Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and the last video that we did
in this ongoing series
about the development of the Lee-Enfield rifle
was at the very end of World War One.
We were looking at the Number 1 Mark III*.
And today we're going to jump forward a little bit
to the Number 4 Mark I rifle.
This is the Lee-Enfield of World War Two in effect.
Now the Number 1 rifle would continue to see service all the way through World War Two
in the hands of, for example, the Australian and Indian troops, who never adopted this.
But for the British themselves, this would be the standard World War Two rifle.
So, just to bring us up to speed.
At the end of World War One it was realised that the British
really wanted an improved rifle, they wanted something better than the Number 1 Mark III.
The first development effort was in the early 1920s, and that was the Number 1 Mark V.
The Number 1 Mark IV rifle, by the way, being a .22 calibre trainer.
So Number 1 Mark V was basically an SMLE that had a rear aperture sight.
They liked that rear aperture, they'd got a taste of it on the Pattern 1913 rifles,
what we call here the ... M1917 in American service.
They liked those aperture sights, so they tried them out on the Number 1 Mark V.
That rifle was actually built in substantial numbers but didn't go anywhere,
and I have a whole video on it if you're interested.
Following that they would move to the Number 1 Mark VI rifle,
and that's what was the immediate predecessor to this.
So the ... first rifle that would become the Number 1 Mark VI was made in 1924,
and that would lead to about 6 years, ... almost 7 years of development of the Number 1 Mark VI.
And again I have a full video on the Number 1 Mark VI
looking at the, I think, only surviving example, or one of the surviving examples,
of those 1924 trials rifles and then kind of where that went.
So if you're interested in that step, you can check out that video.
It was in the middle of 1931 that the British actually
had a change to the nomenclature of their rifle naming system. ... (That's redundant.)
But they went from this being a ... Short Magazine Lee-Enfield Number 1 Mark VI
to now renaming the whole thing just "Rifle, Number 4".
Based on this nomenclature, by the way, the ... SMLE was Rifle Number 1,
Rifle Number 2 was a .22 trainer,
Rifle Number 3 retroactively was the Pattern of 1913, our M1917 Enfield.
And then that left this guy as the Rifle Number 4.
So what we have here to take a look at today are a couple of the trials rifle versions.
And then here we have one of the very first production examples of
this is actually what the [Number 4 Mark I] was when it was
formally adopted into service and started seeing issue.
So, let's take a look at all of these in series.
I'm going to start here by bringing in one of the Number 1 Mark VI rifles
so that we have something to compare to the very first batch of Number 4 rifles.
Perhaps the most distinctive element of the Number 1 Mark VI,
in at least some of its iterations, is this big square checkering on the stock.
Which looks pretty cool, but ultimately was way more work than it was benefit.
A slightly more subtle, but mechanically much more significant difference
between the two is that the Number 1 Mark VI had this low cut receiver here,
where ... all of the Number 4s actually
have a receiver wall that's as high as the actual receiver ring itself.
So you can get a good view of that bit here as well.
So the high ... receiver wall is a specific thing for the Number 4 rifles.
If we take a look at the receiver socket here
we'll see basically all of the same elements we've become used to.
We have the Royal cipher up here, Enfield is the factory that manufactured this,
it was made in 1931. This is officially designated Number 4 Mark I for the first time.
And then we have our serial number, which can be a little bit confusing,
because the serial number for the Number 1 Mark VI was "A" prefix 1 through A1000.
And the Number 4 Mark Is are basically the same,
they start at A1 and they go up to about A2500. However, they restart.
So there is a series of Number 4 serial numbers, and a series of Number 1 serial numbers,
and the numbers themselves are duplicated because the model designation changed.
A couple of other things to take a look at here.
We have a rather complex, and kind of interesting, stacking swivel on the front band of this rifle.
This, the swivel itself, actually slides on and off.
This part, it's all chewed up, but it's actually toothed,
so that when you put this in, it's locked in place.
And to rotate it you have to pull it out of engagement, and then rotate it back.
And then there's a second pivot point here that allows the whole thing to move.
So you have a lot of like flexibility with this thing,
but it's way more complicated than it needs to be, and - spoiler alert -
ultimately they would just dump this stacking swivel entirely on the final production version.
I also want to point out briefly the profile of this front sight protector,
which is a little bit different than what you might be used to seeing on Number 4 rifles.
So there's some checkering on the front,
and it's actually kind of scalloped right in here.
So there's a substantial complex profile to this part.
It is worth pointing out because it is present only on early Number 4 Mark I rifles.
Probably the most significant visual difference between the World War One
and World War Two iterations of the Lee-Enfield is the front end of the thing.
So the original World War One SMLE had basically sort of a pug-like front end.
It was all flush, there was a big heavy nose cap on here that
was used to mount a sword ... type bayonet.
The muzzle was flush with the end of the nose cap, etc.
What they did with the Number 4 was to change that substantially.
So they wanted the end of the barrel to now be exposed,
and that was done primarily so that you could mount a grenade launcher on it.
There hadn't been a particularly good way to mount a cup grenade launcher
... with the World War One iteration of the rifle.
So in doing that they also wanted to make the rifles more accurate.
So the barrel is heavier, the barrel in one of these is about 2.5 pounds just by itself.
And they were concerned about the impact of hanging a bayonet off the end.
On the ... World War One guns most of the weight of the bayonet
was actually being supported by the stock and the nose cap.
Whereas here, if you have this exposed,
you're going to be hanging the weight onto the barrel itself.
And so what they did was to develop a much lighter profile, lighter pattern bayonet,
and it is this short little (it's 8 inch long total) cruciform spike bayonet.
What they found was the sword bayonet, while it looks cool,
actually really isn't the best pattern for actual combat use.
They tended to be easy to break, they would bend easily.
A little bit gruesome: but they would tend to get stuck in people,
they were hard to pull out of a person.
And of course they were heavy.
And it was found that they weren't really all that good of a tool by themselves.
There's a lot of thought to, "Well, if you make the bayonet basically like a dagger,
or a small sword, or a big field knife, it can be used as a standalone weapon."
But what was found is that troops were much more likely to go to something like
a trench club in World War One than using the bayonets that they all had.
So after some thinking and research and development,
... the British decided to go with a cruciform spike.
This is light, it's strong, it doesn't have any use as a field knife,
but that wasn't something that they found being done anyway.
And aside from the lightness being nice to carry,
this ... minimised the amount of weight on the barrel.
Now the Number 4 rifles were fitted with these two lugs on the barrel
that allow you to lock on a device like a bayonet or a grenade launcher.
So that just goes on and snaps in place.
It is worth pointing out that there is this little lug right here,
which prevents you from being able to put the bayonet on and rotate it the wrong direction.
You can only put it on in the correct orientation.
And this is in fact one of the trials pattern of original Number 4 Mark I bayonets.
The bayonet got the same designation as the rifle.
Now these trials rifles were made in a series of patterns.
The first ones were the A pattern, and that was actually the low receiver wall guns,
namely the Number 1 Mark VIs.
The B pattern were guns with the high receiver wall,
and that actually included some of the very last Number 1 Mark VIs as well as the Number 4 Mark Is.
For a grand total of about 2,500 of these B pattern guns.
There was a very short series of C pattern guns
that were made with a few additional improvements and modifications.
In total they actually only made 56 of these,
so it's really cool that we have one to take a look at.
However I can tell you that the changes are fairly subtle.
So first off, keep in mind all of these guns still have the magazine cut off,
that's still a thing in the early 1930s.
Now where the C pattern differs, like I said it's fairly subtle,
so the butt plate was replaced with aluminium, or as they would say, aluminium
simply to reduce weight. Like it's not a particularly high stress part,
so if you can make it out of something that's weaker but lighter, it's worth doing.
So, aluminium butt plate.
Here's an even more subtle differentiation, this is our B pattern rifle,
and it has a little spring-loaded ball bearing in the back of the receiver
that puts pressure on the rear sight to keep it snapped into the up or down positions.
The C pattern would replace that with a spring-loaded plunger instead.
Like I said it's subtle, but it really is a more effective design ... element.
And the plunger would be retained in the standard
production Number 4s, where the aluminium butt plate was not.
If there was one particular area of focus for development of the Number 4 rifle
it really would have to be accuracy.
There were a lot of trials of ... different ways to stock the rifles.
How do you design the interface between the barrel and the handguard
and the stock to ensure the best possible accuracy.
The heavier barrel in this rifle in general compared to the Number 1
was all done for the purpose of accuracy.
And so it shouldn't come as any surprise that there was a lot of thought put into the sights.
And one of the other changes to the C pattern guns was to adjust this guy.
This is your micrometer click adjustable element of the rear sight.
And on the B pattern going between increments would take four clicks,
with the C pattern it takes six clicks. So they made this a finer adjustment screw.
The C pattern was the last real iteration of trials rifle.
There were originally plans for a D pattern, but ... those were dropped
as they apparently involved too many major changes to the rifle
that they just weren't interested in following up on any further.
They thought they had the design pretty well figured out.
Now there would be a fairly long drought in actual rifle production.
So ... our C pattern here is a 1931 production gun.
The Number 4 Mark I would be formally adopted into service in November of 1939,
and then production would take a couple of years to actually start up after that.
And the production model would have a few additional changes
from the last of the trials models.
Of course, remember that there were 7 years of trials
that went into this before it was actually adopted.
So you can see one of them right here, the hollow bolt handle was deemed not sufficiently relevant,
and it was simpler and cheaper and easier to fill it in.
Again, something that I actually should have mentioned earlier and didn't,
one of the other major rationales for the Number 4 was to develop a rifle that was
better suited to modern rapid manufacturing than the Number 1 had been.
So a lot of the developmental changes that went into this rifle
over the course of its final years of trials and development
were done with the idea of making it faster and easier to manufacture.
Not necessarily about changing the features of the rifle as the user would interact with them.
So in ... alignment with that goal the magazine cut off is finally gone,
and it would never come back on the Lee-Enfield rifles.
... Well basically they got rid of it for simplification purposes during World War One,
with the Number 1 Mark III*, and then it came back right after the war in the Number 1 Mark Vs,
stayed through the Number 1 Mark VI, and then finally now when Number 4 production begins, it's gone.
The grasping surface on the cocking piece here has been made a little bit larger,
and that's more for manufacturability, again, than it is for user interface.
The aluminium butt plate wasn't worth the weight savings, they went back to brass for that.
The front stacking swivel has been removed.
It kind of looks like it's still meant to be there, but that's because this is a hinged
barrel band that's held together by a screw there.
So these two bosses for the screw are still necessary,
they just didn't bother putting a stacking ... swivel between them.
That cruciform bayonet remained in service and it was well liked,
although it would not be that long before they started simplifying it.
And what we have there are the markings of a production Number 4 Mark I bayonet.
And if we go look at the socket markings, they are not there anymore.
So we have a serial number here, and this is a very early one.
We also have an import mark from when this rifle came into the US,
that of course would not have originally been there.
But instead of being on the socket,
our markings on this example are up here on the side wall of the receiver.
So this is ROFM, and that is Royal Ordnance Factory Maltby, Number 4 Mark I, manufactured in 1941.
There would be three factories that would produce these rifles in the UK.
They are Fazakerley, which was near Liverpool,
Maltby, over by Sheffield, and the BSA plant at Shirley.
Enfield would not actually produce these.
So, of those three factories, Maltby was the first to actually have guns pass inspection
and be complete and ready for military use.
Those first guns came out in June of 1941.
Fazakerley would follow in July,
and BSA Shirley would be the final plant to actually get production started
with their first rifles being turned out in August of 1941.
If we look at the timelines here you may notice that there's something that seems a little funny.
Like our trials rifles are both 1931 dated,
and then our actual very first production rifle is 1941.
So there's some question naturally of like, "What was going on for 10 years?"
Well, part of that is the actual trials themselves.
They made the trials rifles in '31 and ... through like '33 or '34.
They would then need to take some time to actually do the trials,
and trials continued through the mid-1930s.
At this same time there wasn't yet this huge urgency for making a bunch of new issue rifles.
They still really did have a lot of Number 1 rifles out there.
And in fact they would continue producing Number 1s all the way until, I think, 1940.
... The British government was looking at self-loading rifles,
so they experimented with a whole bunch of them.
They experimented of course with the Vickers Pedersen rifle made by Vickers in England.
The Enfield factory actually manufactured a .303 calibre copy of the Italian Scotti ... Model X rifle.
That's still in the Royal Armoury's collection today.
They experimented with the Czech ZH 29s, and a number of other self-loading rifles.
They weren't necessarily sure that a new bolt action is really what they wanted,
despite having put in the time to develop a new one.
So until they actually ... make a final decision on,
"Do we want self-loading? Do we want a bolt-action rifle?
Do we want to put a lot of money into making a whole lot of new rifles right now?"
Well, they didn't want to do that right off the bat, and it would take the
imminent pressure of war to push them to do it.
In addition, the late 1930s are also the period when the Bren gun is going through first trials,
and then tooling up, and manufacturing, and introduction to the British Army.
So the Enfield factory, for instance,
as I mentioned the Enfield factory never manufactured Number 4 rifles.
In large part because during this time they were busy making Bren guns as well as pistols,
and they would refurbish a lot of Enfield rifles. ...
There was a lot going on here, and you don't get the whole context of the time
if you don't look at the other guns that are in development as well.
So, that is basically why we have this 10 year gap between manufacture of the trials rifles
and the beginning of manufacture of the full production rifles.
The one other interesting little quirk that I want to touch on here briefly
is the ultimate fate of these trials rifles, because a very small number
of them, like these, survive today in their trials configuration.
However, after Dunkirk the British government was in really pretty serious need of small arms.
And they actually brought back in most of these trials rifles,
including in fact early Number 1 Mark VI marked rifles, and refurbished them.
And some of those were issued as just standard front line Number 4 pattern rifles.
Mostly Number 1 Mark VIs went out as standard infantry rifles.
Something like 1,400 of the trials Number 4s with their special serial numbers
were actually rebuilt as early sniper rifles, Number 4 Mark I (T) rifles.
And those are actually a pretty well recognised sub-variation of the early Enfield snipers.
They were non-standard rifles, they ... were available,
they really were a pretty good base rifle to build a sniper upon.
So that got done to quite a lot of them, and that's where a lot of them end up today.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. Stay tuned, next time we're going to take a look at how
this rifle changed during the course of World War Two.
Thanks for watching.