has a straight ... recoiling barrel, and one has a tilting recoiling barrel.
So the pistols come back, they're submitted to French trials in 1922.
By the way, Colt is given an option on these patents from Browning.
They opt to pay for the patents, but they ... decide not to actually
do any development or production on this model of gun.
In French trials the French come up with some changes that they want to make.
And this would be the beginning of a very long sequence of changes
that the French wanted to make in their pistol trials.
And there would be a series of developments where the French
in particular ... every time they want the gun lighter.
Lighter, lighter, lighter, lighter, it's not light enough, got to be lighter.
And so there are further developments of the pistol in 1923, '26, '27, '28.
Finally by about 1929 the gun has evolved to the point where it looks pretty much like this.
And all of this development work has been done by Saive.
In order to save time really, they take John Browning's original prototypes
when they come back from the French trials, and they give the guns back to Saive
to make the modifications and the improvements
each time the French come up with something that they want to change.
And this isn't really a matter of talent, this is a matter of saving time.
Saive is on the European side of the Atlantic.
Having the guns go back and forth to Browning is going to simply be impractically long.
It takes a long time to ship stuff back and forth on a boat
over the Atlantic, and they don't have that time really.
So while John Browning is typically credited with
having the Browning High Power as his last design,
his ... hand in the development of this pistol is actually really pretty tangential.
He designs the very first original patterns,
which bear very little similarity to what would end up becoming the High Power.
The original guns have a very different profile, they are striker fired.
And the magazine, which they do more or less share in common with the final High Power,
is actually something that was designed by Saive. So anyway.
By 1930 we get to the point where FN has decided that this gun is good enough
that they might be able to get some buyers for it outside of
this ... French trial that keeps dragging on, and on, and on.
And so in 1929 they announced the
or the "high efficiency" military pistol.
By this point it now has a 13 round magazine.
As part of the attempt to save weight the magazine was cut down, the grip was cut down a little bit.
And they announced this for sale in their commercial catalogue.
And the plan is to find a military customer, get a significant contract for the guns,
and use that contract to pay for the tooling process to actually build a production line for them.
This is how FN had done the Model 1900 pistol.
Yes, it became an extremely popular commercial pistol after they started making it.
But they didn't start until they got a substantial military order from the Belgian army.
And lo and behold, the Belgian army took an interest in this pistol about 1931.
And they would go on to order a bunch of them for testing, but we'll talk about that in a moment.
First let's take a closer look at the
and see how it compares to the final High Power.
And what it is, this is a really unusual pistol to actually find.
Before we go further, I want to take a moment and
plug Anthony Vanderlinden's outstanding book on this subject, "FN Browning Pistols".
He actually has the second edition out right now, this is the first edition.
But I want to show you what the
So this is the ... 1922 French trials submission.
And it really is substantially different, mechanically and in profile,
from what would eventually by 1930/31 be the
So we evolved from this, through this whole series of iterations
in the 1920s at the hands of Dieudonné Saive.
So Browning is responsible for this.
All of this work is Saive, including this guy,
and then it's finally that we get to the point where we have the
So ... it's interesting, this is serial number 211, the gun we have here is number 205.
We have essentially exactly this pattern to take a look at.
And at this point we have something that's really very similar
to the final Browning High Power design.
But there are a few little differences. One of them is just the design of the grips.
Let me bring in a 1940 production Browning High Power here, this is actually a Finnish example.
But this is standard Browning High Power
as it was adopted ultimately by the Belgian army and then everybody else.
So we can compare the feature differences here, and you can see the difference in the grip panels.
This has a little bit of a slimmer grip to it,
it feels a little bit snugger in the hand and I frankly like it.
The hammer design is the same, but on the
the hammer is left in the white on the side, for what that's worth.
The controls are identical to the regular later High Power.
Magazine release on the side of the frame of course.
We have a manual safety right there.
The grips are slightly different in that they come out a little bit under and behind the safety.
Our slide stop operates just as normal.
And if I take the magazine out the gun cannot fire,
it still has the magazine disconnect that would remain in the standard High Power.
When Browning had these guns in mass production they had their slide legend
here, like this, with all of their name and address.
But the
these are hand-made individual examples.
And on them the slide legend is actually hand engraved on every individual gun.
And you can tell that looking at it, and it's rather distinctive.
One of the other things I rather like is the fact that on regular High Powers
when you hit the magazine eject the magazine just barely kind of pops out
a little bit, and you have to drag it out by hand.
And a lot of people look at that as an obnoxious bug in the design.
Well, the
And in fact they have this cool two-tone feature to them that you can't help but ... reference to
the two-tone early Colt 1911 magazines, where they heat treat the top separately from the bottom.
Well, the Belgian army would develop an interest in the
but one of the things that they want to change is they don't like the fact
that the magazines drop completely free.
They don't want magazines hitting the ground and potentially getting damaged or lost.
And so they specifically request that FN change the design
so that the magazines release, but don't actually drop out.
Thus FN goes in, they change the mag well dimensions a bit.
And they give a rather rough Parkerised texture to the magazines
specifically to give them the friction to do that.
Anyway, moving on, we have a slightly different construction here on the front of the slide.
The bushing is completely integral to the slide.
Now it's interesting that in the 1929 pattern of
they actually used a 1911-style removable barrel bushing.
1930/31, kind of the final definitive
they have gone to a completely integrated barrel bushing.
When we get to full scale adoption and production
it's still an integrated barrel bushing, but it's manufactured as two pieces
and then assembled together into one to make production a little bit more efficient.
So you have a bit of a different look here at the front of the slide.
And of course at this point in production they're not putting shoulder stocks on these pistols.
So the gun has plain fixed notch sights, and there's no slot in the grip for a shoulder stock.
When the gun goes into mass production, when the Belgians adopt it,
they do so with an adjustable tangent sight and a slot for a shoulder stock.
And that becomes pretty much the standard pre-war pattern.
But all that comes after the basic gun design.
Now I did mention that this is kind of the point
where the French trials guns split off on their own development path.
It's worth mentioning that they kind of go off down this weird French rabbit hole.
The French trials continue up until 1935, so another 5 years after this pattern.
By the time the trials are done they're ... back to a single-stack magazine,
they're in 7.65 French calibre,
and they have ... like unitised removable fire control parts.
One of the things that the
to go to a hammer that is actually pinned into the frame,
and is not part of the ... field stripping process.
Something that the French wanted, that ... Saive decided to simplify.
We don't know total production quantity of this specific pattern,
the 1930/31 model of
It was sort of the definitive pattern prior to actual Belgian trials.
But it was never put into any significant production,
because that was only going to happen when a major contract was obtained.
So without any further specific data to go on,
I will estimate productions is probably 10 to 20 guns.
Certainly very, very few of them.
There would never actually be a major customer for the
The closest that they came was the Belgian army.
Like I said, 1931 the Belgian army expresses an interest.
In 1933 they buy 1,000 guns for field trials, the FN factory actually makes 1,100.
The other 100 are used for some commercial sales, and other trials and testing and marketing.
Anyway, the Belgians would of course go on to adopt the pistol in 1935.
At that time there was a Peruvian delegation that was also very interested
that FN came really close to selling a bunch of guns to.
But they didn't manage to actually close that deal until after World War Two.
But this ends up leading directly to the GP35, the
So there's a tiny number of these that were ever made,
and a much smaller number that even survive today.
So it's extremely cool to get a chance to take a close look at this one.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.