Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at
some of the guns that they're going to be selling
in their upcoming September of 2017 Premier Auction.
And today we're taking a look
at a British Lanchester submachine gun.
Now let's set the stage properly: it is 1939,
Germany has invaded Poland.
Germany then invades a bunch of other countries, and then France.
And then we have the evacuation from Dunkirk,
and things are looking pretty bleak for the British.
Now the British had gone into World War Two
without having any of what they called "gangster guns" in their military inventory.
They had not a single submachine gun in 1939.
And that was just fine, because they had all of the other standard arms of the British Army.
However, in 1939 and 1940 it very quickly became apparent
that the submachine gun was a very valuable tool in the modern military arsenal.
And not having one was a serious problem for the British.
So they instituted an emergency program to come up with some sort of submachine gun.
Now the first solution to this was an easy one,
"Let's just buy Thomson guns from the United States." So they've proceeded to start doing that.
The Thompson was a pretty expensive gun,
we're talking about something like $200-$220 at the time.
That would translate into something like 50 pounds sterling at the time.
That was a ton of money.
The British were paying for these things with gold bullion reserves,
and they were going to be needing that money for a lot of other things.
And the Thompson was not the most efficient use of it.
So they started looking for other solutions.
And one that presented itself was a pair of captured German MP-28 submachine guns
out of Ethiopia that were brought back to the UK and reverse engineered.
So the Lanchester itself comes from the reverse engineering of an MP-28
by a guy named George Lanchester for the Sterling Engineering Company.
Of course better known for its Sterling submachine guns, late and after World War Two.
But for the time being, Sterling would be the prime manufacturer of the Lanchester submachine gun.
And this really is a slightly modified but mechanically identical copy of the MP-28.
Once the plans were set up to begin manufacturing the Lanchester,
the next question was how many do we need?
So there was some consultation with the different branches of the British armed forces.
And, well, the British Navy was quite interested in these.
They wanted them for shipboard guns for boarding parties, Royal Marines, that sort of thing.
The Air Force was also interested in them, they wanted them for guarding airfields.
The Army however was not interested in them, the Army decided that it was
pretty happy with the Thompson guns that it had.
That would prove to be a poor decision in the long run, but that's what they decided at the time.
So an initial order was placed for 50,000 Lanchesters.
They were to be divided basically 50:50 between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.
This was actually later bumped up to 80,000,
and in total just under 80,000 of these guns were made by 1943.
So production began in '41, ran until ... roughly mid-point of 1943.
And interestingly, partway through the Royal Air [Force] actually decided
"Never mind, we don't want them anymore."
They had found a different option which was Smith & Wesson Light Rifles.
So 9mm, basically semi-auto submachine guns, from Smith & Wesson
that were I guess cheaper, or maybe they were going to be available more quickly.
That turned out to be a really bad decision,
as those guns were basically so bad that most of them were thrown in the ocean.
The upshot being that the Royal Navy ended up with the vast majority
of the Lanchesters that were produced.
Now I mentioned these ran until 1943, that's because once you've got it in production
(and it's a commercial contract with Sterling,
and then eventually with a couple of other companies, including Greener, and a company called Boss),
once it's in production that production is going to finish.
So even though by the middle of 1941 the early versions of the Sten gun had been adopted,
and those were going to go to the Army,
the Lanchester would stay in production for a couple of years.
Now there was an early Mark I version, and ... only a couple of thousand of those were made
before they pretty quickly transitioned to the Mark I*.
One interesting side note. Shepherd and Turpin, the two guys who were behind the Sten gun
actually developed plans for a Mark II Lanchester that would be more simplified than this.
That was never adopted, ... the military only adopted part of it,
namely the conversion of the trigger mechanisms.
So as originally developed, the Mark I Lanchester had a semi-auto selector switch,
so you could fire this in either semi or full-auto mode.
That was scrapped when they went to the Mark I*.
In fact it was scrapped a little bit before the Mark I*,
this for example is a Mark I gun that is full-auto only, it was built with some Mark I* parts.
There were a couple of other changes made to the actual design of the gun ... in that transition.
And actually, why don't we go ahead and take a look at those right now?
The similarities between the Lanchester down here, and the MP-28 here, are, well, pretty obvious.
We have the same perforated barrel jackets.
We have the same design feature of a turned receiver tube
that has a magazine well fitted over the top of it.
Bolt on the side, we have the safety notches here.
The same exact disassembly mechanism
where both guns pivot around this front screw point to open.
The British have a different locking catch then the Germans did.
The British had a different ... fire selector system.
But with the exception of a few little details like that,
these guns are mechanically basically identical.
I'll show you a comparison of the internals when we take them apart as well.
A few things to point out here, the Lanchester does include a bayonet lug.
Not a typical thing on submachine guns, but a few people did it.
The Japanese did it, and the British did it with the Lanchester.
So this fits the standard 1907 pattern Lee-Enfield bayonet.
I should point out: this gun is coming up for sale at Rock Island, it does not include the bayonet.
I pulled a bayonet off of another gun just to show you the fitting there.
One of the more distinctive features of the Lanchester is its brass magazine well.
This is of course a separate ... part that slides over the receiver tube, and is mounted in place.
(On the MP-28 design as well as the Lanchester.)
So it was not difficult to make this out of a different material than the receiver.
And I believe it was done just because it was easier to cast brass ...
... under those circumstances than steel.
And this is a relatively complex part,
so it is something that you would want to cast most likely.
On the top of that magazine well are the markings on the gun.
These look like they are pretty cheesy electro-pencil sort of markings,
and that's true, that's exactly how these were actually done.
So you'll note that this is a Mark I gun, it does not have the star.
Serial number is relatively low. That "A" suffix on the serial number
indicates that this is a gun which can only be repaired with hand fitted parts.
So Lanchesters were not manufactured with any necessary guarantee of parts interchangeability.
If you wanted something like a new extractor,
(because extractors did actually kind of tend to break on these,
that was one of the relatively few problems they had),
you would have to make sure that it was hand fitted.
It might just drop in, but you weren't guaranteed that.
One of the specific features of the Mark I early Lanchesters
is this tangent sight going out to 600 yards.
This would be replaced by a two-position flip sight
that would be 100 and 200, not that much later on in production.
And the buttstock is another relatively distinctive feature of the Lanchester.
It's got the same kind of hooked wrist as the SMLE rifle,
the same brass butt plate as well, with a cleaning kit trap in it.
So rather than copy the exact profile of the MP-28 stock,
"Well, let's just use what everyone's used to, and what we already have tooling to manufacture."
And that would be an SMLE buttstock.
Now it's not actually an SMLE buttstock, it's a one-piece stock that comes all the way up here.
And it's actually a quite heavy duty handguard at the front.
But the tooling and the profile are the exact same.
The disassembly catch here is one of the parts that definitely differs from the MP-28 design.
So to take this apart we're just going to rotate this 90 degrees clockwise, like that.
Then, as with the 28,
the action pivots up away from the stock and allows you access to all the internal parts.
As with the 28 we're going to rotate this cap slightly counter-clockwise to remove it.
And then out comes the recoil spring,
and the bolt.
Here we have our Lanchester internals, and ... a set of MP-28 internals.
This is actually not a great example of a Lanchester bolt,
because this is in fact a modified Sten bolt that has been used in lieu of
the original MP-28 style bolt.
So the MP-28 has a separate striker, and the Lanchester copied that.
This bolt however is a Sten bolt which is better practically in several ways.
It has a much stronger extractor to it, the Lanchester extractor was
really kind of the one weak point of the gun, it tended to break.
And this has a fixed firing pin
... which makes it a little simpler to manufacture than the two-part bolt of the MP-28.
So the Lanchester would have originally had this style of bolt.
This one has been retrofitted, and in a practical matter upgraded, with a Sten bolt.
The trigger mechanism of the Lanchester, in full-auto at least,
is actually still basically a copy of the ... MP-28
where we have the trigger pushes a bar forward, which retracts a sear catch right here.
And when the sear comes down, the bolt is free to travel forward and fire.
Now the ... semi-auto version of this
was substantially different from the MP-28 and a little simpler.
But that ... semi-auto selector switch
was very quickly removed from the design because it was unnecessary.
This fires at about 600 rounds per minute, or a little slower,
and it's actually pretty simple to fire single shots with a Lanchester.
So not only did they stop manufacturing the semi-auto switch
(which by the way, was sitting out here at the front of the trigger guard),
they actually took all of the semi-auto parts out of the parts catalogue,
and ... made it very difficult for anyone to retrofit semi-auto back onto the guns.
So as far as I can tell, this is sort of a transitional example made with a mixture of parts
because this particular gun has a Mark I* trigger group in it,
but it does have the early Mark I sight, and it is marked as a Mark I.
I think it is also worth pointing out some of the simplifications that were done with the Lanchester.
While it is a mechanical copy of the MP-28, there were some improvements that were made.
Things like the whole trigger group being a self-contained unit
that then is welded to the magazine tube.
On the MP-28 there was a separate trigger housing and trigger guard,
the trigger was pinned into a metal piece in the stock.
That requires a lot more time and a lot more fitting to make everything work right.
When you've got a self-contained unit like this that's permanently attached to the receiver,
... it's much quicker and easier to get it all assembled.
You'll also notice the rather terrible looking welds.
You know what? They may not look super pretty, they may not be ground down,
... and in this case they are hiding under the wood stock.
But that does the job, that trigger housing is not falling off of this gun.
We can see the same sort of thing here with the rear sight.
It's actually screwed in place and then welded over the top of the screws,
both at the front and at the back.
This was the beginning of the war, this was a very bleak-looking period for the British Isles.
And there was a lot of very serious speculation
that Germany would literally be invading any month.
And it was a lot more important to have a gun that worked
than have a gun that looked nice and pretty.
Now the magazines for the Lanchester are identical in function to the Sten gun magazine.
They are a double-stack single-feed design, this is copied from the MP-28.
However, the Lanchester magazines were made in 32 and 50 round varieties.
And this is one of the 50 round magazines.
This is one of the very few examples out there of an actual military production
submachine gun stick magazine of more than about 30 rounds capacity.
This thing is huge and awkward and unwieldy, but the Royal Navy wanted them.
And I guess on a ship maybe it makes sense.
Clearly they worked well enough that these magazines stayed in service as well.
The guns were of course used with Sten gun magazines from time to time
because those were available in very large numbers once production got going.
But ... this most of the time is going to work.
It has the same downsides as a typical Sten gun magazine,
namely feed reliability because of that single-feed design.
The feed lips have a tendency to get a little bit bent from time to time,
which can change the feed angle which can cause malfunctions.
But in general, that 50 round mag worked.
Looking at it overall, the Lanchester is a relatively heavy gun.
... While it's cheaper than the Thompson, it's still a first-generation submachine gun,
just one that was made as quickly as possible.
So it still has a lot of machine turned components,
obviously that big cast magazine well, and it was still too expensive.
So that's why the Sten would take over and be produced in far larger numbers than the Lanchester.
This weighs ... a little under 12 pounds, about 5.4 kilograms.
It has a relatively reasonable rate of fire, something like 550 or 600 rounds per minute.
And between that and the weight, it's quite controllable.
It's heavy to carry, but then again it was ... primarily used by the Royal Navy.
So some Royal Marines would have to tote these things around,
but a lot of them were on ships, and they'd sit in the arms locker, or sit chained to the deck.
And not the sort of thing you had to hump for dozens of miles at a time.
So the Lanchesters served pretty well for the British.
Well enough that they were maintained in inventory until the early 1970s by the Royal Navy.
And they were also used by a whole bunch of other countries around the world.
Interestingly, it appears one of the main ways that these things actually
got out to other countries - some were sold,
but a lot of them were actually on British naval vessels,
they were part of the equipment for the ship.
Now this would be for preventing enemy boarding parties and that sort of thing.
And when the British were surplusing naval vessels off and selling them to other countries,
they were selling them complete. Everything down to the kitchen silverware apparently.
And that included Lanchester submachine guns in the ship's armouries.
So a lot of countries that bought a few ships from the British
ended up getting Lanchesters with them.
So you'll still see them in service in some places around the world even today.
If you'd like to have this one in service in your own gun collection,
it is coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
It is a fully transferable, registered, Mark I, I would say a Mark I transitional, submachine gun.
So if you take a look at the description text below,
you'll find a link to Rock Island's catalogue page on this guy.
You can take a look at their pictures, and description,
and their estimated pricing, and all the other good stuff there.
And if it's something that you can't live without, you can come participate in the auction live,
or you can place a bid over the phone, or through their website.
Thanks for watching.