Firearms Collecting for Amateurs 058410085X, 9780584100853

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James Henderson

FIREARMS COLLECTING FOR AMATEURS A thorough guide to the assessment and collection of an item ever-increasing in value, Firearms Collecting for Amateurs begins with the blow-gun and covers the matchlock, wheel-lock, flint-lock, percussion lock, muzzle-loading rifle, breech-loader, fowling piece, etc., and gives valuable ad-

vice on the care, maintenance and display offirearms. James Henderson is no home-bound collector peering at surrounding treasures; out of doors he is a first-class shot and is thus able to range over the whole vast and fascinating subject. He has written a practical work for the practical collector, with a keen eye to the economics as well as the pleasures of the pastime.

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“Concise and expert... James Henderson has the gift of explaining technicalities lucidly.”’ — Times Literary Supplement

Jacket design by R. Mabey

SBN:

584

10085

X

£1-0p

fee 2510521

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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

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Firearms Collecting for

Amateurs

By the same author: SILVER COLLECTING FOR AMATEURS FURNITURE COLLECTING FOR AMATEURS SWORD COLLECTING FOR AMATEURS IT’S MADE LIKE THIS—CARPETS

JAMES

HENDERSON C.B.E.

Firearms Collecting for

Amateurs

FREDERICK

MULLER

First published in Great Britain in 1966 by Frederick Muller Ltd., Fleet Street, London, E.C.4

Copyright © 1966 James Henderson Second Impression 1969

Printed and bound by C. Tinling ¢» Co. Lid., Liverpool, London and Prescot SBN:

j&q rooé8s x

Contents Martial Fire The Earliest Firearms

The Matchlock

The Wheel-lock The Snaphaunce

The Miquelet The Flintlock The Flintlock Musket Oo KN WwW ff vam mn

tm,

The Flintlock Rifle The Flintlock Pistol

Flintlock Sporting Guns Percussion

The Muzzle-loading Percussion Rifle Percussion Muzzle-loading Pistols and Revolvers Breech-loading Rifles Breech-loading Sporting Guns Breech-loading Revolvers and Automatics HF HR YW fh O Am on Maintaining the Collection Glossary Index

oe oe EE oe ee Le

95 105 113 118

123 131

139

for Colonel Duncan Todd, D.S.O., C.D.

Illustrations (Plates facing page

Seventeenth-century wheel-lock pistol (Christie) Two snaphaunce pistols; two early Colts; a sixteenthcentury wheel-lock (Sotheby) A Tschinke, and close-up of its lock (Christie) Three miquelet pistols (Sotheby)

Lorenzoni action pistol; early Colt (Sotheby) Six decorated seventeenth-century pistols (Christie) Turn-off cannon-barrelled pistol (Author) Four pistols, 17th and 18th century (Christie) Six 18th-century horse pistols (Christie) A double-barrel pistol by Joseph Egg (Christie) Duelling pistols by Joseph Manton (Christie) Four 18th-century rifles, two fitted for air (Christie) An 8-bore duck gun (Author) Five guns and carbines, c. 1800 (Christie) Muzzle-loading 4-bore duck gun (Viscount Prestwood) Four rare pistols (Sotheby) Two boxed pairs of duelling pistols (Christie) Pair of decorated revolvers and deringers (Christie) Pair of pistols, platinum and silver mounts (Christie)

16 16 17 a2 33 33 48 48 49 64 65 65 80 80 81

81 96 97 97

8

ILLUSTRATIONS

(Line drawings, by Anna Townsend) Earliest handgun Two types of matchlock Wheel-lock Stock of Afghan matchlock Petronel Snaphaunce lock Dog-lock English-lock

page

14 17 21 5 28 32 39 40

French-lock

41

‘Scent-bottle’ lock

83

Back-action lock Early rifle bullets

89 91

I am greatly indebted to Christie, Manson and Woods, Ltd., and to Sotheby and Company, Ltd., for the use of their splendid libraries of photographs and for their ready

assistance. hE

I

Martial Fire Frre, a primitive and deep-rooted terror of mankind, has been used in war since murder first was organized. The blazing arrow in the thatch of the stockaded village was a diversive preliminary to the assault. It was left for the Greeks of Byzantium to develop fire-throwing as the main weapon of Imperial defence. In a.p. 716 a Saracen fleet of 1,800 light vessels was completely destroyed by twenty ships armed with the Greek Fire. This was invented by a Syrian named Callinichus, and must have been a mixture of crude petroleum with sulphur and tar; it was used in many ways, but most effectively by discharge from copper pipes mounted in the prows of ships—the flammenwerfer, in fact. After the loss of the oil-bearing lands there is little heard of such devastation, and the Greek Fire so often mentioned in later centuries

was a mixture of sulphur and saltpetre, with other ingredients according to taste. The accounts of the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1202 and by the Turks in 1453 record naval engagements which could never have been successful against the flame-throwers of 716. Once sulphur and saltpetre are brought together, gunal powder is not far off. A recipe book of 1225 gives charco Roger before as an ingredient of Greek Fire, half a century was Bacon’s famous formula. When Edward I of England York in d besieging Stirling Castle in 1304, he requisitione r, and ‘a horse-load of cotton thread, a load of quick sulphu

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another of saltpetre’. From the expenses claim it would appear that the method was to sew up the inflammable mixture in canvas along with stones, and throw it by catapult. The recipe of 1225 gives 6 parts of saltpetre, 2 of sulphur and 1 of charcoal;? this is very similar to what is now called

‘Chinese Powder’, much used in fireworks; if the ingredients were

pure, and intimately

mixed,

it would

almost

certainly explode, or at least go off with a terrifying whoosh; so that the missiles of Edward I would be quite devastating incendiary bombs. We have now arrived at gunpowder, but as an incendiary, not yet as a propellant. No doubt it was a mere matter of development; it is not so far from sewing your powder ina sack to confining it in a tube. We can disregard all tales of cannon used by the Chinese and Indians before the Christian eta. The Romans were importing silk from China by the time of Augustus, and they would certainly have been more interested in firearms. The Tartars who occupied China so long knew nothing of gunpowder when they invaded Europe, and the Turkish Emperor had to depend on a Genoese renegade to construct his cannon in 1453. It is impossible that such attentive travellers in China as Carpin (c.1246), Marco Polo (¢.1280) and Ibn Battuta (¢.1340) could have overlooked such a wonder. A learned gentleman informed the French Academy in 1850 that he had seen a cannon in China to which he ascribed a date of 618 B.c. Had

he had only the ordinary antique dealer’s knowledge of the Chinese skill in forging the reign-marks of earlier periods, he would have saved a lot of well-read but ill-experienced people from repeating this nonsense until they believed it. It is a certainty, from every kind of evidence, that whatever the people of other continents learned about firearms they learned from Europeans. Every known Eastern firearm is a careful copy of a well-known European prototype. ? An average modern propellant gunpowder is 75-15-10.

MARTIAL

FIRE

LOE

I have an affection for the legend that the propulsive force of gunpowder was discovered by a monk in 1320. His name is always given as Berthold, sometimes as Berthold Schwarz and sometimes as der schwarze Berthold, inferring perhaps grimy labour in the laboratory rather than a surname; and the place is sometimes Fribourg and sometimes Mentz. There is no contemporary reference, but the first mention is not much more than a generation later. As for the place, there is

no doubt the production of firearms was first pursued on a large scale in the realms of the Duke of Burgundy, and as for the name it is obvious from what has been said that gun-

powder was well known by 1300; sooner or later somebody was going to direct the explosion by a tube, and why not

Black Berty ? Anyhow, after the most careful collation of all contemporary evidence, one can say with confidence that

gunpowder as a propellant was unknown in 1300, very little

if at all known in 1320 and in general use throughout Europe

in 1340.

2

The Earliest Firearms MIssILE weapons were well developed before the introduction of firearms. England alone retained the long-bow, which required great physical strength and training from infancy, but which could shoot three times faster than any other weapon. The English were very reluctant to abandon

it and archery remained a part of the curriculum of Harrow up to 1571; Sir Roger Ascham published his treatise in ptaise of archery in 1545; Sir John Smythe in 1590 urged that

all hand firearms should be discarded in favour of the longbow, which was, however, discarded by Ordnance in 1595. Attempts were made to reintroduce it in 1633, urged by

William Neale, and it was advocated during the Civil Wars because of the shortage of firearms. Its last use in Britain was by some of the Highlanders at Killiecrankie in 1689, and its positively last appearance in any field was at Leipzig in 1813, when a company of Siberian archers in the Russian army

were near a detachment of Rocket troops under Captain Bogue, who used the new Congreve rocket with devastating effect. So the last of the arrow and the first of the rocket exactly coincided. In 1300, however, all Continental armies used the cross-

bow, which was bent and set by the whole strength of the body, leaving the bow-man to discharge it by trigger, aiming from the shoulder; or its bigger brother the arblast, which

was similar except that it was wound up by a geared handle.

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There was also the mangonel, a similar but larger carriagemounted weapon, wound up by a screw and shooting a very heavy arrow. The cross-bow and arblast shot a short heavy arrow, sometimes all-metal, called a bolt or a quarrel. It is therefore not at all surprising that the earliest use of gunpowder was to propel just such a projectile. The first illustration of a gun, in an English manuscript of 1326,

shows a vase-shaped object strapped to the framework of a mangonel. A large arrow projects from the muzzle and the gunner is putting a red-hot rod, with right-angle bend at the end, into the touch-hole, while everybody else stands at

a respectful distance. In 1346 the city of Rouen, for the English war, issued a pot-av-feu and 48 iron arrows to suit it. Similar guns were used by the English at Crécy, although their use is ‘played down’ by the English historians who prefer the long-bow. At least twenty large guns were used at the siege of Calais in the same year, 1346, and there exists

a shipment order (10 May, 1346) for 10 guns, 5 barrels of

powder, and 100 ‘pellots’, which may have been of fired clay. Ten rounds per gun for a siege does not suggest a high rate of fire. These early guns appear to have been breech-loaders.

The ball was put into the tube, called the ‘chase’, and the

powder into a heavy canister called the ‘chamber’, which was either screwed or wedged into the chase. The touch-

hole was in the chamber. The demand was for larger and larger guns, far beyond the foundry capacity of the day, so enormous ‘bombards’ were fabricated of iron staves welded together and heavily hooped like barrels; whence the term which has been used ever since for every type of firearm. Guns grew bigger and bigger till they were firing stone balls of 600 Ibs. weight with 400 Ibs. of powder. Looking at the remaining guns of this type I feel that one would be much safer in the target area than at the touch-hole. Bursts

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were very common and destructive, and King James I of Scotland was killed by a burst in 1460.

The earliest hand-guns were miniatures of the larger; vase-shaped castings with a hole bored up (hence the ‘bore’ universally used since). An example dated 1322 has been noted, but this date is suspect. They were certainly in general use before 1364, in which year the Commune

of Perugia

ordered 500 hand-guns, to be each a hand in length. All known specimens are of Froissart mentions that the 1369 had many hand-guns. recorded by the Wardrobe pike-staffs.

this size, about 9 ins. long. English troops at Montsac in About this time a payment is for fitting eight hand-guns to

The earliest handgun: a vase-shaped casting strapped to a staff; gun about 9 ins., staff about 6 ft. The iron rod, heated in a brasier, plugged

the touch-hole and fired the charge

This was, in fact, how these earliest hand-guns were used. They were fitted and bound to staves or planks; they were filled at least half-way with powder, and then crammed to the muzzle with iron balls or any small scrap. To fire, the end of the stave was put into the ground, and the user, holding the stave about a foot behind the gun, heated his rod in a pan of charcoal and thrust it into the touch-hole. The rate of fire was much slower than the cross-bow, and very much slower than the long-bow; but the hand-gun could

bring down the heaviest-armoured man-at-arms. In those days armies were counted by ‘lances’, a lance being one

THE

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completely armoured man-at-arms attended by from eight to twelve light-armed supporters; bring down the man-atarms and his supporters were very likely to retire in disorder. This business of the pan of charcoal, keeping the rod redhot, finding the touch-hole with it while trying to hold an aim, was all very trying. Slow-match was already known, consisting of string soaked in a solution of saltpetre and then dried; but how to get it down the touch-hole? Then some unknown genius had the idea of filling the touch-hole with powder, and scooping out a shallow ‘pan’ at the top, with a little powder in it; touch this with a slow-match and the fire would instantly communicate itself to the charge. True, some of the explosion would be discharged back through the touch-hole, but experience showed that this made no noticeable difference to the force of the projectile. Once the principle was established, the way was open to rapid developments in hand-guns. These early hand-guns are excessively rare, very few specimens being known. No doubt, being handy little chunks of cast-iron, they would be melted down and re-cast as something else soon after they became obsolete. But never despair; sooner or later some bull-dozer levelling an ancient rubbish-heap, some litter being cleared from a ruined castle, will reveal a little iron vase about nine inches long, with a

straight hole bored down it. If you are there, seize upon it and hold it at any price you are asked; it is treasure.

3

The Matchlock Ir Isn’r difficult to imagine the hand-gunner, fumbling for the pan with the slow-match in his fingers, wishing that the

match were held in metal fingers and inevitably directed to the spot. By 1470 this was accomplished; a pair of jaws held

the match, and an extension of the arm was pivoted so that when the lower end was pressed the match descended into the pan. Immediately, it became possible to make guns to be aimed like cross-bows,

from the shoulder;

the ultimate

weapon, obviously. It came to be called the arquebus, otherwise harquebus, or hacquebus, or hackbut, or hagbut. It sprung into use all over Europe; in 1476, at the battle of Morat, the Swiss are said to have had 6,000 arquebus, which, together with the

great Swiss halberds, completely routed the chivalry of Burgundy. No longer was the armoured cavalier to be the king of the battlefield; the peasant with an arquebus was more than his match. This does not mean that the arquebus immediately superseded all other missile weapons in all circumstances. Forty years after Morat, the force which Cortes assembled for the

conquest of Mexico consisted of 508 soldiers, of which only 13 were armed with the arquebus, and 32 with the crossbow; there were 16 horses and 14 small cannon. Later still, in 1532, the force with which Pizarro penetrated into Peru consisted of 62 horsemen and 102 foot, of whom only three

Early seventeenth-century wheel-lock pistol with ivory inlays Top, two

snaphaunce

pistols, circa

holster

1600; centre, two

early Colt

revolvers; bottom, a sixteenth-century wheel-lock

Top, North German wheel-lock Tschinke, decorated in silver and ivory, of the seventeenth century; botfom, the lock of the Tschinke

THE MATCHLOCK

17

were arquebusiers and 20 crossbowmen. Various reasons may be conjectured for this evident distrust in the arquebus, but the facts are not to be doubted. The original lever mechanism for the matchlock was found to have some disadvantages. The match came down rather slowly into the pan, and as it was more or less above the pan a slight sputter might cause a premature discharge. (Experto

The Matchlock. Above, the sear lock; below, the trigger lock

crede—as a schoolboy I lost a lot of hair and eyebrow by just such an incident with home-made gunpowder on Armistice Night, 1918). The next step was the sear lock, in which the

jaws holding the match were on a short bend, well away from the pan, and the lever operated by pressing on the short

end of the bend. This was the same action, in which the

whole hand had to press the lever, although the action was B

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much quicker. Next comes the trigger matchlock, in which the mechanism at the firing end was much the same, but the pressure to push the match down into the pan was exerted by a trigger separately mounted. Small as it seems, this was in fact a major development. The actual lock could be readily removed from the gun, leaving the trigger in place underneath. Last of all came the snapping matchlock. Why exert energy through the trigger to press down the match into the pan? Put a spring on the match-holding jaws, let the trigger engage in a notch in a tumbler, and all you have to do is to press the trigger; down comes the match quickly and positively into the pan, with the wind of its short, swift passage making its little spark white-hot. A further refinement was a cover for the pan, to keep the touch-powder dry and in place, a valuable addition so long as the soldier

remembered to push the cover aside before he pressed the trigger.

Crude though it sounds, and in its earlier stages as it undoubtedly was, the matchlock remained the principal military firearm for two centuries; from the days when Charles of Burgundy was the most magnificent prince in Europe, till the first campaigns of John Churchill. All the great captains —Gonzago, Alva, Gustavus Adolphus, Cromwell, Conde,

Turenne—had to base their tactics on the ‘stand of pikes’, the formation of infantry with their 18-ft. pikes, backed by the matchlock musketeers. The early matchlock musket was a formidable weapon, firing a ball of 1} ozs. and having a barrel 4} ft. long. The length and weight made necessary a ‘rest’, consisting of

a wooden shaft with a spike to go into the ground and a stirrup in which to rest the gun. The unhandiness of it led to the smaller and lighter caliver, 3 ft.-6 ins. in the barrel, with a ball less than an ounce. A military manual recom-

mends that the biggest men should be the pikemen, the short strong men the musketeers while the little fellows should

THE MATCHLOCK

19

use the calivers. In the ballad, the Brave Lord Willoughby commands:

Stand to it, noble pikemen, and look you round about: And shoot you right, you bowmen, and we will keep them out: You musquet and caliver men, Do you prove true to me, PU be the foremost man in fight, says brave Lord Willoughby.

Gradually the handiness of the caliver was recognized as against the power of the musket, and in 1639 the Ordnance otder was for 15,000 matchlocks, 5,000 with 43-ft. barrels and 10,000 with 34-ft. barrels. Under Cromwell the distinction between musket and caliver disappeared, and the

standard matchlock musket was a weapon of manageable length, about 5 ft. long overall and not requiring a rest to fire it. An interest feature of the matchlock is that when the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English first voyaged to distant lands, their firearms were all matchlocks. These were

eagerly copied by the inhabitants of the countries they visited, who kept on repeating the design for centuries, usually either the trigger matchlock or the snapping matchlock. The consequence is that the collector finds that almost every specimen of matchlock that comes on offer is of Eastern origin, or occasionally North African. A matchlock of proved European source is an extremely valuable acquisition for any collection. The Eastern or African matchlock has to be judged on its merits, not snapped up regardless; not even if it has a reign-mark for 618 B.c.!

4

The Wheel-lock THE MATCHLOCK kept its place as the soldier’s weapon for nearly two centuries because it had all the essential character-

istics—cheap to produce, easy to operate, simple to repair, not readily put out of action by misuse. For the officer, for the noble huntsman, a very different firearm was developed —the wheel-lock. At the same time the principle of rifling was developed, the first example being perhaps a little eatlier than the wheel-lock, as a rifle exists which can be dated with certainty before 1508, while the earliest datable wheel-lock is 1525. The ‘very fine German gun’ which

Benevenuto Cellini received from the Duke of Florence in 1535 was certainly a wheel-lock, and most probably a rifle,

from the fact that he used a small charge of powder and a single ball, and also the long range and accuracy he claims in his memoirs. These are all very possible fora rifled wheel-lock in expert hands; it is only when he loads it with ‘a certain noiseless powder’ that the historian has to part from the artist. Nurnberg, Augsburg and Dresden have all had claimed for them the first invention of the wheel-lock; all three were towns filled with skilled clockmakers and locksmiths, and

there is no real proof which has the best claim to be the Jirst; certainly most of the best wheel-locks still existing were made in Dresden. It is essentially a clockwork job, made by skilled mechanics who had no fear of tackling an intricate piece of spring-driven machinery.

THE

WHEEL-LOCK

21

The principle of the wheel-lock is much the same as tha of the modern cigarette-lighter. The pan, instead of being on top of the barrel as in the matchlock, was built out from the side; through a slot in the

pan protruded a part of a serrated wheel, against which was pressed a piece of iron pyrites. On the wheel being rotated, a shower of sparks fell into the pan and ignited the priming powder which fired the charge. Very simple in theory; but to build this into a firearm called for mechanical skill of the very highest order.

The Wheel-lock. Note the lateral sear engaging in a hole in the wheel

Cutting the slot in the pan to receive the wheel was no child’s play, as the wheel must revolve quite freely and yet must fit so closely that no powder can escape; until the invention of ‘corned’ powder about 1560 this was impossible. The slot was made by drilling and filing, and then finishing with a stone of diameter just exceeding that of the wheel. The piece of iron pyrites was gripped in a doghead just such as held the match in a matchlock; a strong leaf spring bearing on the square base of the doghead held it firmly in one of two positions, either erect and out of all harm’s way, or pressing down firmly on the pan-cover, or the wheel when the cover was withdrawn. The serrated wheel was rotated by a strong leaf spring.

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In early examples, this acted on a stud set into the side of the wheel, while the sear engaged another stud. This, however,

allowed only about a third of the wheel to be rotated, and various devices provided for a complete rotation. In one, the wheel on which the spring acted was provided with gearteeth, which engaged with a much smaller gear-wheel mounted on the same spindle as the serrated wheel. In another, the spring-driven wheel had a chain which drove a smaller wheel on the main spindle, in much the same way as the fusée movement of a watch, which doubtless was so named as being an adaptation of the gun-lock. Combinations of both methods are to be found; the object was attained,

to give at least a complete rotation of the serrated wheel, ensuring a satisfactory shower of sparks into the pan. The pan itself was provided with a cover, so that the ptiming would not be lost. This cover was made either to swivel aside or to slide, and a drawback was that in the

excitement of action one might forget to open the pan, so that on pressing the trigger the wheel rotated ineffectively with the pan cover separating it from the pyrite. To obviate this, advanced wheel-locks had the pan-cover fitted with a spring and sear, connected with the trigger, so that on pressing the trigger the pan-cover automatically sprang out

of the way. Now one had a weapon which could be carried always loaded and ready, and which would, almost, always fire merely by pressing the trigger. The ultimate weapon, obviously. Iron pyrites were always used for ‘flints’ in wheel-locks, partly because pyrites were common and flint scarce in the Central European countries where the weapon was developed, and partly because flint was too hard, and quickly wore away the serrations of the wheel. Replacing the wheel was a job for the gunsmith, whereas replacing the pyrites was a very simple operation. The weapon was set by winding up the wheel with a large key (also called spanner or wrest)

THE

WHEEL-LOCK

23

which fitted over the square end of the spindle. The screw of the dog which held the pyrites had an identical projection, so that the same key could be used. It was customary to put a small patch of red leather between the jaws of the dog and the pyrite, to lessen the risk of the comparatively soft stone being crushed. Collectors should always see that their wheel-locks are fitted with both the pyrite and the leather— it is one of those touches which count. The spanner was always a drawback with the wheel-lock. It was loose. The ram-rod could be very conveniently stowed in the weapon itself, but not the key; so that the user had to carry with him his powder-flask, his bullet-bag and his

wrest, not in pockets but attached to his person. The usual method was by cords from the shoulder, sometimes by straps from the belt; the attachment had to be long enough

to allow free use in re-loading, but not so long as to be dangling about in the way. The problem was never quite solved. I have seen a wheel-lock with the key permanently in position on the spindle, and in this case the screw of the

dog was slotted to be tightened with a screwdriver or the back of a knife. Another idea was to use the dog as a lever, so that putting it over into the ‘away’ position wound up the mainspring; but this proved too complicated in practice. One consequence was that the key was frequently lost, and, of course, to lose it in combat was usually the end of

the fight. Therefore it is extremely rare to find a wheel-lock with a key which is certainly the one originally made for it. Even if there is a key, which is seldom enough, it is almost always a replacement. If you find a wheel-lock with a key

which, from its style of workmanship and decoration, or

maker’s or owner’s mark or arms, is without doubt the original key, you have a treasure indeed. Wheel-locks were fitted to all kinds of firearms, from

pocket pistols to great ‘wall guns’, 6 ft. long in the barrel

and more than an inch in the bore. From 1450 to 1600 was

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the golden age of the armourer; all the nobility of Europe vied in the magnificence of their tilting armour, and more even than in armour, they competed in the splendour of the firearms carried by themselves and their attendants. A pair of fine pistols was an acceptable gift for a city to give to a prince on some ‘joyous entry’; the 25-ft. long cannon at Dover, called ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket Pistol’, was, in fact,

a present from the Emperor, Charles V, to Henry VIII. Throughout the western Continent, particularly central and south, thousands of craftsmen and artists of the first order

were turning out splendid weapons, gorgeously decorated, for their opulent and ostentatious patrons. The horse and weapons became the status symbol, like the motor-car today, and usually representing a greater slice of the owner’s wealth. Knowledge of firearms was an essential part of a courtly education, and the greatest monarch in the world, Charles V, was proud to be acknowledged a competent gunsmith. The smallest type of pistol (usually called pocket pistols, although the pocket as we know it was no part of the clothing of the period) is comparatively rare, and is usually plain—a serviceable rather than an ornamental weapon. The reason may be found in the many edicts of the period, in almost every European country, prohibiting the manufacture, carrying or possession of these secret weapons, which could be carried hidden by clothing and had taken the place of the dagger as the assassin’s weapon. There was no point in spending a lot of money on decorating a pistol which could not be carried openly. Niirnberg appears to have been a chief centre of manufacture, and many of the existing examples are of all-metal construction, which no doubt accounts for their survival; besides, an all-metal

pistol would be a useful little club after its shot had been fired. Next in size was the horse-pistol, with a barrel usually

THE

WHEEL-LOCK

Zz)

about 18 ins. long, to be carried in a holster attached to the saddle. Very large numbers of quite plain service pistols were made, for it became the chief weapon of the cavalry. The tactic was for the cavalry to advance, rank by rank, at

the trot, up to a ‘stand’ of pikes, rein in, fire their pistols

and then gallop off to a safe distance to reload. Unfortunately the pikemen were always ‘interlaced’ with an equal number of musketeers, whose heavy weapons far outranged the pistols, with a much heavier bullet. Thus the horsemen tended to advance rather too rapidly, fire as soon as possible without halting, and scamper off without too much regard to keeping rank. Such desultory and ineffective tactics resulted in a corresponding laxity of discipline, and it became all too common for the cavalry, when they perceived the battle to be going against them, to leave the field

altogether, abandoning the unfortunate infantry. The battles of the seventeenth century were invariably won by the commander who could keep his cavalry in hand, and the great captains, from Gustavus Adolphus onwards, recognized that the pistol was, in fact, a menace to discipline and

of little practical utility in battle. Marlborough reduced the

issue of pistol ammunition to three rounds per campaign, and when that most dashing of British cavalry commanders, the Marquis of Anglesey, became Master of the Ordnance,

he discarded the pistol altogether as a cavalry weapon.

As the personal protection of the cavalier, however, the horse-pistol was supreme, and on such weapons was lavished all the ingenuity of the gunsmith and artist. The

most

complicated

mechanisms

were

designed:

double

barrels, usually over-and-under, with separate wheel-locks

fired by successive pulls on a single trigger; multiple barrels, firing either simultaneously or successively; totally enclosed weather-proof locks; and an axe-head or a mace wrought on the muzzle as a secondary weapon, are all to be found; although the simple straight wheel-lock, well decorated and

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in good condition, is more valued than any of these complications. Decoration ranged from the exquisite to the frankly vulgar. Ivory and rare woods for stock and butt; engraving, chasing or deep chiselling on steel; inlaying with gold, silver, or carved ivory; blueing, fire-gilding, or jewelling; the cipher, crest or full coat of arms of the owner, were

all employed in embellishing. Coats of arms are especially valuable in dating pistols; thus the earliest wheel-lock which can be dated with certainty (it is combined with a cross-bow) belonged to Maximilian, brother of the Emperor Charles V;

the arms show that it was made between his marriage in 1521 and his becoming Emperor in 1526. The fine wheel-lock pistol is the most prized of all by collectors. The highest price ever paid for a single firearm is the £5,000 by a London dealer at a 1965 auction for a fine Dresden wheel-lock. In practically perfect condition, it was made about 1610. The average price at this sale (the collection of Dr. Runes of New York) was approximately £500 per lot, some lots being pairs. At the same sale an Augsburg pistol of about 1580 made £2,300, equalling the previous record price. This, of course, was the dispersal of one of the finest and best-known collections in the world in purely private hands. At a different sale in the same year the best

price for wheel-locks was £1,350 for a pair of Dresden wheel-lock pistols, dated 1571 and with the maker’s mark of Lorenz Dressler II; this seems low by comparison, but it was a more general sale. It is still possible to find very fine examples of decorated wheel-locks at prices much less than £500, and for plain military types and incomplete or defective pistols the price drops away altogether. The next size of wheel-lock weapon is the petronel, with a barrel about 30 in. long and a very distinctive shape of butt. Here I must correct an error which will be found in almost every book about arms, to the effect that the petronel was meant to be fired while held against the chest; this is

THE WHEEL-LOCK

27

impossible. True, about 1560 Sir Roger Williams wrote about the recoil of hand-guns—‘were they stocked crooked after the French manner to be discharged on the breast, few or none could abide their recoyling’; but a crooked stock for such a purpose must have been upswept in the style of the Afghan stock, so as to bring the barrel in line with the eye. With such a stock, a part of the recoil would be ab-

sorbed in throwing the muzzle up, and if the firer wore a cuirass he might be able to ‘abide the recoyling’; but there exists no contemporary illustration of such a method of discharge, nor does any example survive of such a weapon. All the contemporary illustrations of horsemen firing show

Stock etc., of a long, Afghan matchlock. A modification of such a stock could conceivably have been held against the chest, ifprotected by a cuirass

a very short-stocked weapon held freely in the hands, without being held against any part of the torso, and many such guns survive. In general, only the heavy matchlock musket, to be fired from a rest or a wall, has what we should con-

sider a full-length stock to come to the shoulder. A consideration of the petronel will show its purpose. If the flat end of the butt were placed against the chest, the flash of the priming in the pan would take place immediately under the nose of the firer; the weapon would be pointing almost directly downwards, so that he would probably shoot his foot off; and the recoil would hit him neatly under the chin. This is improbable, and the writers who claim that

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the petronel was fired from the chest are either copying blindly from somebody else, or else have deceived themselves by combining Sir Roger Williams’s note with an imaginary etymology from po/trine. In fact, the petronel is a highly sophisticated doublepurpose weapon. It could be held and fired by one hand as a long-muzzled horse pistol. If circumstances permitted taking an aim, the flat on the end of the curved stock fitted neatly against the bicep of the upper arm, while both hands steadied the weapon in the line of the eye. Thus one could take a good aim even from horseback, the flash of the

ptiming was well away from the face, and the recoil was

A South German Petronel, late sixteenth century. The claim that the frat of the butt could be held against the chest was highly optimistic

taken on a strong but yielding muscle. No experienced shot can be in doubt that this was the method of use; if an etymology is necessary, it might be found between pefrara and mangonel—pethaps at first a light stone-shooting cross-bow? “Hailstones actually as big as cross-bow stones’, says Cellini. Certainly the cannon-petro (listed by Monson), which weighed nearly two tons, was not meant to be held against the breast. The petronel was the finest of all the wheel-lock weapons

THE

WHEEL-LOCK

29

for the use of great personages. The greatest manin England, the Earl of Leicester, had his portrait painted with his petronel, a magnificently-decorated weapon, as are indeed almost all the examples that have survived. These are few enough in private hands, although there are plenty in museums and in royal and princely collections; but such things turn up unexpectedly. There may be hanging on the gun-room wall of some English country house the identical petronel of which Leicester was so proud. The last type of wheel-lock was the long gun, of which there were many forms. Plain military weapons were made for many special purposes, all having the common requirement of being always ready for use without the necessity of the slow-match. Carbines and calivers were made with wheel-locks for cavalry use, as it was not practicable to use the match on horseback. Sentries on powder-magazines had wheel-lock

muskets,

because

of the risks of accidental

explosion with the match. Great wall-guns had matchlocks for battle use, but a number had wheel-locks for night sentry duty, to be ready for instant use without disclosing

the position by the spark. Numbers of these military weapons have survived, and are naturally of great interest, but the prizes for the collector are the splendidly decorated guns made for noble sportsmen. Short light guns, usually rifled, were made for hunting the chamois in the mountains, where the hunter had to carry his own weapon at all times in steep and dangerous places, Heavier guns, both smooth and rifled, were used for the bigger game of the plains and forests, while Northern Germany developed a highly char-

acteristic gun known as the Tschinke, easily identified by its very short and almost straight stock. All these guns are to

be found, of the finest workmanship and magnificently decorated, in most cases quite equal to the pistols but on a larger scale; but the long guns, however splendid, are for some reason not so eagerly sought for as the pistols.

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FIREARMS

All wheel-lock

COLLECTING

weapons,

FOR

AMATEURS

in reasonable

condition,

are

desirable additions to any collection. Plain military types may be had on fairly easy terms, but for the splendid firearms made for kings and great nobles one must open one’s purse wide, for good reason. Such weapons cost vast sums when they were new, and it is impossible that they can be cheap now, when they have a scarcity value added to their own intrinsic splendour.

J

The Snaphaunce OnE oF the objections to the wheel-lock was its high cost, and it isn’t surprising that its cheaper rival should be developed by the thrifty Dutch. Apart from price, the wheel-lock had its shortcomings. The loose key was always a drawback; if it were lost the weapon was useless, and to drop it during a cavalry action was disastrous. The pyrites could be crushed by the jaws which gripped it, and wore away vety rapidly. The shower of sparks was not guided directly into the pan and there was frequently a noticeable period between pressing the trigger and the discharge. All the objections were met by the Dutch lock. There was no loose essential except the ramrod; it used durable flint, the

spark was directed into the pan, cheap to repair and could stand ultimate weapon, obviously. The pan remained the same as cover but without the slot for the

it was cheap to produce, up to rough usage. The

in the wheel-lock, with a wheel. In place of the dog holding the pyrites was a similar lever, similarly actuated, but terminating in a striking-plate. The dog, now called the cock, was brought round to the other end of the lock and held a flint in its jaws. Actuated by a powerful mainspring, it was bent back by the thumb until a notch engaged with a horizontal sear; on this being released by the trigger, the flint came down sharply against the striking-plate, sending an effective spark into the pan, as long as the firer had

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remembered to slide away the cover. This last was not so

important, as the weapon was intended to be used by musketeers firing volleys controlled by an elaborate series of commands, as many as 26 successive orders being necessary to get off a volley from matchlocks. In the case of finer weapons for officers or sportsmen, an elaboration of the lock provided for the pan-cover being automatically withdrawn when the trigger was pressed.

The Snaphaunce. Note the rod from the tumbler to the pan cover, to open the pan simultaneously with the fall of the cock

Safety was ensured by keeping the pan-cover in place, by not cocking the piece, or by keeping the striking-plate! swung forward, away from the pan; to make it ready for instant use was quick and easy, and it was possible to let the cock down gently at any time to relieve the mainspring. The wheel-lock tended to jam if it were left wound up too long, and it was awkward to let the spring down without discharging the gun. 1T use the expression ‘striking-plate’ for clarity; the correct word is ‘hammer’, but the terminology of firearms is confusing enough without using an active to denote a passive.

or

miquelet belt pistols; century nineteenth early the of bottom, a miquelet pistol

ip, a pair of early

seventeenth-century

Top, an eighteenth-century pistol with Lorenzoni repeating action; bottom, an early Colt single-action revolver with pearl grip Collection of seventeenth-century flintlock pistols, some heavily decorated with silver

THE SNAPHAUNCE

33

The etymology of the name is simple; the cock (Hahn) was made to snap (schnappen); hence Schnapphahn, anglicized into Snaphaunce, with, of course, various spellings all over

Northern Europe. An absurd story gained credence among quite a number of nineteenth-century writers to the effect that farmyard marauders were called Schnap-hahnen, from their habit of snapping up chickens, and that they devised the lock so that the glow of the match would not give them away at night: as if chicken-thieves could ever invent a major improvement in firearms. Nobody takes this seriously

now. Snaphaunces were first made in Holland about 1550, and their manufacture and use spread quickly over all Northern Europe, and examples are known of Italian origin. Snaphaunce muskets were issued to Queen Elizabeth’s troops for an Irish expedition in 1580. It did not supersede the wheellock, but existed along with it. It was the northern weapon, and it can be said in a general way that the Protestant

countries adopted the snaphaunce while the Roman Catholic countries preferred the wheel-lock. In all countries, and almost to the end of the seventeenth century, the matchlock was the standard weapon for the private soldier, who might, however, be issued with the more modern and expensive

weapons for special duties. In Scotland, which had close connections with Holland, the snaphaunce is almost the first type of fine weapon made in the country. Possibly it was the safety of the snaphaunce which caused the trigger guard to be dispensed with and the absence of the trigger guard remained typical of Scottish firearms to a late period and much more sensitive locks. From various contemporary documents, such as Ordnance accounts, it might be deduced that snaphaunces were made in large numbers throughout the seventeenth century; but this is not the case. Terms were very loosely used at that period, and ‘snaphaunce’ meant any weapon with a snapping c

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cock; and most of the ‘snaphaunces’ were, in fact, the more

modern flintlocks. The distinction is easy; if the strikingplate is quite separate from the pan-cover, and pivoted at a distance in front of it, then it is a snaphaunce; if the striking-

plate and pan-cover are in one piece, then it is a flintlock. Snaphaunces, whether pistols or long guns, are rare and fine examples much sought after. Even the military types ate very scarce, because when the flintlock came in many old snaphaunces were converted to flintlocks, a comparatively easy job. Such conversions, if recognized, are naturally of much greater value than the flintlock which they appear to be. No reasonable opportunity of acquiring a snaphaunce should be missed, even those of Eastern origin. Just as the Portugese and the Spaniards brought the matchlock to nations who kept on copying them for centuries, so the Dutch introduced the snaphaunce which

was faithfully copied in many parts of the world up to the end of the nineteenth century. Even these late examples are of great interest, and are usually much more elaborately decorated than Eastern matchlocks.

6

The Miquelet THE SNAPHAUNCE

was a considerable advance, in that it

eliminated all detached and losable parts, except the ramrod, which could be securely housed; but it still left the difficulty that one had to remember several things—one had to bring over the striking plate and swing aside the pan-cover, for example—which presented no great difficulty on the field of battle, where every single action was subject to the word of command, but were distinct disadvantages in the pistol as the personal protection of the traveller. Something was wanted that should avoid the cost and complication of the wheel-lock, and yet be more ready for instant use than the snaphaunce. Such a weapon was developed in Northern Spain, about 1600, by whom not quite certain. Simon Marquarte was brought into Spain by Charles V, himself an excellent gunsmith, to introduce the manufacture of wheel-

locks into that country and it is to his son, another Simon, that the new invention is generally attributed, with a high

probability. Some romantic-minded persons have supposed the lock to be the invention of a band of Pyrenean bandits known as los Miguletes, the little Michaels, but actually the

now usual name miquelet was not applied before the nineteenth century. In Spain it was earlier called the pati//a, no doubt from the shape of the cock; it has been called the Mediterranean

lock and excellent Continental authorities,

for example the Musée

d’armes at Brussels, call it the

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Catalonian lock; but I am writing in English, and all English collectors call it the miquelet. The great advance in the miquelet was combining the

striking plate with a pivoted pan-cover, at such an angle that when struck by the flint the pan cover opened and allowed the spark to fall into the pan. This was a most important invention, and could only have arisen from long study by an expert in previous devices. Hundreds of millions of flintlocks were to be made on this principle, and with a thing so customary we are apt to forget the credit due to the inventor who first thought it out. Most of the works of the miquelet were on the outside. The cock was shaped rather like a foot and shin, pivoted at the ankle-bone, and having the dogs to hold the flint about the kneecap. A powerful mainspring bore down on the toe. The screw which firmed the jaws on to the flint was fitted with a large strong loop above, so that sufficient pressure could be exerted by the finger and thumb; or if necessary a small lever of any kind could be put through the loop. The combined pan-cover and striking-plate had a spring that could hold it either open or closed, sufficiently firmly to raise a spark from the flint as it opened when struck. The only interior part was the sear, which projected through the lock-plate to engage a hole in the cock, usually at the heel, when cocked; the action of the trigger withdrew the sear and the flint came down smartly on the striking-plate. As time went on there was perceived the need for a half-cock position, in which the pan could be opened or closed for loading but the weapon could not be discharged; this was provided by a second sear. The lock was applied to all sorts of firearms, but almost all that have come down to us are pistols. They are scarce, not rare, for their manufacture continued in Spain well into

the nineteenth century, their strength and dependability reinforcing the native Spanish conservatism. Many early

THE MIQUELET

37

examples, especially Italian ones, are most elaborately decorated, every part of the ironwork being carved, the barrel deeply chiselled and the stock ornamented with highrelief work. Late examples are plain, with only a little engraving on the lock-plate, round the pivot of the cock, and the edge of the butt-plate, the loop for the dog-screw being a plain ring. These later pistols are also very well made and were esteemed as serviceable weapons long after the percussion cap had replaced the flint throughout the rest of Europe. A miquelet pistol is a very desirable addition to any general collection, and no opportunity of acquiring one should be missed whatever the age. Even the mid-nineteenth century models have a pleasing aspect of antiquity, with so much of the mechanism on the outside of the lock-plate. Earlier and more elaborate examples are, of course, correspondingly more valuable. They are very often found in excellent condition, owing to the strength of every part. There is sometimes a good deal of wear on the hole in the heel of the cock which engages the nose of the sear, but this

should always be left as it is. Every collection should have at least one example of this pleasing and important step in

the development of firearms.

vf

The Flintlock THE ‘TRUE’ flintlock is supposed to have been first made by Marin le Bourgeoys in Normandy about 1615, and this is highly probable, as he came of a family of competent gunsmiths. It was a development rather than an invention, a

combination of the best of the snaphaunce and of the miquelet. From the former he took the enclosed mechanism,

with the mainspring acting on a tumbler held by a sear, released by the trigger; only the cock, on the same shaft, was outside the lock-plate. From the miquelet he took the

combined pan-cover and striking-plate, from henceforward to be known as the frizzen, from the furrowing or frizzling on the face of the striking-plate to facilitate spark-striking. There was, however, a new feature. The sear, instead of

being pivoted so as to move laterally, was now swung vertically, and instead of having notches to engage arms on the tumbler, or studs projecting through the lock-plate, it was a pawl, having a point which engaged in two deep notches

in the tumbler,

to give half-cock and full-cock

positions. This was a development of great importance, as the half-cock was much safer than any predecessor, and enabled a really effective weapon to be put into the hands of the common soldier, whose intelligence in those days was not highly rated. The pull, however, was heavier than that required for the lateral sear, and in England at least the old release was

THE FLINTLOCK

39

preferred, although all the other improvements were adopted. The need for a safe half-cock was imperative, and the method was to fit an extra catch, or dog, outside the lock-plate, which engaged in a notch cut in the cock at such

a position that when engaged by the dog it was positively fixed in the half-cock position. This English lock or dog lock was used for all military weapons, while there was a decided preference for the French lock among private buyers. Later the French lock was adopted for military muskets also, but the dog-catch was retained as an addi-

tional safety. When, between 1700 and 1710, the Birmingham manufacturers commenced supplying complete locks, these were all ‘with ketches’. During the wars with Louis IV the London gunmakers were unable to cope with their orders, and were accustomed to get all their ironwork in the rough from Birmingham. Muskets were even bought in Holland, whose great part in Marlborough’s wars is quite insufficiently recognized in England, even now.

The Dog-lock. The lateral sear engages fingers on the tumbler to give half and full cock, while the dog behind the hammer gives additional safety

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The English-lock still featured the lateral sear

Ordnance

now

introduced

a system of buying from

Birmingham supplies of assembled locks, barrels, triggers,

brass furniture, in fact all the metal-work of the musket, and

putting these in store in the Tower to be issued as required to the London gunmakers for finishing, stocking and fitting up. An Ordnance Viewer was stationed in Birmingham, to inspect the stores produced there; but the ‘proving’ of the barrels was done at the Tower. The Birmingham smiths were at first averse to this arrangement, and preferred to sub-contract to the London gunsmiths. The reason was simple; a private purchaser would pay sooner or later (although long credit was the rule) and legal process could be brought to bear; whereas delivering goods to Government and getting paid for them were two very different things, and the Crown could not be sued. A manufacturer had to be a large capitalist to be able to accept Government orders in those days.

Karly in the eighteenth century the double bridle lock was introduced, the bridle being a shaped plate to cover the

THE

FLINTLOCK

41

working parts and provide independent hubs for the pivots. There was much less chance of parts working loose, and the lock could more readily be removed and replaced. The loosening of screws continued to be a problem, and in 1784 Jonathon Hennem produced a lock which had no screws whatever, being held together by spring clips fitting into grooves in the ends of the various pins. This was improved upon by other gunsmiths, notably the famous Henry Nock, who produced a lock that was not only screwless but also totally enclosed. There were many modifications of this lock, many made by Nock himself, and screws were not entirely eliminated;

but the general principles remained unchanged throughout the subsequent history of the flintlock.

The French-lock. Note the vertical sear, with half- and full-cock notches in the tumbler. With various modifications, this pattern remained standard for two centuries

8

The Flintlock Musket THE TRUE flintlock musket was well established in England by the time of the civil wars, although it is always difficult to identify by documents, as the term snaphaunce was used for all types of flintlocks during most of the seventeenth century. The matchlock remained the chief infantry weapon for much of the period, flintlocks being reserved for cavalry carbines, pistols and special duties where the match was unsuitable. By 1700 the flintlock

musket had become the standard weapon in all European armies, and remained so from before Blenheim until long after Waterloo, during which period many millions of muskets were manufactured. The musket as the sole weapon of the infantry was made possible by the introduction of the bayonet, about 1660. At first these were plug bayonets, with a short wooden handle which fitted into the muzzle of the musket, and of course

prevented it from firing; but before 1700 the socket bayonet was produced and the musket became more or less standardized for a century and a quarter. The musket was 5 ft. 2 ins. overall length, with a barrel of 3 ft. ro ins., and weighing

10 lbs. 12 ozs. With the bayonet fixed it was 6 ft. 8 ins. overall, and weighed 12 lbs. The bore was ? in., and the

balls were 14 to the pound. The ‘windage’, the difference between the diameter of the ball and the bore, was about

1/zoth of an inch, so that long range and accurate aiming

THE

FLINTLOCK

MUSKET

43

were not expected. Rapid fire by steady troops was the desideratum. Solid bodies of infantry marched up to each other and opened fire at a range of about fifty yards, and well-trained soldiers could get off four rounds a minute. Loading was by paper cartridge, which contained both the ball and the charge. Holding the ball in his fingers (through the paper) the soldier bit off the other end and poured the powder down the barrel, where enough drifted through the touch-hole to prime the pan; then down went the bullet, and the paper formed the wad, which was rammed down tight by the ramrod, which was then replaced in its ‘pipes’. To do all this, and aim and fire, in fifteen seconds called for

a high standard of training. Marlborough was the first of the great captains to attach prime importance to fire-power and mobility of infantry. Whereas the French fired rank by rank, Marlborough trained his men to fire by platoons; rank firing tended to become straggling, as the better loaders got ahead, but platoon-firing, under immediate

command

of

the platoon officer, continued to give a solid volley even after a prolonged engagement. In 1768 the Short Land Musket was introduced, being 3 ft. 6 ins. in the barrel, and it was found to be just as effective in every way and much handier for men of average height. Both the long and the short pattern are called the Brown Bess, a handsome well-made weapon, with a high comb to the butt. The earliest examples have iron butt-plates but after 1725 all the furniture is brass, very well fitted. The

standard of viewing and proof was very high, and it was quite usual for a quarter of the muskets submitted to be rejected. Shorter guns were made for sea service, with 3 ft. 1 in. and 2 ft. 2 ins. barrels, for handiness in fightingtops and boarding, and the standard does not appear to be so high. Indeed, during the whole of the eighteenth century it seems to have been the custom of the Ordnance, if they had some type which the Army did not like, to palm it off on

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to the Navy, who appear to have taken whatever it was given without demur. Naval officers, of course, attached little importance to small arms, putting their faith on the

great guns. Nowadays a carbine is thought of as a short musket, but the earliest examples were as long as the Land Muskets, but of smaller bore, -65 in. as against the -75 in. of the musket. It was not until well on in the century that short barrels of

less than 30 in. were adopted. These cavalry carbines have two distinguishing features. The sling had its lower swivel on a ring which ran freely on a rod attached to the side of the stock, so that a horseman could bring the carbine round and fire without unslinging it. Secondly, the ram-rod had a swivel fitted at the muzzle, so that the rod could be with-

drawn from its socket, swung round on the swivel and pushed down the barrel; while it was secure from any danger of being dropped. These imptovements made the cavalry carbine an extremely useful weapon. It was not used in the pitched battle, where the sabre was the only weapon for horse troops, but it was invaluable in all the everyday work—patrolling, skirmishing, foraging and keeping down occupied territory. The outbreak of the French Revolutionary War in 1793 found the stock of arms at a very low ebb. Many historians have blamed the officers of Ordnance for this, but it really

was not their fault. In Britain it is never possible to persuade Parliament to vote sufficient money for defence—there are always more popular outlets for the taxpayer’s-money. At this period very few gunmakers really wanted to work for Government. The very highest quality was insisted upon; proof was strict and rejects many, and getting a warrant on the Treasury and having it paid were two very different

matters. Any person whatever who had anything to do with Government involving money had to be able and willing to wait for years before payment. As an example, papers in

THE

FLINTLOCK

MUSKET

45

my hands refer to a Volunteer Corps which was formed in 1803 and disbanded in 1806; but it was

1814 before the

officer commanding the battalion had his accounts finally settled. In 1793 the demand from private persons for arms was higher than ever before, and the Ordnance had a formidable rival for the services of the gunsmiths—the Honourable East India Company. This trading company, which ‘ruled kingdoms and sold tea’, maintained a larger standing army than did the British Government; it accepted a simpler, plainer musket, and the standards of proof were not nearly so severe; and above all, it paid on delivery. It is, therefore, not surprising that the armouries of the Honourable Company were well stocked while the Tower was almost empty; and early in 1794 the Government was reduced to begging the Company to sell them muskets, to which the Court of Directors “did most readily consent’, transferring during that year nearly 40,000 muskets to Ordnance. Muskets were obtained from abroad in fair quantities and various patterns tried, while the gunmakers were sweetened by getting extra rates if they had to wait for payment. On the resumption of the war in 1803, after the short Peace of Amiens, there was a real threat of invasion.

Nearly half a million men formed themselves into Volunteer Associations, all clamouring for muskets. There was nothing for it, Ordnance had to accept the musket the gunmakers

wanted to produce; the India Pattern musket became the standard. In ten years more than a million and a half muskets of this pattern were produced, until the Tower could hold no more and stores had to be set up in various cities throughout the country.

The India Pattern was shorter than the Brown Bess, being 39 ins. in the barrel; with the improvements in gunpowder this length was found to be perfectly effective, and much more convenient. All the brass furniture was smaller and less elaborate, and there was no longer insistence on the very

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best quality of walnut for the stock. It is a sound, plain gun, fit for its purpose and suited for mass production in time of war. Its main interest for collectors is its availability. In 1829 there were three quarters of a million of this pattern set up at the Tower, and as new weapons were under consideration half a million were sold off, mostly to colonies and friendly powers. They are not difficult to find, and a comprehensive collection should include one; but of course it is

not to be compared with the earlier and far superior Brown Bess, the most desirable of all military muskets for the collector.

9

The Flintlock Rifle THE VERY FIRST fifle still in existence belonged to Maximilian I, and from the coat of arms it must have belonged to him between 1493 and 1508. Indeed, this may well have

been the first rifle ever. Maximilian was a mighty hunter,

expert both with the crossbow and firearms. He is said to have laughed at the idea that it had pleased God to ‘give the Papacy to that drunken beast Julius and the Empire to a chamois-hunter like me’. In a book on hunting of 1500 he states that he has shot a chamois with a firearm—which would require a weapon of much greater range and accuracy than any smooth-bore. As a crossbowman Maximilian would no doubt understand the method of laying the ‘feather’ diagonally, so as to make the bolt spin in the flight, greatly increasing accuracy. He may very well have ordered his gunsmith (perhaps Caspar Zollner of Vienna) to try something to make a bullet spin. This is just the sort of weapon that would have been produced for the experiment. The barrel is of bronze, tapering by steps and with a cannon-ring at the muzzle. Inside are cut about twelve (much worn) grooves on a very slow spiral; in the infancy of the art it was much easier to cut such a pattern in bronze than in iron. The lock is missing, but must have been a matchlock, perhaps a snapping one. It has a blade foresight and an aperture backsight, all very modern. It is a short,

handy weapon for the mountain and there can be no doubt

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that with a well-fitting bullet, when the grooving was new it would be very accurate indeed at a hundred yards, which is as near as anybody can get to a chamois. The grooving, by slightly retarding the progress of the bullet down the

barrel, would allow the slow-burning powder of the time to develop its full power and thus greatly increase the velocity of the bullet. It has been supposed by some that rifling originated in straight grooves intended to reduce fouling, and that by some fortunate error a spiral grooving was produced and found to have advantages. This theory is quite untenable. Every practical shooter knows that a perfectly smooth bore

is much less liable to foul and much easier to clean than a grooved one; and it is very difficult to produce an effective spiral grooving; it could never possibly happen by accident. The progress of the rifle was slow, no doubt due to the difficulty and cost of cutting the spiral grooves. Up to the end of the seventeenth century most rifles had wheel-locks and were richly ornamented, treasured possessions of the noble sportsmen who owned them. There are small-bore (half-inch or less) short, light rifles evidently intended specially for chamois-hunting where every ounce of weight is an added peril among the dread crags. There are larger rifles of musket bore (about # in.), still quite short, seldom exceeding 30 ins. in the barrel, for the big game which abounded in the forests of Central Europe—elk, bison, red deer, wild boar and wolf. These rifles are always known as ‘Jager’ rifles, from the German for ‘huntsman’, and are often most elaborately decorated with carving and inlays.

The flintlocks of the early eighteenth-century Jager rifles have occasionally a ‘set’ trigger, usually straight, and fitted in front of the ordinary trigger. This can be used as usual, as a trigger with perhaps a six-pound pull, but if the ‘set’ trigger is pressed first then the main becomes a hair-trigger which will fire on the slightest touch. This was an advantage

Turn-off cannon-barrelled

pocket pistol. Birmingham, circa 1760

From top to bottom, a finely-decorated holster pistol, late seventeenth century; flintlock duelling pistol, late eighteenth century; Spanish miquelet pistol, late eighteenth century; Scottish Doune pistol, all-steel, mid-eighteenth century

La —

pe 8:Ei BI:

i.

ea AilySagte eke nSeepcem mney

—

Collection of eighteenth-century flintlock horse pistols

THE

FLINTLOCK

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when all shooting was done standing, and usually at moving objects among trees. All Jager rifles are of the greatest interest to collectors, and there is considerable international competition when a fine example makes its appearance in the saleroom. Even quite plain or defective specimens should not be missed, so long as they have wheel or flint locks. The nineteenthcentury percussion-lock rifles of the same general build are often called Jagers, but there are plenty of them about, especially in Europe. The rifle was also used as a military weapon. As early as 1630 the Danish army included some companies of riflemen, and not long afterwards certain of the French Horse Guards were issued with a few rifled carbines as an experiment— not, apparently, a success. The Bavarian troops who opposed Prince Eugene’s wing of the army at Blenheim included riflemen, whose fire from the wooded slopes prevented any outflanking movement by the Prince, and who played their part in covering the orderly retreat of their wing of the French-Bavarian army. By the middle of the eighteenth century all armies of Central and Northern Europe included companies of riflemen, some of whom carried adaptations of the Jager rifles they were accustomed to use as hunters, while others had specially designed military weapons—still much shorter than the musket but with heavy octagonal barrels, almost full-length stocks and fitted for a bayonet. There were always difficulties, however,

in firing the rifle with the bayonet fixed. These early European military rifles, while much plainer in every way than the gorgeous weapons made for wealthy sportsmen, are nevertheless very desirable additions to any collection. There are not so many of them about, but they ate to be found from time to time, particularly in the countries where they were made, and are well worth

acquiring. D

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At first the rifles were loaded by pouring in the powder, and then putting the ball into the muzzle, for which it was too tight a fit; it was then struck several times with a mallet to force it into the grooving, whereafter it was thrust down with some difficulty with the ramrod. Eventually a better system was evolved, using greased patches of thin cloth wrapped round the ball, which took the rifling without having to be hammered so hard as to deform the ball. Almost all rifles are fitted with a little box let into the stock,

fitted with a sliding wooden lid in early examples and a hinged brass lid in all later types, whether sporting or military. These are always called patch boxes, from the notion that they were used to carry the greased patches; but no trace of grease has ever been found in these patch boxes, and it is now thought that some other use was intended. In one that I have is a brass cylinder, roughly constructed, of just such a size as to hold the proper charge of powder for the rifle. The box is just the depth to hold a ball, and could contain three balls and three charges. Was not then the ‘patch-box’ really intended to hold an emergency supply of ammunition, in case the rifleman became separated from all

his other equipment? It is a tentative theory, and I cannot produce any contemporary evidence to support it; but I

like it. In the middle of the eighteenth century some German gunsmiths migrated to Pennsylvania and set up their trade there. At first they made their native weapon, the short heavy Jager, with a sling, which the shooter used not only for carrying but also twisted round the forehand to steady the shot. The needs in Eastern America, however, were

different from those of Central Europe. The deer which comprised most of the game were comparatively small, the black bear was not given to attacking and the only dangerous creature was the Red Indian, who often showed a certain resentment at having the lands of his fathers taken

THE

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over by immigrant strangers. The sling was discarded, for the frontiersman liked to have his rifle always handy, not slung behind; the barrel was lengthened, for greater range and accuracy, and the bore reduced, because there was no

target calling for a heavy bullet. Thus was developed the splendid weapon which some collectors nowadays want to call the Pennsylvania rifle, from its State of origin, but which at the time was called the long rifle, or the American rifle, or the Kentucky rifle, or the pea rifle, this last from

the size of the ball. A contemporary has described the process of loading: “The rifleman places the ball, about the size of a large pea, on the flat of his left hand, then pours powder over it from his flask until the ball is just covered. He then lifts the ball,

pours the powder down the muzzle, wraps the ball in a greased patch and rams it well down. No wad is used, for the patch holds all secure.’ This amount of powder would be a fairly heavy charge, but the length of the barrel would no doubt allow for complete combustion. Certainly the Kentucky rifle and its expert marksmen became legendary throughout the world. One does not have to swallow all the marvellous tales one reads in contemporary newspapers or the fiction of Fenimore Cooper; there can be no doubt that in the 1770s the Ameri-

can backwoodsman was the most skilled and practised marksman in the world, just as his weapon was the longestranging and most accurate. At the beginning of the American Rebellion (it doesn’t become a Revolution until successful) the first ten companies of volunteers were all riflemen. Firing from cover at long range, they had a devastating effect on the close ranks of the British, whose only hope was to close with the bayonet; a hope never realized as the riflemen had a whole continent into which to retreat. The fact that irregular, untrained volunteers could have such an impact on regular

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troops attracted world-wide attention, and the rifle assumed

an absorbing interest. Companies of Hessian mercenary riflemen were hired for the British Army and showed themselves to be excellent marksmen as well as resolute soldiers; there was, however, no British general officer who could

adapt himself to this kind of warfare, whereas General Washington, apart from his splendid personal character, had a complete knowledge of the terrain, of his own men, and of his opponents. It is, however, an error to suppose that the War of Independence was won by the rifle. It was essentially a skirmisher’s weapon. When it came to forming a real army, Washington trained his formations after the European

model, with smooth-bore musket and bayonet. Only such troops were fit for the clash of armies, the attack or defence

of strong positions. The rate of fire of the musket was three ot four times faster than the rifle, and the American rifle had

no bayonet. Riflemen were quite unable to assault a defended position and unreliable in defence. Their method was to fire from cover, then retreat out of fire altogether in order to load, which took about a minute, during which time the

enemy would advance a hundred yards. With an unloaded rifle it was impossible to overcome the bayonet and the riflemen tended to merge into the landscape when hard ptessed. Washington ordered folding spears to be issued to riflemen, but it is dubious whether this ever materialized;

with his complete understanding of this kind of war, he ordered the commanders of rifle companies never to fight in any position where there was not a good line of retreat.

At Saratoga the riflemen on both sides were used as flanking companies, and it was the American demonstration of their

ability to defeat the best Regular troops with musket and bayonet that led France, Spain and Holland to rush to the aid of the victor. The fully-developed Kentucky is a graceful weapon, with

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a long curving stock, without comb; sometimes quite plain, sometimes decorated with metal inlays, usually brass or pewter, occasionally silver. They still exist in fair quantities, having always been treasured relics of justly-admired ancestors; but they are very difficult for anybody in Britain to acquire. There are very few in Europe, and exchange difficulties make it practically impossible to raise the large number of dollars necessary to purchase one in America.

There are quite a number of shooting clubs in America

which continue to use the Kentucky rifle, and its range and accuracy after nearly two centuries completely justify the claim made for it, ‘the finest flintlock rifle ever made’.

As a military weapon the rifle fell down on its slow rate of fire; the bullet had to be forced down a yard of barrel which was too small for it. The obvious remedy was to load at the other end, but the means of doing so were not so obvious. The very first cannon were breech-loaders, and Henry VIII had several breech-loading hand-arms made; attempts were continually being made, but the problem remained insurmountable—to make a gas-tight breech which could be quickly opened and closed, allowing for the heating of the metal, the corrosive products of combustion and the natural excitement of a man in action. The successive experiments are of great interest to the student, but not really to the collector, for there are none

to collect; they are all in

museums or national collections. The first practical breech-loader was devised by a Frenchman, Isaac de la Chaumette, during the Spanish Succession wars. Being a Huguenot, he found life in France too difficult, and came to England in 1721, where he took out a patent on his invention. By this patent, the breech was closed by a vertical screwed plug, which was fixed at the lower side to

the trigger guard, which acted as a lever to turn the screw. When screwed down, the breech was open and ball and powder could be expeditiously loaded; then tilting the

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weapon downwards, the plug was screwed up again, the pan primed, and all was ready. The idea was perfectly sound, but insufficiently developed. In practice, the screwed block

could come out altogether, losing the charge, and it was difficult to find the thread again; the products of combustion forced their way into the thread, and the heat of frequent

discharges caused jamming. It was not until 1776 that all these defects were remedied by Patrick Ferguson, who produced the first practical breech-loading rifle in that year. As a boy of fourteen Ferguson was commissioned as a cornet in the Scots Greys and had spent his life in active setvice, though with intervals when ill-health retired him to his father’s estate of Pitfour in Aberdeenshire. In 1776,

at the age of thirty-two, he had the rank of Captain, and would normally not have the least chance of getting his inventions known at the Horse Guards; but his father was

a prominent Member of Parliament, a personal friend of the Pitt family, a man of influence; and Patrick was able to demonstrate his rifle, made for him by the famous Durs Egg, before all the ‘top brass’ at Woolwich. The demonstration quite astounded the experienced officers present. Although a storm of wind and rain raged throughout the whole period, Captain Ferguson hit a small target with every shot at two hundred yards, firing four shots a minute. He was able to get off six shots in one minute; he could fire four accurate

shots a minute while advancing at the quick step of four miles an hour. This was combining the quick fire of the musket with the accuracy and range of the rifle; obviously, the ultimate weapon. The British troops in America had been clamouring for rifles, and the Viscount Townshend, the Master-General of the Ordnance, had ordered a thousand, close copies of the

muzzle-loading Jager; 200 in Hamburg and 200 apiece from four Birmingham gunsmiths, at three guineas apiece. Lord Townshend now intimated that no more muzzle-loaders

THE FLINTLOCK RIFLE

55

would be required, and ordered from each of the four gun-

smiths twenty-five rifles of the Ferguson pattern, appointing

him to supervise the manufacture, along with William King, the Master Furbisher. The price allowed was £4 each, with

bayonet. Meantime a Rifle Company was made up, mainly of Highlanders accustomed to the use of the rifle for deerstalking. After a demonstration at Windsor before the King, Ferguson sailed with his company for America in time to take part in the battle of Brandywine Hill, where he was severely wounded in one arm. It was, of course, the worst possible deployment of manpower to put a technical expert like Ferguson in the forefront of the battle, whatever his undoubted courage and leadership; but there it was, and in view of his probably lengthy incapacity, the C-in-C, General Sir William Howe, decided to disband the survivors of his Company and incorporate them in the flank companies of various regiments. At the same time he let Ferguson understand that he still wanted to retain him when he recovered from his wound. It would have been far better if Ferguson had gone back to England, where with his genius and experience and his father’s influence he might very well have completely rearmed the British Army; but to retire from the battle area was incompatible with the ideas of a Scottish gentleman. He was back in service at the end of 1778, served throughout 1779, and in 1780, with the substantive rank of Major, was appointed Inspector-General of the Loyalist Militia,

with the brevet rank of Lieut.-Colonel. He was in command of a battalion of this Militia at the battle of King’s Mountain in October 1780, when by one of the frequent errors of higher command the battalion was put in against a four times superior enemy, and was wiped out completely, Ferguson being killed (by eight bullets) in his correct position in front. It has been frequently said that the Militia under Fer-

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guson’s command were armed with his rifle, but there is no evidence to support this. Certainly Ordnance did not pay for any more than the original hundred, of which only one specimen remains which can be identified. Rifles were made of Ferguson pattern for the East India Company, but the quantity is not known. They were also made by such famous gunsmiths as Henry Nock and Durs Egg for private users, of very superior quality. There is a considerable variation in the bore and in the length of barrel, showing that they were made to individual requirements. Although every

detail of the Ferguson rifle is well known, it is the scarcest of the leading weapons, and is perhaps the greatest treasure which may be sought by the collector. There may still be some unknown specimens somewhere, more probably in India or America than in Britain. No opportunity of acquiring one should be missed, whatever the condition—it is almost certain to be cracked across the stock—it is still the collector’s dream. It seems most extraordinary that the Ferguson rifle was dropped by Ordnance, when there was no longer anyone to push it. It was fairly expensive; it needed a well-trained man to get the best out of it; and the hole for the plug-socket weakened the stock at its thinnest part. None of these difficulties was at all insuperable, but the British Army had to wait ninety years for an efficient breech-loading rifle. Interest in the rifle continued, and the new MasterGeneral of the Ordnance, the Duke of Richmond, a busy-

minded projector, had many experiments carried out. He ordered from Durs Egg thirty sample carbines, some rifled, some smooth, of various lengths, all to have Hennem’s locks and a breech-loading mechanism which Egg claimed to have invented, but which was merely a copy of one which the Austrian Army had used for some years and discarded for the usual cause—it was not gas-tight. Several other experiments were in progress when the outbreak of war

THE

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with the French Revolutionary government in 1793 put an

end to experiment. Since the American War there had been many advocates

of the rifle among senior officers. Close study of Bonaparte’s astounding victories in Italy revealed the general picture of the tactics. After a heavy bombardment by artillery, large

numbers of riflemen, ‘clouds of “rail/eurs’, went forward in

very open order, taking every advantage of the ground; under cover of their fire, a dense column of heavy infantry marched up to the already shaken opponents; when they wavered, the cavalry dashed in and scattered them. The British General Staff considered that they had a complete answer to all this, except the ‘sharpshooters’; rifles, and more

especially riflemen, were required, for it takes much longer to make a rifleman than a rifle. At first five thousand rifles were ordered from Germany, at a cheap price; they were correspondingly inferior, and were used to arm a miscellany of auxiliary troops who were experienced with the rifle. Meanwhile the decision was made to train a corps of riflemen and arm them with a British rifle. A Corps of Riflemen, of eight companies, was established in October

1800, under the command

of Colonel

Coote

Manningham, who had long been an enthusiastic advocate of the rifle. Afterwards they were commanded by Lieut-Col. William Stewart, and after the renewal of war in 1803 three regiments were trained at Shorncliffe Camp by Sir John Moore, the greatest commander of men the British Army

ever produced. With their special training, special weapon, and distinctive green uniform, the Rifle Brigade felt themselves to be a corps d’élite, quite equal with the Brigade of Guards ;and they proved it on almost every battlefield of the long war. Under Moore’s training, every man had complete confidence in his officer, his comrade, himself, and his rifle.

The rifle chosen was designed and manufactured by Ezekiel Baker, a well-known gunsmith with a large estab-

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lishment in Whitechapel. He submitted a number of specimens, including some of musket bore, which was considered too heavy; the one selected was of carbine bore, ‘625 in., the barrel being 30 ins. long, with seven grooves giving one quarter turn on the length of the barrel. This was as quick rifling as the low-velocity round lead ball could take with any advantage; on a later experimental rifle Baker increased to a half-turn, which was hopelessly inaccurate. When one considers that the modern highvelocity rifle gives three complete turns in 30 ins., one begins to appreciate the many considerations which arise in firearm design. There was an ordinary type of flintlock, a box in the butt with a brass lid, and brass butt- and side-plates, the last of a very simple pattern. The stock extended right to the muzzle, finishing off with a brass nose-piece. A bracket was built on to the side of the muzzle to receive the bayonet. This was, in fact, a short sword, about 23 or 24 ins. in

length, with an ordinary hilt plus a fitting for the bracket. The great length was supposed to compensate for the shortness of the rifle as compared with the musket. When fixed, it was as bad as a bayonet could be; its weight pulled the aim down and to the right, and in any case it got in the way of the blast of gases which followed the bullet, so that it was not practical to fire the rifle with the bayonet fixed. The rifleman fixed his bayonet after he had ceased firing. Vatious attempts were made to provide a socket bayonet, the stock being cut back from the muzzle to accommodate it, but this interfered with the foresight; and though several very ingenious light bayonets were produced they came up against the final objection that the riflemen /iked the swordbayonet. It looked well as a side-arm, and it was extremely useful for chopping firewood and frying bacon. All Baker rifles have a well-shaped trigger guard, giving a grip for the non-trigger fingers, and with the swivel for

the sling attached to the fore-part. The earliest models have

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a fairly large two-compartment patch-box, with an ogee end to the brass cover-plate;

later ones

have a smaller box

with a rounded end to the cover, and only one compartment. The earliest ones were issued with a small wooden mallet (cost 24d.) for starting the bullet down the grooves, but this was very unpopular and it was found better to rely on the comparative elasticity of the greased patch and the weight of the steel ramrod. Early models have the ramrod fitting into a hole drilled in the stock, later ones have the stock slotted for most of the length of the rod, to lessen the risk of jamming. The Baker was a sound military rifle, and remained the standard issue until about 1830, when percussion began to supersede the flintlock. It was

not, of course, issued in

anything like such quantities as the musket, but it was highly desired by the Volunteers of 1803, who greatly embarassed Ordnance by their clamour for arms; half a million of them were enrolled ina month. A letter in my possession, from the Marquis of Titchfield, Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, to the commander of a battalion, ends ‘if it is the pleasure of the Corps, that one company should be a rifle company, there will be no objection thereto, provided they do not expect to receive rifles from the Government, which has none to

ive.” ; There are a fair number of Baker rifles to be found, and the

collector can afford to be discriminating. It should be complete with all its brass furniture and its steel ramrod, and should be in good order. Slings are seldom found, but an original one is, of course, an advantage. The sword-bayonet is relatively scarce. An early issue Baker with its original sling, sword-bayonet and scabbard, and wooden mallet, would be a find indeed.

IO

The Flintlock Pistol THE FLINTLOCK PISTOL was so much cheaper than the wheel-lock that it rapidly became almost the universal weapon for personal protection—or assault, for that matter, as it was the favourite weapon of footpads and highwaymen. There were frequent laws prohibiting the manufacture, sale or possession of small pistols, which were observed and executed in the same way as most laws of the period. In a law of 1637 Charles I prescribed that no pistol was to be made less than 14 ins. long in the barrel, but this had no

effect on the production of pocket pistols. In those days, when the only method of travelling was on horseback, every traveller was armed, usually with two long pistols, 18 ins. or mote in the barrel, in holsters attached to the saddle-bow,

and a smaller pair in the belt, with elongated hooks to hold them in place. As the eighteenth century progressed, travelling by coach or chaise became more usual, and the usual thing was to have a pair of heavy pistols carried in a box, and a pair of pocket pistols in the capacious coatpockets. Some fortunate collectors have boxed sets, consisting of a pair of long and a pair of short pistols, all the same bore, with bullet mould, ramrod and all the tools that

could be required, all neatly nested in a handsome case. An interesting development was the screw or turn-off pistol, in which the barrel was made to unscrew, leaving just enough breech for the powder and shot. These are

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frequently called Queen Anne pistols, although they were made long before and long after her twelve-year reign. These turn-off pistols are usually handsome weapons, with cannon

barrels, often in brass. Their main advantage was that the

bullet could be made a tight push-fit for the barrel, without the risk of deforming it by ramming it down. This gave it much greater range and accuracy than the usual ‘rowling in’

bullet, which might be a 345 in. less than the bore. There are

many well-authenticated stories of wonderful shots with these screwed pistols (Prince Rupert is said to have shot the tail off a church weather-cock) and it has been frequently stated that the term screwed meant that they were rifled as well. I cannot say that this is not the case, but I have never seen or read of an authentic rifled screw-off barrel, an actual

example, and I can think of a number of reasons why such a barrel would be impracticable. The idea may have arisen from the fact that it was quite common practice to cut splines in the muzzle of the pistol, into which a large key with corresponding splines was inserted to unscrew and re-screw the barrel. A collector finding the pistol without the key, and seeing the splines, might well mistake this for rifling, if he did not notice that the splines only go about three-quarters of an inch down the muzzle.

All these

turn-off pistols are

great favourites

with

collectors, especially with a brass cannon-shaped barrel; they have a pleasing archaic appearance. No opportunity should be missed, however poor the condition. About the end of the seventeenth century the box lock

was developed, and became very popular for pocket pistols. In this the frizzen and pan were on top of the barrel, and the cock was fitted in the centre of the lock. This made a neat flat pistol without anything on the side to catch, and to make it even more portable the cock and frizzen were reduced to the smallest practical dimensions. The stock was fairly weak where it was cut out to accommodate the box lock, and on

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the most compact examples an all-steel construction was adopted, with a barrel no more

than two

inches

long,

usually turn-off in the early part of the eighteenth century, fixed later. Such a pistol it was that Casanova found, without surprise, in the pocket of a lady friend, ‘an English weapon of fine steel and the most beautiful finish’. These high-grade pocket pistols were not made in any great quantity, since they had no use as military or travelling pistols; they were for use at very short range by a lady, or an elderly man who could not rely upon his sword for close defence. They are still to be found, but scarce; an all-steel,

box-lock pocket pistol, with a 2 in. barrel, nicely engraved and with its original blueing, is what every collector is waiting for; and most will have to wait a long time A distinctive type of pistol was evolved in Scotland, where this weapon became almost universal at an early date. The earliest pistols were made in Dundee, with wooden stocks

fairly straight, ending in a tulip-shaped pommel, which later became a kidney shape. The typical Scottish pistol, however, was made at Doune, a small burgh on the river Forth, a few miles west of Stirling, very near the most

southerly extent of the Highland Line; hence the pistol is called the Scottish, the Highland, or the Doune pistol. A flourishing craft was established, which lasted for a century and a half; it was common in Scotland for a small town to

have a monopoly of a small craft, the guildsmen passing on their skill from generation to generation. Doune had a favourable situation, about thirty miles from both Edinburgh and Glasgow, and almost on the Highland Line, beyond which lay their best market; no dhuinewassaille! was properly dressed without a Doune pistol at his belt.

As it finally developed, the Doune pistol was an all-steel weapon, with a fully-curved butt finishing in two scrolls A gentleman of sorts, weating a single feather in his bonnet, a retainer of his chief with whom he claimed kinship.

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called rams-horns, having between them a small knob which was the screwed-in handle of a pricker for the touch-hole. It almost always had the tongue on the side opposite the hammer to slip it over the belt. The most distinctive feature of the Doune pistol, and indeed of practically every Scottish

firearm, was that it had no trigger-guard, the trigger finishing with a small knob; and no other safety device except the half-cock. Ever-ready was more important than safe, but I have no knowledge of any accidental discharge. In 1724 a body of Highlanders was raised under the auspices of General Wade. Four hundred and eighty in number, they were divided into six companies, each commanded by a laird of standing, and they were all some sort of gentleman, many bringing their personal servants with them. They were known as the Black Watch, often ascribed to their dark tartan, but in my view more probably from their duty, which was to maintain a watch to suppress the Black Mail, a system whereby cattle thieves ran a protection racket; if you did not pay Black Mail (mail is Scots for rent) your cattle would be driven off some night. The Black Watch carried their own arms, of course including a Doune pistol.

It was a popular and successful service, the cattle raiders being by no means romantic figures to their immediate neighbours.

In 1743, their local task accomplished,

they

were embodied for foreign service first as the 43rd and then as the 42nd Foot, now the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) which has taken part in several engagements since that time. By 1760 six or seven more Highland regiments

were raised, but volunteers had to be promised a Doune pistol like the Black Watch. The Board of Ordnance agreed to this (one pistol per man) but found difficulty in supplying them; they therefore allowed the Colonels £1 155. 7d. per pair to find their own. However, a dire suspicion arose, and when mote regiments were being raised Ordnance demand-

ed receipts, having found that at least one Colonel, instead

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of buying the expensive Doune pistol, had been having them copied in Birmingham in an inferior quality at 185. a pair. The matter was further discussed in 1788, when two

more regiments were being raised, but by this time it was recognized that for a soldier armed with musket and bayonet a pistol might be ornamental but was certainly not useful, and eventually this requisition was supplied by a toyshop in the Strand at 10s. 6d. per pair. Not to carry a joke too far, the Highland regiments all discarded the pistol by 1795. After the visit to Edinburgh of George IV in 1822, when he expressed a wish to see his Scottish gentlemen in Highland dress (which shook to the core many a Lowland laird), there was a revival of interest in the kilt and its acoutrements. His Majesty showed the example by appearing himself in the kilt, but forestalling the inevitable question by enduing the royal limbs in pink satin tights. Queen Victoria kept up the interest in Highland dress, and as long as firearms could be freely purchased there were versions of the Doune pistol to be had, toys sold by haberdashers. The Highlander normally carried a single pistol, slung in front of the sporran-strap, the barrel passing behind the sporran with the butt slanting up conveniently to the right hand. They are therefore usually found as single specimens. Pairs are rare, but were undoubtedly made, and it may have been that they were sold in pairs but only one carried, or Lowlanders may have carried a pair in some other way. Certainly the Doune pistol was well known on the Continent, where at one time a common term for all-steel pistols was “Ecossaises’. They had no popularity in England, and when the fine Doune pistol died out against Birmingham competition, one John Murdoch, of a famous family of Doune gunsmiths, applied in 1781 to Ordnance for a job at his trade, but was turned down on the grounds that his experience must be insufficient.

-a double-barrel flintlock pistol by Joseph Egg,

i '

Pair of flintlock duelling pistols of t800 by Joseph Manton Four late eighteenth-century

| rifles, two fitted as air-guns

THE FLINTLOCK

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It is necessary for the collector to understand this odd historical background, for there is no other object one can collect which has a wider range of values for things which at first sight are very much alike. A toyshop pistol of perhaps 1825 is of no importance, whereas a really good Doune pistol is one of the most valuable in the world. £1,500 was paid in 1965 fora late seventeenth-century pair by Alexander

Campbell, and in the same year £900 was paid for a single eatly eighteenth-century silver-mounted pistol by John Campbell. Names are not an infallible guide, for forgeries are possible, and one must be guided chiefly by the quality, the style, the general feel of the piece; but names can be useful to confirm your opinion. The names of Cadell, Campbell, MacKay,

MacNab,

Mickle,

Murdoch

and

Stuart

should

denote the genuine Doune pistol. The name Waters, on a pistol with a bronze, kidney-shaped butt, denotes a Londonmade job, probably made for one of the regiments. The name Bissell has been said to be that of a Leith gunsmith of the eighteenth century, but I can find no record of him;

in

my view this is Isaac Bissell of Birmingham, a well-known pistol maker, and these are the cheap ones from which the Colonel made his disgraceful profit. They are not at all bad, no doubt good value for the money; but they have not that combination

of grace and strength, that hand-made

air,

which is the essential character of the Doune. The

duel was

unknown

in the ancient

world,

when

nobody carried arms except a soldier under orders. Hence men used the most scurrilous terms to each other, even in

solemn assemblies, without the least fear of personal retribution. After the Gothic nations occupied the Roman Empire they had always to go armed, and this matter of carrying arms became the mark of the superior race and class. High-spirited and hot-tempered, the sword would flash out on the least provocation; hence the elaborate E

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courtesy which grew up in the Middle Ages: to be rude to anybody was quite literally as much as your life was worth. The establishment of the judicial combat gave a legal and even a religious sanction to single fight, giving to the stronger arm the legal victory which nowadays goes to the longer purse.

Long after the introduction of firearms, duels were fought with the sword. Examples are known of pistol duels in the seventeenth century, some even on horseback, but these seem to have been between people of yeomen class, usually in Southern Germany and Switzerland, who might be more proficient with firearms than the sword. An etiquette grew up about duels: they were only to be fought between people of approximately equal status. A Royal personage could not fight a duel, and a challenge could be refused on the grounds

that the opponent was not ‘worthy of his steel’. Thus when the Duke of Hamilton was killed by Lord Mohun (also killed) in a duel in Hyde Park, it was felt that the Duke should have refused the challenge; he being the premier Duke of Scotland, a Peer and Duke of France, and design-

ated Ambassador to France, whereas his opponent, although a peer, was a discredited adventurer. During the eighteenth century, it would appear that an etiquette arose, whereby a gentleman need only fight a duel with the sword if his opponent was well known to be of an equivalent rank, but in cases of doubt one might fight with the pistol, without either derogating one’s rank or allowing any pretensions on the other side. Thus when Casanova challenged Count Branicki, one of the greatest noblemen of Poland, he sent him the length of his sword; but Branicki would only fight with pistolk—‘I never use swords with unknown persons.” Casanova was so proud of having fought with an undoubted nobleman that he carried his wounded hand in a sling for eighteen months afterwards. For this point of etiquette, and because of the passing of the custom

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of wearing swords on all occasions, the pistol became the sole weapon used for the duel. In every European country, laws were passed against

duelling, and in every European country they were ignored. The point of honour transcended all law, and had to be

vindicated at whatever trouble and risk. James I and VI was very strict against duelling; when in 1613, Sackville afterwards Harl of Dorset, and Bruce Lord Kinloss quarrelled in London about some trifle, they could not meet immediately, but months afterwards Sackville journeyed from Derbyshire and Kinloss from France to meet in a meadow in Holland, near Bergen-op-Zoom,

very near the border

with the Austrian Netherlands, and there fought to the death, the desperately wounded survivor being carried over the border out of reach of any law. It was an extraordinary social phenomenon. There was the law, sound and sensible: Thou shalt not

kill, if you have a dispute bring it before the Court; but no gentleman dared obey it. To refuse to fight was to be ostracized from society; if an officer declined a challenge, he would have to resign his commission. In the Indian Army of the early nineteenth century, an officer who had never ‘been out’ was regarded with some suspicion, and could not look for quick promotion. No eminence could exempt him from liability. Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Canning, two leading Cabinet ministers, fought a duel on Putney Heath in 1809, Castlereagh being the challenger. He shot Canning in the thigh, and as he was being carried off Canning asked his opponent ‘Now, pray, will you tell me what we have been fighting about?’ Even the Duke of Wellington challenged the Earl of Winchelsea to a duel in 1830 on account of some expressions the Duke thought insulting. They met at Chalk Farm, where the Duke rode attended only by his second,

Sir Henry Hardinge, and one servant. The Duke’s ball cut the Harl’s hair, whereupon the Earl fired his pistol in the

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air, and advanced to apologize in most handsome terms. Honour was satisfied. Few duels ended so pleasantly, especially in Scotland, where the ‘deadly feud’ might go on from generation to generation. In 1783, two Fife lairds, Boswell of Balmuto and Stewart of Dunearn, whose extensive lands lay together, quarrelled as neighbouring proprietors always do some time or other. Boswell challenged Stewart and they met in a hollow of hilly ground near their mutual border; Stewart fell dead, Boswell was wounded and fled the country. My maternal great-great-grandfather, who was present, lifted the turf on which Stewart fell and replanted it on his own ground at Aberdour; every day for the rest of his life he stood on that turf and renewed his oath of deadly feud against the whole house of Balmuto. In fact, the consequences of this duel were fatal for both these ancient families, which are now no more.

When these circumstances are fully understood, it is easy to see why every gentleman found it necessary to own a pair of pistols of the best possible manufacture. All the great gunsmiths had special departments to make these weapons. Price was absolutely no object, but the decoration of an earlier period is conspicuously absent. This is business, deadly business. Barrels are blued, browned, or damascus,

never ornamented. There is usually some fine engraving on the lock-plate, cock and trigger-guard, but no chasing, no carving, nothing standing out to catch some unlucky slant of light as the pistol comes up to the eye. The quadrant butts have no other decoration than the most exquisite chequering. The pommels are quite plain. All the cost is in the actual weapon, the barrel precisely true, the ball a dead fit, the balance absolutely correct for the owner’s hand, the

lock infallible. Every conceivable improvement was introduced, particularly toward quickness of fire; a tenth of a

second might be the difference between life and death. All

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springs were lightened as far as was consistent with certainty of action, and roller bearings were inserted where they bore on tumbler or frizzen. Pivots were sleeved, and everything done to make the action as quick and as certain as possible. Bullets were carefully weighed and ground to an exact fit in the barrel and the correct charge of powder was scrupulously estimated and measured. This could be done with great accuracy, as the distance at which they would be used was certain to be between ten and twenty yards. The usual bore was about half an inch, the barrel 10 ins. long, and the

charge very light. The pistols were boxed in pairs, the boxes being very neatly compartmented to hold everything necessary and cushioned so that there could be no jarring. The box was quite plain, usually of fine Cuban mahogany, with hinges, a lock, a flush handle and a shield for the owner’s crest or

monogram. The fitting of the brass furniture was, from the perfect precision of the work, evidently done by gunsmiths. The screws are countersunk so as to be exactly level with the surface, and the slots are all lying parallel with the edge. There is sometimes a little fine engraving on the hingeleaves and lock-plate. French duelling pistols were usually rifled, but this was not thought quite sporting in England, where smoothbores were correct. Some people cheated, however, for there can be found pistols with ‘blind rifling’ which stops about two inches from the muzzle, so as to be invisible

when inspected by the opposing second. It is very dubious if this shabby trick would really give an advantage. Once

the bullet left the rifling it would be quite a loose fit in the rest of the barrel, and might very well take a bounce that would put it off course altogether. The smooth-bore was quite accurate enough for the purpose. A hundred-andsixty-year-old specimen was tried recently and found to be quite accurate at eighty yards, four times the maximum

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duelling range, and far superior to the musket of the period. With such a weapon at fifteen yards, and a target the size of a man’s torso, rifling would give no further advantage; all that mattered was nerve, hand and eye. Constant

practice was, of course, essential, but at the

same time it was not good to wear out these beautiful weapons by constant use. Very frequently the owner had a pair of target pistols made, of the same weight and balance as the duelling ones but with a very small bore. These could be used in any room, passage or garden, and with a loader a man could get in ten minutes all the practice necessary for the day. In London and all the larger cities there were pistol galleries, where men could practise or compete, either with their own pistols or the gallery pistols, also small bore. The frequenters of the galleries became well known, and each one’s standard of skill was carefully noted. All the best gunsmiths delighted to make duelling pistols, Durs Egg, Joseph Egg, Joe Manton and all the lesser Mantons,

Henry

Mortimer,

Henry

Nock,

and

all the

Richards. All their productions are keenly sought for, and a pair of duelling pistols in good order, in the original case with all the accessories, is a valuable prize and priced accordingly. During 1965, pairs by Richards were sold for £460 and £400, and a pair by Durs Egg went to £540. The most valued of all, however, are those made in Paris,

particularly by Le Page or Boutet, both from long lines of eminent gunsmiths. Nicholas Noel Boutet was particularly fortunate. As quite a young man he was Gunmaker to Louis XVI, with a factory at Versailles; the Revolution overthrew the King, but needed guns, and Boutet was

reappointed at Versailles to mass-produce muskets, but with a special department for arms-de-luxe. Napoleon, as First Consul, confirmed his appointment, with special emphasis on splendid arms for presentation, and granted the appointment for eighteen years. The period of the Consulate

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and the Empire was Boutet’s heyday, working as he did for a master who thoroughly understood firearms and with the wealth of a continent at his disposal. After the Fall, Boutet’s factory was “Cossaqué’, but he set up again in Paris and became Arquebusier du Roi to Louis XVIII. No doubt he did not much mind for whom he worked as long as he was able to make the finest weapons the world had ever seen. Pistol,

carbine, shot-gun or rifle, a weapon by Boutet is what con-

noisseurs drool over. Everything is perfect, balance, action,

precision, and the decoration simply superb. It is by no

means surprising that when a pair of target pistols by Boutet appeared in a London saleroom in 1965 they were

bought for £1,600. With Boutet, the flintlock pistol reached

its ultimate perfection: there was nowhere to go from here.

Jide

Flintlock Sporting Guns IN THE earliest period of firearms there was no specialization. Here is your gun, load it how you please. It was primarily a weapon of war, although, as we have seen, it came early to be used for difficult or dangerous game. For the market, birds and small game were caught by the peasantry, using various snares. As sport for the nobility, deer were run down with horse and hound, and birds were

taken by hawks. James I and VI, who had an inveterate passion for hunting and hawking, for which he would neglect business of State, never fired a gun in his life, as far as Iam aware. But his son Charles I liked shooting, and it is from his accession that we can date the development of the birding-piece. There is extant a very fine birding-piece with a Scottish snaphaunce

lock, which

belonged

to Charles

I; it has,

unusual in a Scottish piece, a trigger-guard; the possibility exists that it was made in Holland, in the Scottish style. The birding-piece came to have a barrel of extraordinary length, as much as 6 ft., the idea being to increase the range and

accuracy. No doubt the length would allow a large charge to be completely consumed, but it is unlikely that any extra pressure developed would compensate for the friction of the shot in such a length. Almost invariably the lock is the

English flintlock with a dog. It is uncertain when small-shot was first used, but there

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exists an English sixteenth-century statute prohibiting its use under certain circumstances. Early small-shot was by no means small by our ideas, being what we should now call swan-shot, or buck-shot, or S.S.G. Both charge and load being much heavier than is used in modern guns, the birdingpiece gave a good spread and coverage up to a hundred yards. The custom was to fire from cover, using some sort of rest, at sitting birds or small game. The barrel was about musket-weight at the breech, lighter forward, and usually cannon-muzzled. During the civil wars they were used with solid shot as wall-guns in the defence of castles and tenable manor-houses. Long after they had ceased to be used on land, they were useful as water-fowl guns on fens and marshes, and are indeed the ancestors of the punt gun. With a few exceptions, such as the Royal gun already mentioned, these birding-pieces are plain, workmanlike weapons, without any special refinements of action or

decoration. They were used to shoot birds or small game for the table or the market, not for sport. There are not many to be found. In most cases they would be used until their rather roughly-made actions were worn out, or the barrel burst by frequent overloading; some had the barrels cut down when they went out of fashion, as experience showed that with good powder the last two feet of barrel was only useless weight where it was least wanted. Birdingpieces, although scarce, do not command 4 high price; they are usually fairly rough jobs to begin with, and usually in poor order. Of course, if a fine one with good decoration were to turn up, it would be highly desirable; but you must take care not to mistake a long Moslem flintlock fora seventeenth-centur city birding-piece. Game was scarce in seventeenth-century England. Less than a fifth of the land was enclosed, and much of that was

deer-park. The commons and wastes could support only a very small game population, and anybody who pleased

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could pursue them at any time, take their eggs, kill them in the breeding season and keep them generally disturbed. The only kind of game usually to be had even by wealthy travellers in the inns was rabbit, and we find that in the

third quarter of the century a couple of rabbits cost 25. 84., while on the same bill a bottle of claret cost 1s. Hares appeared on the best menus, and were a usual present for the yeoman freeholder to send to a friend in town, while the nobleman would send up a haunch of venison. Pheasant was very scarce; when observed, they would be stalked, fired at from cover, and the survivors would be marked

down wherever they lighted and stalked again. Pepys only once, so far as I am aware, treated a friend to a pheasant. The same applied to partridge, which was similarly stalked from place to place. In 1666 Pepys met a man who ‘told us of the plenty of partridges in France, where he says the King of France and his company killed with their guns, in the plain de Versailles, 300 and odd partridges at one bout’. In the nineteenth

century,

a small squire of 2,000 acres

would not see anything notable in 150 brace on September rst. |have myself been one of a party of six guns which took 60 partridges out of an eight-acre field in half an hour, walking up over dogs. The birding-piece was little used in Scotland. There wasn’t much game in the more-or-less cultivated Lowlands, and while the Highlands swarmed with muitfowl, black-cock,

grouse, capercailzie and ptarmigan, cover was heavy and they had to be flushed and shot flying, with a light, handy gun. Otherwise,

the red deer was

stalked with the rifle,

usually of North European origin. The well-known portrait of MacDonnel of Glengarry shows the Chief with a short rifle having a heavy octagonal barrel and a Dutch or perhaps Danish look about it. The most important of all the revolutions of the seventeenth century was the introduction of the turnip. No longer

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was it necessary to slaughter and salt down most of the cattle at Martinmas, keeping the remainder just alive over the winter on a meagre ration of hay. The whole herd could be amply fed on turnip in stall, and the resulting manure enriched the cornfields, further helped by the new system of rotation of crops. These enriched fields were worth enclosing, and hedges were planted everywhere, so that by 1720 the countryside had already assumed that appearance of a cultivated garden which so delighted foreign visitors up to a generation ago. The many Enclosures Acts undoubtedly encroached upon the common rights of many villagers and freeholders, but the legalized proprietors made the wastes into productive farmland by spending fortunes on hedging, ditching and draining. Forests, too, were carefully managed, for in those days of wooden walls ‘ship timber’ was a slow but valuable crop. All this was wonderful for game birds, which found among the woods, hedges, grain and turnips all the shelter and food they needed, all the year round, and they multiplied accordingly. They became a regular part of the produce, like the cattle or the corn. Shooting became a sport, and every gentleman prided himself on his ability to shoot flying. The big shooting-parties and drives were still far in the future; the squire, with perhaps

two

friends,

would go out after breakfast (six o’clock) with a keeper to handle the dogs and perhaps a couple of lads to carry the bag or beat out a thicket. When the pointers ‘set’, the keeper would ‘down’ his spaniels and the shooters would move

forward to good positions, while the pointer kept the covey down; the birds will not move until the dog does. Then on

the word from the keeper one pointer would go in, step by step, trembling with excitement, till he sprung the covey and the guns had their say. For this kind of shooting a very different weapon was wanted from the little cannon of a birding-piece; long range was not of first importance, so

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that smaller charges and lighter shot could be used; these made possible a much lighter and handier gun, and this in turn made a double barrel possible, which gave the shooter a chance of a right-and-left before the covey was out of shot. When hundreds of well-to-do gentlemen were calling for new weapons, regardless of cost, it was likely enough that the English gunsmiths would respond. The fowling-piece emerged as a totally new firearm. It had to be as light as possible, and it must come up sweetly to the shoulder. Pattern was studied rather than range, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was recognized that the ideal was a well-covered pattern of perhaps 30 ins. diameter at forty yatds with No. 5 shot, rather than a few scattered S.S.G. at

a hundred yards. Then it was found that a load of small shot did not put the same strains on the barrel as a ball of the same weight, which made it possible to have a gun light enough to be carried at the ready for six or eight hours at a stretch. New problems arose; if the gun were too light, too little of the recoil was absorbed in the weight of the gun and

too much taken against the shoulder of the shooter. The double barrel evolved almost of its own accord. Some doubles were made over-and-under, as indeed they are to this day, especially Italian models; but somehow nobody really liked them in spite of their theoretical advantages, especially after Joe Manton produced the raised aiming-rib between two side-by-side barrels, setting the shape of double-barrelled shot-guns until the present day. Still, there were conservatives who insisted that the single-barrel shot much further, and was more accurate at the longer ranges than the double; they were probably right. I myself knocked over and bagged two rabbits with one shot from a singlebarrelled old hammer-gun at 164 yards (tape-measured later), about four times the range at which one ought to fire a double-barrel.

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A new type of barrel was developed to meet the need for light double guns. This was the Damascus, which got its name

from the famous

swords

made

at Damascus,

by

repeatedly folding and welding the iron until it showed an infinity of fine, wavy lines. Even finer damascening is found in the Japanese swords of the best period, the fifteenth century A.D., when the great swordsmiths such as Muramasa,

Yoshmitsu

or Masamune

would

fold the iron a

hundred times before (with religious ceremonies) welding in the steel edge. Damascus barrels were first made in Spain, and are said to have been the idea of a German, Nicholas Bis, who hammered out discarded horse-shoes for the

purpose. One might have thought that Spain, with its strong Moorish connections and long traditions of the finest working of iron, might have produced a native inventor; no

doubt there was a pooling of knowledge of the German gunsmith and the Spanish ironsmith. In the manufacture

of a Damascus

barrel, a small bar

of iron (it might very well have been originally an old horseshoe) was beaten out thin, care being taken to swage it lengthways. It was then folded over lengthways and hammered out again, until there was a very long bar, almost a tape, of well-wrought iron having a close pattern of wavy lines. This was then wound spirally around a mandrell, welding the join as the winding proceeded until there was a tube of beautifully wrought iron, much lighter than a solid-forged barrel but equally strong, for the spiral winding was using the iron in tension, its greatest strength, just as Armstrong used wire-winding for great naval guns at a much later period. A further refinement was to beat out two narrower bars and wind and weld them simultaneously, the barrel then being called double-Damascus; and finally three bars were used, not above a quarter of an inch in width,

giving triple-Damascus, which combined in the highest possible degree the beauty of the patterning iv the iron and

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the strength of the wound barrel. Such barrels were very soft and easily damaged by the least ill-usage; hence, though they were used for sporting rifles, and to a much greater extent for duelling pistols, their main use was in fine sporting guns, where their lightness and beauty were fully appreciated and their tenderness duly cared for. It remained the standard for the ‘best’ gun until ousted about 1880 by the ‘sterling’ seamless drawn steel tube, and then perhaps rather from the cost and utility aspect. I had a favourite gun with tripleDamascus barrels, hammerless ejector with Greener style cross-bolt action, which must have been from thirty to fifty yeats old when I came by it, and I used it for thirty years without any trouble whatever. In spite of its 30 in. barrels it weighed just over seven pounds, and balanced perfectly. Some of the finest flintlock sporting guns ever made were produced in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth. In England, the barrels were mostly made in Birmingham and the stocks and usually the lock in London, where the setting-up was also done. For the cheaper guns the locks were usually Birmingham, only the setting-up being done in the London workshop of the maker whose name appeared on the gun. All the greatest names appear, Joseph Manton and the lesser Mantons, Charles, John and Thomas, Durs Egg and Joseph Egg, Henry Nock, Henry Mortimer and Arnold, while the very greatest name of this great period is Nicholas Noel Boutet, whose flintlock sporting guns, made for Napoleon to present to deserving monarchs, are unsurpassed, probably unequalled, at any time or place. But the name is unnecessary; nobody can mistake the quality of those weapons, made regardless of expense by consummate gunsmiths for clients who knew just what they wanted. Then, as now, the ‘best London gun’ was fitted to its owner with more care and more cost than his clothes, with a ‘cast-off’ to the stock

so that the barrel would align itself with the eye without

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bending the neck. The screws all lie the same way, with their slots parallel to the barrel; engraving includes the screws in the design. The more you can appreciate ‘quality’ the better your collection will be. In spite of the very large number of fine flintlock sporting guns made in this period, they are not at all common nowadays. No doubt when percussion came in the squire would give his father’s old Joe Manton to his keeper, who might not be all that thrilled to get it; he would like a percussion job himself. Numbers no doubt were adapted to percussion,

and when the breech-loader came in would be discarded. Nevertheless, I have been told of a flintlock muzzle-loader in the field in the 1880s; not because the owner could not

afford a new one, he just preferred his flintlock. ‘It seemed to fire as quick, quite as accurate, and certainly a great deal further than any of our latest guns.’ Apart from the gun-rooms of old country houses there must be very many fine flintlock guns in country cottages, relics of the days when ‘my mother’s grandfather was head keeper to Lord Snodgrass’. (It is always head keeper.) I myself have seen what appeared to be a very fine flintlock over the mantelpiece of the one-roomed cottage of an old man who bred black pointers, and I’ve often regretted the obscure point of etiquette which prevented me from bringing the conversation round from black pointers to old guns. The man, the pointers and the cottage are no more; but what happened to the gun? There is a field here for the collector. The ‘best London gun’ of this period represents one of the peaks of the gunsmith’s art, and no general collection should be without one. The blunderbuss could scarcely be considered a sporting weapon, but undoubtedly it fired a scattering charge of smallish shot and was neither a rifle nor a pistol. It was

developed in the seventeenth century and the Austrian

Army—always ready to try anything once—armed the front

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rank of their Cuirassiers with what they called trombones, a short, trumpet-shaped weapon loaded with twelve bullets. In 1781, a hundred of these were ordered from Austria by Britain to arm the flank companies for the American war,

but the Austrians had already abandoned the blunderbuss as a military weapon. It was essentially a personal protection weapon for the man who had no military training and no great knowledge of firearms—to be shown from under cover to intimidate the robber. Butlers and caretakers in country houses, citizens in charge of their own or other’s money, guards upon the coach-outside, all liked the blunder-

buss. They felt that you couldn’t miss, with all that flare on the muzzle; actually the spread was from 4 in.-1 in. per foot, and an active man close in with sword or pistol was in

little danger. Well might Alan Breck Stewart say to Ebenezet Balfour—‘Ere ever your dotterin auld finger could find the trigger, my hilt wad dirl on your breastbane!’ Gradually it was found that the trombone-shape, round or oval, had no effect on the spread of the shot; and the blunderbuss became in effect a short, large-bore carbine. The barrel was usually of brass, as it was carried in all weathers by coachguards, and might hang for years on its hooks in the pantry; even in its latest forms the muzzle was flared, to terrorize

rather than to have any effect on the spread of the shot. The load must have terrified the burglar, certainly it terrifies me —a pound of buckshot and as much as 160 grains of powder. However, it was intended to be fired only once. There is an idea that the blunderbuss could be and was loaded with rusty nails or any old scrap, and this was theoretically possible, supposing that you had powder but no bullets, but highly improbable. The blunderbuss was essentially a weapon to be loaded at leisure and with every care, and sixteen or

twenty lead balls was far superior to any odd langridge. Sometimes a blunderbuss is found with a spring bayonet attached—after firing you released the catch and the

Double-barrel

8-bore duck gun with bottom lever action and rebounding hammer locks From top to bottom, fintlock large-calibre boat gun used by the

Navy; early-type breech-loading percussion carbine; blunderbuss with spring bayonet; muzzle-loading

flintlock carbine,

percussion

military

converted

to

breech-loading;

pattern,

circa

1800

Baker

rifle,

Muzzle-loading 4-bore duck gun with single barrel. A flintlock converted to percussion, it is still in use

Top left, an early nineteenth-century ‘duck-foot’ pistol, a favourite with merchant skippers for dissuading mutineers ; op right, a fourbarrelled double-hammer twist-over pistol of the early nineteenth century;centre, an ivory-inlaid seventeenth-century pistol—the tail of the trigger- ‘ouard isi a later addition; bottom, early nineteenthcentury flintlock revolver, the chamber moe by hand

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bayonet sprang into position, as if the sort of person the blunderbuss was meant for was in the least likely to engage in close combat with the cold steel! It was not for the soldier or the gentleman but people not normally accustomed to the use of arms, to whom the heavy charge and apparently wide spread gave a sense of security; the householder, the coach-guard, even the assassin: ‘Tom of Ten Thousand’,

Thomas Thynne of Longleat, ancestor of the Marquesses of

Bath, was riding in his carriage, with coachmen and footmen, in London, and at the corner of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall he was shot dead through the coach window with multiple wounds from a blunderbuss. Not being a weapon of precision, there was no need to practise with it; and being for emergency only, it was very little used. Readers of the Pickwick Papers will recall the ornaments of Mr. Wardle’s kitchen, including ‘an old rusty blunderbuss, with an inscription below it, intimating that it was ““Loaded”—as it had been, on the same authority, for

half a century at least.’ It is, therefore, not surprising that substantial

numbers

of them have survived,

and indeed

there is scarcely an inn in England with the least pretensions to Ye Olde that has not a blunderbuss hanging up among the coach-horns and horse-brasses. By all means acquire one if it comes your way, especially if it has a flintlock in good condition and a brass barrel with a good flare; but don’t

strain yourself or your purse unduly; another will turn up.

IZ

Percussion By THE middle of the seventeenth century all “chymists’ were aware of ‘thundering powder’, salts of certain metals, which detonated loudly on a sharp tap. They were called fulminates, and the fulminates of gold, silver and mercury were the subjects of many chemical experiments. They were naturally tried as propellants, instead of gunpowder, but the explosion was far too sudden and violent, bursting the gun before the bullet could get on its way. Fulminates came to be regarded as scientific curiosities, interesting to schoolboys but without any practical application. The Reverend Alexander Forsyth, minister of the parish of Belhevie in Aberdeenshire, was a versatile divine. Be-

sides giving every attention to the spiritual needs of his parishioners and preaching with great acceptance to the most critical of sermon-tasters, he was an excellent mechanic,

a learned chemist and a good shot. The shooting mainly available to him was swimming duck, which he shot from

a punt, as was the regular form at that time. Now the duck is one of the wisest and wariest of birds, and Forsyth’s experience brought out all the disadvantages of the flintlock. In wet weather—and rain does occur in Scotland from time to time—it was very difficult to keep the powder in the pan dry enough to ignite, and if the frizzen was wet there would be no spark. The flash in the pan took place perceptibly before the discharge of the gun, and with the low velocity

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of shot of the period it was quite possible for a duck to catch sight of the flash in the pan and dive under water before the atrival of the charge of shot. This was generally accepted as just one of those things—nothing you can do about it; but Forsyth’s keen and critical mind was not prepared to accept anything as inevitable, and his chemical experience gave him the clue—fulminating powder, in tiny quantities. The sharp detonation would produce a flash many times hotter and quicker than flint and steel and gunpowder. Excellent idea; and Forsyth’s skill as a mechanic enabled him to make it work.

Forsyth’s ‘Scent-bottle’ detonating lock, hammer descending on firing-pin. ‘Scent bottle’ reverses for re-charging

No doubt he thought of many things, but his ultimate idea was a very fine though perhaps complicated bit of mechanics. Into the touch-hole was screwed a plug, having

a hole corresponding to the touch-hole, and another hole right through it at right angles. On this plug was pivoted what came to be called a scent-bottle. One end held a quantity of mercury fulminate: turn it upwards and a very small quantity of fulminate fell down into the central hole, corresponding with the touch-hole; now turn it up the

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other way and there is a firing-pin poised above the fulminate. The cock of the flintlock now becomes the hammer of the percussion lock; and when it struck the firing-pin it drove it down sharply on the fulminate, producing a quick, sharp, hot flash, which detonated the charge of gunpowder with far greater certainty and speed than was possible with flint and frizzen. It is not clear how he got in touch with Government, but the Master-General of the Ordnance, Lord Moira, invited

him to work at the Tower, providing him with a workshop and assistance and also salarying a substitute in his parish of Belhevie. There were the expectable difficulties of expert gunsmiths working under the direction of a Scottish parish minister—what could 4e know about guns?—but these wete surmounted and Forsyth produced a carbine with his scent-bottle lock, and a cannon-lock on the same principle. Unfortunately, just at this time there was a change of Government, and the new Master-General was Lord Chatham, the eldest son of one and the elder brother of the

other greatest of British Prime ministers. And again unfortunately he had none whatever of the qualities of his father and his brother; he had not yet demonstrated his total incompetence for any command, as he was to do at Walcheren two years later, but he was the same man. Pitt was to discover, as Napoleon did, and perhaps much later statesmen, that nepotism never pays. One of Chatham’s first actions as Master of the Ordnance was to order Forsyth out of the Tower with all his rubbish. It is said that at this time Forsyth was offered £20,000 by Napoleon to come and work for him, but the Aberdeenshire minister was a loyal subject, however he might be treated by jacks-in-office. Since Government rejected him, he went into private business and took out a patent on his system on 11th April, 1807. He set up in business as Alexander Forsyth & Co., in 1811, first in Piccadilly and later off

PERCUSSION

85

Leicester Square. Quite a large part of his business was protecting his patent from all the other gunsmiths, in which he

was generally successful. It must be admitted that many of the proposed variations were, in fact, improvements, as for example the lock of Hayward of Winchester, which fed pellets of fulminate from a magazine; but no great progress was made until Forsyth’s patent expired, when a flood of percussion systems came on the market, the one which was finally sucessful being the copper cap, in which the fulminate of mercury was mitigated by a little varnish. Potassium chlorate had been favoured by Forsyth and his imitators, but this had a very corrosive effect on the barrel. It was about 1824 that Frederick Joyce of Old Compton Street first marketed

his Anti-Corrosive

Percussion

Powder,

which

soon became the copper percussion cap. Colonel Hawker, in his important Instructions to Young Sportsmen, published in 1824, more than hints that he himself gave the idea of the copper cap to Joe Manton, but there appears to be little doubt that it was a chemist’s and not a gunmaker’s job, and Joyce was correct in describing himself about 1828 as ‘inventor and sole manufacturer of the anti-corrosive gun cap’. The great disadvantage of Forsyth’s scent-bottle, and all the other locks which incorporated a magazine of fulminate, was the very real danger that the jar of the discharge might explode the whole magazine of fulminate. This was impossible with the separate copper cap, and while there might be difficulties in carrying a lot of loose caps, and putting one neatly on the nipple, nevertheless they were waterproof and practically infallible. By 1825 the copper cap was in use for duelling pistols, where its certainty and speed were particularly valuable, although it would seem that C. E. S. Forrester has fallen into (for him very rare) an anachronism in presenting Hornblower with a pair of percussion pistols

in 1812. By 1830 the copper cap was standard for all private

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firearms, pistol, gun or rifle. But the Army and Navy still had the flintlock. All these early percussion weapons are of the greatest interest to the collector, especially, of course, the scent-

bottle locks actually made by Forsyth; but any kind of percussion lock which precedes the cap-and-nipple system is a tatity to be snapped up, whatever the condition and whatever the price, if you can pay it. They turn up so seldom in the salerooms that it’s difficult to find a typical price, and condition is an important factor of the cost. It is not at all impossible to find a sporting gun which has started off as a flintlock, been converted at some time to a ‘loose’ percussion of some kind, and later still converted again to a cap-and-

nipple type. Such a gun, if the various conversions can be clearly traced, is of the greatest interest to the collector, but

not necessarily of the greatest monetary value; whereas an original scent-bottle gun would justify almost any price. Forsyth himself was awarded £200 by a grateful country in 1842, afterwards

increased,

on strong representations,

to

£1,000, which was not paid until after his death. It would be very surprising if one of his guns did not fetch in today’s salerooms several times as much as his heirs received for his labours of a lifetime. The same applies to all his imitators and competitors; if you come across any gun, and most especially any pistol, having a percussion system before the cap-and-nipple, collect it.

a3

The Muzzle-loading Percussion Rifle THE PERCUSSION cap was one of the major inventions: it was not only a better way of firing the charge; it opened doors. Just like the internal combustion engine, which appeared in the nineties as a noisy and dirty substitute for the horse, but actually opened the door to the skies, the percussion cap made possible the revolver, the breech-loader, the magazine rifle and the machine-gun. It took a long time, but now it was possible. The Board of the Ordnance has been frequently criticized for its delays in adopting any new system, and especially percussion; but this is to overlook the enormous expense of equipping an army and navy with a new weapon, when there are vast stocks of perfectly sound weapons already in hand. Many hundreds of thousands of rounds have to be fired at targets before even an experimental number can be issued for service in the field. At this period there was no hurry; there was not the least sign of any disturbance of European peace, and there were in stock and on issue at least two million muskets and a hundred thousand rifles, all

with flintlocks, which had proved their dependability through twenty years of warfare. Apart from the natural conservatism of the senior officers, there was still a feeling

for flintlocks among the staff of the Ordnance. The MasterFurbisher, Charles Manton, had just scraped into the job in spite of doubts because his experience had been confined to

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‘best guns used by the opulent classes’; and he obviously shared his famous uncle’s predilection for the flintlock. He spent many years designing a very good cavalry carbine with flintlock, and persuaded Ordnance to make an issue of 1,000

in 1835, long after percussion had been adopted by every private user of firearms. At this time, however, the Chief

Storekeeper was George Lovell, who had come up from junior clerk by his own abilities. An educated man, he was able to keep abreast of the latest developments as published in French and German, and his reports greatly impressed his seniors. Eventually, he became Inspector of Small Arms, which does not appear much in these days of high-sounding titles for junior clerks, but which meant that he was in sole charge of all production. Meanwhile, Ordnance was quietly disposing of its enormous stocks of flintlocks, which constituted the principal Parliamentary block to new development; between 1834 and 1838 Spain alone had over 340,000, and such friendly monarchs as the Shah of Persia and the Pasha of Egypt were given a small gratuity of a

couple of thousand muskets. The way was open for any gunmaker to make proposals, and hundreds of ideas were carefully examined. The final selection was an unfortunate one. It may be that the Board and their Inspector were impressed by the fact that this rifle was put forward by the Duke of Brunswick, through his adjutant Captain Berners and his agent Mr. Seabright. The idea was to give the advantages of the rifle with the quick loading of the musket. Instead of the seven small grooves, giving a quarter-turn, of the Baker rifle, the Brunswick had two very deep grooves, giving a whole turn, and the bullet was made to fit. It was a special casting, having a belt on it around its equator. In theory one could place the bullet on the muzzle, with its belt fitting the two grooves, and let it drop down like a musket-ball; in practice it was necessary tO wrap it in a greased patch and ram it down.

THE

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As the deep grooves in the barrel ‘leaded up’, ramming became more and more difficult, until the effect was such

that the rifleman’s hand became too unsteady to aim. The ballistic effect was much that of a soup-plate spinning on its edge; as long as its velocity was high enough, it was accurate enough, but thereafter its “drift? was very pronounced. Fortunately, the British Army never had to go into serious action with this weapon; something better was ready just in time for the Crimea and the Mutiny.

Centre-fitted totally enclosed percussion lock; mainspring at the back, bearing up on the tumbler. Neat, but weakened the stock

These Brunswick rifles are available in fair quantities, because they could not be converted to anything else. When the Army would have no more to do with them, the remainder were, as usual, palmed off on the Royal Navy, which was always open to accept any kind of small arms so long as they had their own way with the great guns. They can readily be recognized by the two deep grooves, which ate quite conspicuous at the muzzle. They are not favourites

with collectors, probably because of their unsuccess, and therefore can be obtained cheaply enough; no serious

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collection, particularly of military weapons, should be without one, representative as it is of an important transitional period. An important improvement was made by John Jacob, a Major in the East India Company’s service, commanding first Scinde Irregular Horse and later Jacob’s Rifles. Apparently a person of affluence, there were few years

during the ’fifties that he did not send home some new idea to be worked out by a London gunsmith. He saw the disadvantage of the Brunswick and proposed to remedy it by having four grooves in the barrel and four projections on the bullet; but he modified the bullet by making it cylindrical with a conical nose. His last design was a double-barrelled rifle with short (24 ins.) barrels, and four grooves making almost a complete turn. This he sent to London in 1858, with an order for enough to arm his whole regiment, but they were not delivered for almost three years, by which

time he was dead. It was undoubtedly the most powerful rifle of its period, being sighted up to 2,000 yards, in spite of its short barrel; but with its twirling projections it is very unlikely to have been accurate much beyond 4oo yards. A Jacob’s rifle can be easily distinguished by its four deep grooves, and is very well worth collecting, for its rarity, for

the singular character of its inventor, and because it marks the first of the cylindro-conoidal bullet. Especially in France the search went on for a bullet which could drop easily down the muzzle, and yet take the rifling on its return journey. The idea arose of expanding the bullet after it was in the breech. Delvigne produced a shouldered chamber, against which the bullet could be expanded by a blow of the ramrod. Thouvenin devised a pillar in the breech, against which a skirted bullet could be spread, and

Lancaster in London built rifles on this principle. The objections to all of these were that the breech was difficult to clean, the pillar liable to bend, the bullet was so deformed

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91

D

204& Early rifle bullets: A, base of Jacob’s explosive bullet; B, side view of Jacob’s bullet; C, belted ball for the Brunswick rifle; D, double-belted ball; E, Greener’s bullet with plug; F, Pritchett’s hollow-base bulet:

G, Minie bullet with iron plug, British pattern; H, Enfield bullet with boxwood plug. The upper row relied on heavy bands to grip the rifling, the lower sought to expand the bullet against the rifling on firing

that it could not carry true and by the time the soldier had thumped the bullet sufficiently hard his hand was not steady enough for an immediate aim. As early as 1836 William Greener, the Birmingham gunsmith, had produced an oval bullet having a plug in its underside, the idea being that the explosion would drive the plug deeper into the lead and thus expand the bullet against the lands. The Select Committee on Small Arms rejected this out of hand as being ‘useless and chimerical’. The same committee now paid Colonel Minie of the French Army £20,000 for his invention, which was practically identical: a hollow iron cone was forced by the explosion into the base of the bullet, expanding

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the skirt so as to take the lands. In 1851 large orders were

placed for this rifle, and Greener protested strongly that they could have had the same rifle from him fifteen years earlier; but it took him seven years to get a solatium of £1,000.

The Minie was a good rifle, and was the main weapon of the Crimean War. Its chief troubles arose from the reluctance of the Duke of Wellington to accept any smaller calibre than that which had served so well at Waterloo, not realizing the difference between a ball and a pointed cylinder. Whereas the musket-ball weighed 480 grains, and had only to be shot down a smooth barrel, the Army Minie bullet weighed 680 grains, and had to be forced down the lands of the rifling; and the Marine rifle, of -758 bore, weighed 850 grains and was propelled by 3 drachms of powder. Certainly the men who fired those rifles had little to fear from the kick of a Cossack charger. Compare the Mark VII -303 ammunition— a bullet weighing 174 grains propelled by 37} grains of cordite. In 1852, with war looming up—whether with France or with Russia was by no means clear—the Committee decided to have an all-British rifle, and called on the leading gunsmiths to put in their proposals, the basic idea being that the bullet should have the same weight as the old musket-ball, 480 grains, and should be propelled by 2} drachms of powder. None of the rifles tested was quite to the mind of the Committee, so they evolved a theoretical rifle, to com-

bine all the points they thought advantageous. It was to have a percusion lock, muzzle-loading, 39-inch barrel with three grooves giving a half turn in the length, and a calibre of -577 in. The bullet was designed by the gunmaker Pritchett, who discovered that Minie’s iron cone was not

necessary; the explosion was far harder than iron, and a conical hollow in the base of the bullet was all that was necessary. Needless to say, Pritchett did not get £20,000 for

THE

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this discovery, but he was luckier than most: he received £1,000 in 1854. Rifles to this new design were made at the new Government arsenal at Enfield, exhaustively tested and found to be very satisfactory at all ranges up to 800 yards. Large orders were issued to the leading gunsmiths in the autumn of 1853 and the ‘Patt 53” or Enfield rifle was in the hands of the Army in time for most part of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. It was a fine weapon, undoubtedly the best of the muzzle-loaders. It was sighted to 1,000 yards, but at

this extreme range the trajectory became too steep for accuracy. At 600 yards, however, riflemen could make excellent practice, and this was beyond the accurate range of the smooth-bore field artillery of the period; a matter of great tactical importance. It carried its bayonet well, although with a tendency to drag down and to the right when fired with the bayonet fixed. Capable of wonders in expert hands and yet resisting damage by the most careless, it won the confidence and affection of the British soldier as none of its successors did until the $.M.L.E. The Enfield rifle is scarcer than might be supposed from the quantities made, but most of the stocks in Britain were later converted to breech-loaders, and those on issue were

dispersed over most of the world. They are not expensive when found and every general collector should have an

example. In America, the new arsenal at Harper’s Ferry proceeded on much the same lines as Britain and France, producing a

very creditable version of the Baker rifle in 1803, which was adapted to percussion in 1841; and the expanding-skirt bullets were adopted a few years after their European appearances. There was, however, a characteristically American rifle developed during this period—the Plains Rifle. The long Kentucky rifle was a splendid frontier weapon when the frontier was the Alleghanies, deer the

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biggest game and the black bear the most dangerous; but when the frontier moved westwards to the great plains and the Rocky Mountains, a different weapon had to develop. No longer on foot among the woods, the frontiersman was always on horseback, and he had to encounter big and dangerous game—the bison, the moose, the grizzly bear— which could not be knocked over by the pea-bullet. There was developed an entirely new American rifle: short, to be handy on horseback; large bore, to carry a round ball to stop an angry grizzly; and heavy, to take the enormous

charges of powder the plainsmen wanted behind their heavy bullets. The Plains rifle would weigh as much as 15 lbs. and take a charge of two hundred grains of powder. The plainsman was not interested in very long ranges, Minie bullets

and such-like refinements; a good big ball, well rammed down and plenty of powder behind it was what he wanted, and experience showed him to be right. The Plains Rifle held the frontier from about 1820 until it was ousted by the war surplus breech-loaders about 1870. There are very few Plains rifles to be found in Europe, although there were many made and they were practically indestructible; but the great demand for them in America makes it very difficult and expensive to acquire one. This is only as it should be, for the Plains rifle is a typical American weapon and characteristic of one of the most extraordinary phenomena of history, the expansion of a nation across a

continent.

14 Percussion Muxzle-loading Pistols and Revolvers THE PERCUSSION system was very quickly adopted for duelling pistols. Apart from being more waterproof, it was marginally quicker in fire than even the best flintlock. Adaptations were made, such as a centre-hammer with the cap right above the charge, to send the flash directly into the powder without the fractional delay caused by the touch-hole. The duelling pistol now assumed its final shape, with a long, curved butt and a curved tail to the triggerguard, rather like a second trigger, fixed; this was for the second finger to take a firm grip upon, so that the trigger finger had nothing to do with steadying the pistol. This was a most useful feature, as anyone knows who has ever handled such a weapon, and it is hard to imagine why it should have gone out of use. The duel, however, was going out of fashion. The famous duels already mentioned had an unfavourable effect on the mind of people in general. It did not seem quite sensible that elderly statesmen, of the greatest importance to their country’s councils, should attempt to murder each other on account of some possibly imaginary and certainly verbal affront. The Prince Consort, who did so much to civilize the English, set the views of Royalty. Punch and The Times guided public opinion. Even stronger was the contra-example of France, where people who could not in England have the least claim to be considered

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‘gentlemen’ nevertheless called each other out, a matter for laughter. In 1844, Lieutenant Monro killed Colonel Fawcett

in a duel; this was a bit much, and an Army Council Order prohibited the issuing or accepting of a challenge in the most explicit terms. Percussion duelling pistols are perhaps not so keenly sought as flintlocks, although they are made to the same standards of perfection. The tools which were included in sets ate even more elaborate than those with flints, for they included pressing and shaping the caps as well as all the usual paraphernalia of loading and cleaning. A boxed pair, with all the original tools in their snug compartments, is still one of the greatest prizes for the collector, in the same rank as a pair of good flintlocks or a seventeenth-century wheel-lock. With the elimination of duelling, and the establishment of an organized police force, the need for pistols dwindled away in Britain, but at the same time it sprang up immensely in America. The pistol was not an early American manufacture and it is probable that most flintlocks in America were imported, from France, Britain or Belgium, according

to price; a name stamped on a lock-plate may just as well indicate an importer as a manufacturer. The long rifle, or the fowling-piece, was the usual product of the American gunsmith.

A German immigrant to Philadelphia, however,

was quick to see the possibilities of the new percussion system and by 1825 Henry Deringer had commenced the manufacture of percussion pistols on an ever-increasing scale. At first these were after the model of the European duelling pistol, about the same size and weight, and with the extra grip on the trigger-guard; but the strongest demand was for a secret weapon, and Deringer supplied it. As little, or even less than four inches long, with a bore of about half an inch, the Deringer was an infallible killer at

sufficiently short range—an extended Bowie knife. There

Pair of late eighteenth-century duelling pistols by Manton. The amount of decoration is unusual in duelling pistols of this period

Pair

of percussion

of about

duelling

pistols

unusually

long barrels

1825.

Note

the

Rarly-type, highly decorated revolvers by Hopkins and Allen with pair of miniature deringers

Pair

of back-action pocket percussion pistols platinum and silver; circa 1825

decorated

with

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was no pretence of a challenge to fight with equal weapons; if you had a Deringer in your coat pocket, out with it and shoot your opponent; if he has one too, you must take your chance of it. Thus it grew up that almost everybody in the United States carried a pocket pistol—he never knew when or why he might be himself attacked. As in the eighteenth

century in Europe, the habits of high gambling and deep drinking led to many an altercation, often settled with Deringers across the table. It was with a Deringer that Booth assassinated President Lincoln in 1865. There were, of course, many imitations, and as the Americans of the

period had no scruples about copyright they usually called them Derringers, sometimes Beringers; the name Derringer became general for a short, large-bore pocket pistol. The better makers put them out under their own names, but people called them Derringers just the same. All Derringer pistols are eagerly sought for, especially of course the genuine Deringer with the mark }AilASer on the lock-plate. They are to be found in Europe, for there was a considerable importation, no European gunsmith making such a weapon as standard. The main demand, of ‘course, is in America, and even in Europe a collector will

have to pay a good round sum for a typical example. They are seldom, except for the very earliest true Deringer pistols, of fine workmanship or decoration; just a cheap gun for killing at close range. This is a case, however, where quality does not much affect the price. When the breech-loader came in, quite a number of Derringers were made on this principle, mostly in +410 bore. Colt made these up to 1912, and Remington made a very neat little Double Derringer, over-and-under, with 3 in. barrels, which sold over 150,000 before 1935, when pro-

duction ceased. I understand that Remington have recommenced the production of these, which seems a pity. It shows, however, the demand for any kind of Derringer, G

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although for the serious collector only the muzzle-loader has any appeal. There has in all the ages of firearms been a desire to have at least a second shot; only the old hands know that if you miss the first shot you are more likely to miss the second. In the case of the sportsman flushing a covey, or a man defending himself against a number of assailants, there was, how-

evet, a strong case for repeated fire. The difficulty was to produce. All the museums of arms can show the early attempts, often quite grotesque and usually highly dangerous to the user. There was the Roman-candle gun, which was loaded with seven successive charges of powder and shot, of which the forward charge was fired by match. Its discharge fired the next, and so on until all the seven had gone off—a burst of automatic fire. Unfortunately, it was quite impossible to maintain an aim during the successive shots, if for any reason one did not ignite the remainder were useless also, and even more often they all went off together and the gun blew up. Then there was a system which loaded the gun in the same way, but with stout wads between each charge, a

row of touch-holes and a sliding lock which was supposed

to creep backwards down the side of the barrel firing each touch-hole in turn. Seven-barrelled ‘volley guns’, to fire all seven barrels at once, were actually accepted by the Board of Ordnance in 1779, but as usual were wished off on the

long-suffering Navy. This gun had a central barrel fired by flintlock in the ordinary way, but it had also six other barrels welded to it, which were fired by little touch-holes communicating with the central barrel. Henry Nock actually made 500 of these for the Royal Navy, intended for use in the fighting tops; officers of the Nelson school, however,

felt that the risk of putting the ship on fire was greater than the risk to the enemy, and preferred to have every available man serving the great guns. It was also developed as a

sporting gun, and Colonel

Thornton

had his portrait

PERCUSSION

MUZZLE-LOADING

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REVOLVERS

99

painted carrying a twelve-barrelled volley gun, very short, as indeed it must have been if it were to be raised to the shoulder at all. These multi-barrel guns were very difficult to clean and load, and there does not appear to be anything they could do which could not be done by an equivalent charge of powder and shot in a single barrel. Multi-barrel pistols were also made, the most popular being a fourbarrelled one resembling the spread fingers of a hand, usually called a duck-foot pistol; whatever its real utility, it would

certainly present a most

formidable

appearance.

There was also a four-barrelled pistol, in square, which had a selective system: four touch-holes connected with the pan and a tap was turned to select the one to be fired. All these multi-barrel weapons are of great interest to

the collector, if only for their quaintly formidable appearance, and they are to be acquired whenever possible; they are scarce, and prices run high. In spite of their grotesque appearance they are, in fact, in the mainstream of develop-

ment, for when the percussion cap opened new fields the idea arose in a number of minds to have the central barrel replaced by a fixed axle and to rotate the other barrels in controlled succession to the hammer. This would cut out all the early difficulties of controlling the fire in the barrel it was meant for. The first was a simple over-and-under pair of barrels; having fired one shot you twisted the barrels round and were ready for a second. Shortly, however, four,

five or six barrels were to be had, all loaded and capped, to be revolved by hand to the hammer—infinitely superior to the simultaneous discharge. Shortly an improvement was devised, by which pressing the trigger cocked and let fall the hammer; and then a further device simultaneously rotated the nest of barrels. The weight of the barrels, however, made it very difficult to take a good aim, so they were cut down as short as possible, which in turn reduced the accuracy.

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These peppet-pot pistols, as they came to be called, are now very scarce. Many of them, especially those by the best makers, were later shortened so that their barrels would

serve as chambers for the new single-barrel, multi-chamber revolver, and the cheaper ones might very well be sold as scrap. But they are to be found and are of interest and value, though perhaps not so much as later and commoner types, so difficult is this market to assess. In 1965 I saw a twobarrelled twist-over in fair enough condition sold by auction for £26.

A flintlock revolver was patented in Britain in 1818 by an American, Elisha Collier. Quite a few examples were made and there were several trials before the Select Com-

mittee. The first to be made were exactly on the general lines of later revolvers, but there were so many refinements

necessary to allow of the successive barrels being fired by flintlock that it was admired for its ingenuity but rejected for its complexity. Later Collier produced a much simpler revolver in which the cylinder was rotated by hand, and also a rifled musket on the same principle, both of which were tested by the ever-willing Select Committee. The time taken to fire a hundred rounds was half an hour, a slower rate of

fire than the smooth-bore musket, while the accuracy was less than the Baker rifle and it was felt that with all its complications it would not stand up to service conditions. The

Select Committee were undoubtedly right, for it has never been possible to devise a revolving-cylinder breech mechanism for a rifle. Collier, however, set up a shop in London, probably

having his weapons manufactured for him by Evans of Soho. He sold quite a number, especially of revolving pistols to officers of the Hon. East India Company’s armies, but his interest waned; in 1836 he patented an improved steam engine and thenceforward his name is heard no more in connection with firearms. His flintlock revolvers remain,

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IOI

are very scarce, and often not recognized as the great rarities they undoubtedly are. They are usually marked on the lockplate ‘E. H. Collier, Patent’ usually with a number. They are seldom found complete and in good order, and the casual examiner may not realize that in the earlier type it is necessary

to wind up a spring with a key to rotate the barrel. Mortimer of London made repeating pistols on the Loren-

zoni magazine principle, which had been developed in the seventeenth century by an Italian of that name from the original invention of the Kalthof family of Solingen. This was extremely ingenious, loading the gun by a single movement of a lever, from two magazines in the butt; it failed as a practical weapon because of its extreme complication and its danger. However, with the lower pressures of the pistol it had its attractions for those who could afford it, and nine

successive shots with one loading was a very great attraction. The danger of a flash-back into the magazine was very great, however, as is testified by the fact that most existing exam-

ples have had the butt exploded, and it must have cost the user some fingers at the very least. At the same time it is a most interesting piece of mechanism, necessarily carried out with the very finest craftsmanship; the view of serious collectors is exemplified by the fact that a London-made Lorenzoni pistol was sold by auction in 1965 for {/1,000. It is impossible to mistake the Lorenzoni action, with its long strong side-lever parallel with the barrel and almost as long. Samuel Colt is the great name in revolvers, although many of his contemporaries seem to have regarded him with a rather wary eye. Whether or not he was collating other

men’s ideas, he was granted British, French and American

patents in 1835/6, got some capital somehow and started manufacture in the town of Paterson, New Jersey. He made

several types, but the only one to achieve real sales was a heavy, long-barrelled model which was bought by Texas

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pioneers. They did not,

however, buy enough; private persons preferred the handy

little Derringer or else the formidable-looking pepper-box; rifles with revolving cylinders were no good. Besides, there was a financial crisis at the time and the firm was never adequately capitalized. It folded up in 1843 and all the plant was sold off for what it would fetch, not very much. It was a failure. Nowadays, of course, a Paterson Colt is one of the greatest

possible prizes for the collector, and any one will fetch a price

which would have saved the firm from liquidation in 1843. In 1965 a single small Paterson Colt, with mother-of-pearl butt decoration, was sold in London for £1,000. All was not lost, however. In 1847 the war with Mexico

began, in consequence of which wicked aggression by Mexico the U.S.A. was reluctantly compelled to annex Texas and California. The Texas Rangers were embodied in the American Army, and demanded to be armed with the revolver which they had found so effective. Captain Walker of the U.S. Army was sent to confer with Colt and helped re-design the revolver to make it more suitable for military requirements. With Government orders, money was no problem; Colt was in business again, this time permanently. The warlike aspect of Europe did not escape Colt’s attention, and he took a stand at the Great Exhibition in

Hyde Park in 1851. Many firearms were exhibited by British and European manufactures, each showing the very finest and most decorative weapons they could produce; not so Colt; he loaded his stand with hundreds of plain, serviceable revolvers, He had some very handsome engraved specimens as well, but these he reserved for presentation to senior officers of the Ordnance and the Navy. Colt was sufficiently encouraged to set up a factory iin London. He could get no skilled gunsmiths to work for him; very well,

he put in machines which could do the work by unskilled

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trainee attendants. The organized mass-production factory had arrived. By 1853 the potential output was 1,000 revolvers a week, if only Government would buy them. Somehow or other scare letters appeared in the newspapers stating that the whole Russian Navy was being armed with

revolvers, and how were our poor fellows to face them with cutlasses ?Early in 1854 Colt received large orders for his Navy revolver, of which he was to produce 40,000 before the

end of the Crimean war. The Colt Navy was a much lighter weapon than his American models, weighing 2 Ibs. 10 ozs., with a 7}-in. barrel and a bore of +358 in. It was single-action; that is to say the rotation of the cylinder to bring the next chamber in line with the barrel was done by the action of cocking the hammer; all that the trigger did was to release the hammer. It was thus comparatively slow in action, although there are legends of Wild West gunmen ‘fanning’ the gun, holding it with the trigger pressed and cocking the hammer by a rapid succession of strokes with the side of the left hand. It was,

however, cheap, simple and strong; it would stand any amount of ill-treatment or neglect. The Navy kept on ordering vast quantities, none of which ever saw action on any of Her Majesty’s ships of war. Meanwhile, a formidable rival to the Colt had arisen. In

1851 Robert Adams patented a double-action revolver, in which the pressing of the trigger not only rotated the cylinder but also cocked and released the hammer. The Adams revolver had also a solid frame, there being a permanent top connection between the butt and the barrel. It had only five chambers against the Colt six, but it fired a much heavier bullet; it was made in two sizes, a 5?-in. barrel of -434 bore, and a 7}-in. barrel of -490 bore. It had nothing like the range of the Colt, which could carry at least soo yatds; but what the British officer wanted was not long

range but a sure stopper at close quarters. The double-action

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was much quicker than the Colt single-action, and when Frederick Beaumont’s patent was added, allowing of separate cocking if desired, it was felt that here was the complete answer. After the Crimea, British forces were engaged in quite desperate small wars with some of the strongest and most determined warriors in the world; to stop a charging Pathan was much the same as stopping a charging tiger; and the -490 soft bullet could do both, whereas cases wete known of an officer being cut down after putting four or five light Colt bullets through his assailant. The Adams-Beaumont revolver was the choice of the British Army in 1856. It was also preferred by the Hon. East India Company, so that, seeing the end of the road ahead, Colt gave up his London factory and went back to America. He had been only four years in Britain, but his impact was permanent. He had shown that it was possible to make potent weapons in great quantities by good machines and unskilled labour.

When the Beaumont-Adams

revolver was adopted by

Government, a company was formed to handle the business, known as the London Armoury Company; most of the revolvers now to be found have LONDON ARMOURY on the top strap of the frame, and usually DEAN ADAMS &

DEAN,

LONDON

on

the side.

The

earlier

and

much

more desirable ones have no reference to London Armoury. They are very fine weapons and can be had much more easily than the contemporary Colt, as there is not the same keen American competition. Colt or Adams, they are very well worth collecting, for they represent the last of the muzzle-loaders.

I Breech-loading Rifles Ir HAD always been obvious that the solution for all the troubles of the muzzle-loading rifle was to load it from the other end; the only difficulty was how to do it. Breechloading implied a joint of some kind, and this joint had to stand the blast of the charge. Ferguson had achieved this, but somehow or other Ferguson and his inventions were forgotten. The modern line was set by a Swiss named Paully, who worked for Napoleon in 1812, and later in

England; his inventions included all modern ideas, but he was too much ahead of his times; there was no means of

working them out in practice. He had a German workman named Dreyse, who took back with him to his native town of Sommerda in Prussia a number of ideas, from which he produced in 1837 the Dreyse needle-fire breech-

loading rifle. Here was the first real bolt action, with a firing-pin instead of a hammer. The bullet had a hollow

in its base, which

was

filled with fulminate; on release,

the long sharp ‘needle’ plunged through the paper and

the powder

and

struck the fulminate.

The

explosion

simultaneously spread the skirt of the bullet to grip the

rifling, and ignited the charge to send it on its way. It had its disadvantages, principally in the long thin firing-pin being in the centre of the explosion, but it was far and away the best military weapon of its time. It was adopted by the Prussian Army in 1848, and played a notable part in the wars

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of Prussian expansion from 1864 to 1871. Its superiority was particularly noted in the terrible battle of Sadowa between Prussia and Austria, in 1866.

In the same year Chassepot invented the French rifle which became famous under his name. This was a bolt-action like the Prussian, but the firing-pin struck on a percussion cap at the end of the cartridge. Thus the firing-pin was much shorter than the needle-fire and was not exposed to so much heat. On the whole, it was a better rifle than the Dreyse, and if a fractional superiority in weapons were the only factor in war the French should have won in 1870.

In America, Christian Sharps patented his breech-loader in 1848. In this action the trigger-guard was the main lever, just as in Ferguson’s; but instead of a screw it operated a

down-falling block; improved methods of machining had made it possible for such a block to be gas-tight, or near enough. By an ingenious device, after the paper cartridge had been slipped into the breech, a little knife on the block pared off the end of the cartridge so that the flash of the detonator could reach the charge. In every way an excellent weapon, it was the principal firearm of the Northern cavalry

during the Civil War and used to an extent by the infantry, although the Springfield muzzle-loader remained their main weapon. Out West it replaced the Plains rifle, and was the

gun which exterminated the Indian inhabitants, partly by shooting them down but mainly by eliminating the buffalo on which they existed. All these developments had not gone unnoticed in Britain, and in 1865 the Board of Ordnance decided in

principle that the breech-loading system should be adopted; but they also felt, quite rightly, that they were in a period of

rapid transition and that none of the visible systems would give the final answer; therefore as a temporary measure

they would find some system to convert their enormous stocks of excellent Enfields to the breech system. The type

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chosen was devised by Jacob Snider of New York. A laterally hinged block swung up and over to expose the bed for the cartridge, and when closed it carried the nipple for the percussion cap. There were many difficulties, mostly from gas leakages, but these were all resolved by Colonel Boxer, who in 1867 produced his solid-drawn, brass, self-

sealing cartridge with a central percussion cap, all complete. A very thin skin of brass was quite sufficient to bridge the

joins which otherwise the gases would blast through. A firing-pin replaced the percussion cap and nipple. The Enfield-Snider became a viable weapon solely by Boxer’s invention, and while the Snider is historical Boxer is for-

gotten except by the few. In spite of its subsequent fame, the Snider only lasted four years; in 1871 Ordnance issued a new rifle, rather a compromise, using a falling-block system invented probably by an American, Peabody, and developed by an Austrian named Martini; the barrel was designed by Henry of Edinburgh. Again, the main feature was the Boxer cartridge, which was now fired by a horizontal firing-pin; so for the first time the British Army had a hammerless rifle. The action was not so satisfactory; extraction of the fired cartridge was not easy, especially after rapid fire, and sand or dust could jam it completely; and it had a violent recoil. As a schoolboy in 1918 I carried a Martini-Henry cavalry carbine in the O.T.C., and I can feel the kick as I write.

Meantime the research which was to perfect the rifle was being carried on in England by a private individual. William Ellis Metford

was born in Devon

in 1824, the son of a

Taunton doctor who was also a keen shot. There is much in being reared with a gun in your arms. Metford was a civil engineer by profession, worked with the great Brunel on the railways and bridges and went to India, where he did good military work during the Mutiny. He commenced a series of experiments when he was 26, and kept on making

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notes for the rest of his life. He was the true scientist; he

accepted nothing as axiomatic; he wanted to know why. Here was the deep grooving of the rifle, which so retarded the bullet in its flight. Why ?Because with shallow grooving the soft-lead bullet would ‘strip’, that is ride over the grooves and become a smooth-bore. Then why soft lead? Let’s try a hard alloy and shallow grooving. Metford found that a grooving of 1/1,000 in. was sufficient to grip a hard bullet. Metford’s first rifle had five grooves, only 4/1,000 in. in

depth, muzzle-loading. He took it to Cambridge University Rifle Club, which had the longest range in Britain, up to

1,100 yards, and there won the first prize with ease. He now went on to the breech-loader and applied the same system of exhaustive experiment to each individual function. Each one was completely studied and the optimum decisively

determined. He did not claim to invent anything; he only found out what was best. In all his life he took out only one patent, for a system of increasing the twist on the rifling towards the muzzle, based on a series of calculations which

are a delight for the ballistic mathematician but the bane of the machinist; it was a good idea but it did not perceptibly do any good. It was, however, used in the -256 MannlicherCarcano which was the main weapon of the Italian infantry up

to the time when they changed sides in the Second World War. Meanwhile, the magazine rifle had come into being. In America the tube magazine was popular, but experience showed that while it answered very well with small-bore rifles, there was a risk with heavier weapons that the jar of the recoil would drive the nose of one bullet against the cap of the one in front, hard enough to fire it; and every soldier knew what an explosion in the magazine meant to him. In 1879 James Lee, a Scottish watchmaker living in America, patented a box magazine and bolt action which solved all the problems.

In 1883 the British Government appointed a Committee

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to go into every aspect of the modern magazine rifle; after

sitting for five years, it selected Lee’s magazine and Metford’s barrel, and the Lee-Metford rifle was born. A further deci-

sion was based on the fact that ballistics had become an exact science. There are two factors which at long range cause a lateral deviation of the bullet known as ‘drift’. The first is the spin imparted to the bullet by the rifling, and the drift is to the right or left according to the right or left spiral in the bore. At 1,000 yards this drift is about a foot, but at 1,500 it is over six feet. The other drift is caused by the rotation of the earth, and is always to the right in the Northern hemisphere and to the left in the Southern hemisphere, governed by the same causes which give opposite spirals to revolving storms in the two hemispheres. At 1,000 yards this drift is only about six inches, but increases rapidly above that. It is not affected by the direction of fire, whether east-and-west or north-and-south or

any other point of the compass. The Committee considered that major wars would usually be fought in the Northern hemisphere, and ordered that all rifles were to be made with a left-hand twist, so that the two drift factors would more

or less cancel each other out. The British example was followed by the French and the Norwegians, but by no other army; and all sporting rifles continued to be made with a right-hand twist. Unfortunately, the next big war was the Boer War, fought in the Southern hemisphere, where the two ‘drifts’ were added together; to make things worse, a tiny error in the sights caused a further leftward deviation, about six feet at

1,000 yards, at which range the British bullets were falling about eight feet to the left of the target, while longer ranges were quite impossible; a frightful handicap against the Boers, whose Mauser rifles with right-hand spiral shot within four inches of the aim} at 1,000 yards. This was an ‘The aim’, of course, means the true aim, disregarding the human factor.

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important factor in the British reverses early in the war, and the stories of the infinitely superior shooting of the Boers. In 1895, the rifling of the Lee-Metford was improved upon by the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, and henceforth Metford’s name was discarded and the rifle was called the Lee-Enfield. The introduction of cordite instead of black powder gave the bullet increased velocity, as well as eliminating the smoke. Experience with Mounted Infantry during the Boer War showed the advantage of a rifle which could be used by both cavalry and infantry, and in 1902 was produced the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield, the S.M.L.E. The contemporary Mauser had higher velocity and fractionally greater accuracy; the American Springfield 1903 model optimistically sighted to 2,850 yards; but the S.M.L.E. would take sand, mud, water and any amount of knocking about, and still shoot sure and true.

A new British rifle was projected about 1912, to be of ‘276 bore and to use the Mauser type of bolt; but with the outbreak of war in 1914 it was modified to the same +303 bore as the S.M.L.E., and large numbers manufactured in U.S.A. This is the Rifle No. 3, Mk. 1, pattern 1914, always

called the P 14. With its Mauser-type bolt locking at the forward end and heavier body, it is slightly more accurate than the S.M.L.E., especially at shorter ranges. When fitted with a Parker-Hale sight, it is a favourite for target shooting at ranges up to 600 yards; but for 1,000 to 1,200 yards many

marksmen prefer the older S.M.L.E. When the Americans came into the war in 1917, they used exactly the same rifle, adapting it to their -300 rimless cartridge; this became their Model ’17 Rifle, which is often called a Springfield, quite erroneously for it has nothing whatever in common with the Springfield ’03 model except

the ammunition. It is a straight replica of the P 14 with identical characteristics.

BREECH-LOADING

Canada

produced

the Ross

RIFLES

rifle, possibly

baAg

the most

accurate rifle ever made, rather long, rather heavy in the

forehand, but a splendid target gun. It has, however, a complicated and indeed dangerous bolt, a straight pull without visible locking lugs. Grit in the bolt or any unskilled interference with it made it liable to blow back out of the body and kill the firer. This annoying proclivity caused it to be dropped during the 1914/18 war in favour of the S.M.L.E. There is no better target rifle, however, and the bolt is safe enough if properly looked after. There are plenty of all these rifles about, very cheap, usually from £2 to £10 according to condition. The police will usually give a permit for at least one of them to a member of a full-bore rifle club. The sporting rifle developed on much the same lines as the military up to and including the Enfield; at the Snider they parted. The requirements were quite different. The hunter did not require to fire a large number of shots in rapid succession, he could give his rifle every care and attention and long range was of little interest. The Enfield ‘577 muzzle-loader remained a favourite deer-stalking rifle long after it was discarded by the Army. The bullet was considered to be the right size, and while the rifle was sighted up to 800 yards no sportsman would shoot at half that distance; the stalk was the thing, and the idea was to get within a hundred yards before firing. For large and

dangerous game the round, lead ball had little penetrating power, and it was usual to use very large bore guns. Sir Samuel Baker (1821/93), a man of colossal physique, frequently used a four-bore rifle firing a ball of 3 ozs. and even had a rifle firing a cylindrical bullet weighing 4 Ib. with 16 drams of powder. Very few shoulders could ‘abide the recoyling’ of such a cannon. Gradually the double-barrel came into favour and the Rigby -450 double-barrel rifle became more or less standard

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both for deer-stalking and for big game. Towards the end of the century sporting models of the Lee-Metford, of the same bore, came into vogue, especially for dangerous game. The usual load was the Express bullet, hard-coated but with the lead nose exposed. The speed was much less than that

of sound, and while it was perfect for stag it sometimes failed with big game. The adoption of ‘small bore’ rifles around +303 at the beginning of this century by all the armies of the world

made sportsmen consider them quite seriously. It was found that the high-velocity bullet, three times the speed of sound,

had a far greater effect than its small bore suggested. The sonic waves which accompanied it had a shattering effect far greater than that of a sub-sonic Express bullet of double the weight, and the flat trajectory made aiming much simpler. W. D. M. Bell, the elephant hunter, used to kill elephants with a Mannlicher -256, a tiny thing weighing under 6 lbs. Bell was, of course, a most experienced shot

and had made a study of the anatomy of the head of the African elephant. I have myself shot stag with this Mannlicher but do not recommend it unless the shooter is accurate. The usual rifle for stag in this century is the Mannlicher -375, sighted for 200 and 300 yards, but while the sportsman is so armed he will usually find that what the stalker and the ghillie have for their own use is an old S.M.L.E., with the stock cut back. It is for all practical

purposes point-blank at 350 yards and will grass a stag just as neatly as the heavier Mannlicher, especially if the nose of the bullet is just scraped with a file. A breech-loading sporting rifle for which ammunition is available is regarded by the police as very much a firearm, and you will have to show that you have a real use for one, before you can expect a permit.

16

Breech-loading Sporting Guns LonG BEFORE the breech-loader was adopted for sporting guns, the muzzle-loader with percussion caps had assumed the same general appearance that it retains today. Walking up coveys with pointers was still the system, and if you got a tight-and-left out of a covey you were quite happy to

preen yourself a little, while your man reloaded your gun and the dogs brought in the birds. There was no need for a lot of shots in quick succession. Interest in breech-loading began with Lancaster’s invention of a centre-fire cartridge in 1852 and became intense when Colonel Boxer brought out his solid-drawn, brass centre-fire cartridge. The bolt action did not at all commend itself to shooters, nor was it suitable for a double-barrel.

Quickly the gun perfectly cartridge

the gunsmiths brought out a means of ‘breaking’ at the breech, and closing it again so as to be gas-tight with a brass cartridge, or with a paper having a brass base. The hammer, instead of firing the detonating cap placed on the nipple, struck a firing-pin which exploded the detonator fixed in the cartridge. There were many ways of opening and locking the gun. One of the strongest was the under-lever, in which a strong lever, shaped to conform to the trigger-guard, was turned sideways a quarter-turn to release the holding-bolts, and turned back again to re-lock the gun. There was the sidelever, in which an equally long and effective lever was H

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mounted on the side of the lock, elegantly curved to follow the shape of the stock and terminating in a thumb-piece, which was pushed down to open the lock and brought up to close it. The final form almost universally adopted was the top-lever, in which a short lever mounted on top of the body was turned sideways to open the lock, which automatically locked on being closed. This last type did not, however, really come in until the horizontal firing-pin was

adopted from the military rifle and the hammerless sporting gun became ‘the thing’. Still, the hammer gun had its permanent adherents and I have often shot with men who

pteferred the hammers. ‘Safe,’ said one. “You know where you are,’ said another. ‘When I see a bird between the dogs, I know it’s dead’; he used the old expression which dated from the wheel-lock. At first, spent cartridges were taken from the chamber by a tool carried in the pocket, but soon a device was brought in whereby a half-section of the end of the chamber pushed out the cartridge far enough to allow it to be pulled out by finger and thumb. The logical development of this was to operate this extractor by a hammer and spring, so that a fired cartridge was automatically ejected over the shoulder, while an unfired one remained in the chamber. This hammerless ejector was perfected about 1880 and has remained the action for all good-class sporting guns ever since. It was about this time that the fashion grew among wealthy landowners of breeding vast numbers of game birds, pheasants in particular, and driving them toward the guns.

The system was, and still is, to breed and feed the pheasants in a suitably planted wood all their lives; the day before the shoot they would all be driven out in the direction of another wood, across a suitable open space, and would settle down uneasily for the night. On the day, after the guns were lined up in the open, the beaters with or without Clumber spaniels would beat up the temporary settlement,

BREECH-LOADING

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ris

when the pheasants would take off at high speed towards their accustomed home, across the line of the guns. In this way enormous bags were got in a very short time. Lord Ernest Hamilton

has recorded

that at Eaton Hall, along

with his host the first Duke of Westminister and five other guns, they shot a thousand pheasants in two hours before lunch. This was by no means unique. The record so far as I know is just under four thousand pheasant for seven guns in 1913. It stands in the book that Lord Walsingham shot more than a thousand grouse on one day single-handed, in 1888.

This holocaustic slaughter may not be everybody’s idea of sport, but it called for a very high standard of marksmanship from the guns and rivalry was keen. A pair of really good hammerless ejectors was a mere necessity, for the loader must be able to charge as quickly as you could fire. Gunsmiths gave instruction on the proper position of the loader, so as to exchange guns without confusion. The most opulent society the world has ever seen was willing to pay any price for guns which might enable the owner to ‘wipe the eye’ of his neighbour. The ‘best London gun’ was universally recognized as the finest shotgun in the world and very large prices were paid, as they still are, for a handmade gun precisely fitted to its user. Birmingham could produce the barrels and most of the parts, and many excellent complete guns which are still admired; a pair of sidelock ejectors by W. W. Greener, which must have been a hundred years old, were sold in 1965 for £500. I do not know whether the purchaser wanted them to embellish a collection or to use in the field, but I am quite sure they

would be perfectly suitable for either role. Much later, Birmingham was noted for mass-produced plain guns of excellent quality at low prices. The really cheap guns were imported from Belgium, over-and-unders from Italy, and repeaters from U.S.A.

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By the time the first breech-loaders were being made it was fully realized that with the superior ignition of the percussion cap and the improved quality of powder, a long barrel, such as the 6-ft. barrel of the fowling-piece, was quite unnecessary. Thirty inches was all that was needed to develop the full force of the explosion and to direct the shot, and why carry around a length of useless barrel which not only did no good but by its friction diminished the effectiveness? The attention of gunsmiths was directed to pattern, velocity and range. It was found that all three might be improved by ‘choking’ the gun—that is, reducing the bore very slightly at the muzzle. A great body of expertise built

up around this subject, and one had choke, full choke, half choke, modified choke, quarter choke as well as plain cylinder. As the more the choke the further the barrel would catty, it became usual to have the right barrel, which normally fired first, either plain cylinder or very slightly choked, while the left barrel had as much choke as the purchaser

desired. There were additionally the many questions of balancing the load to the charge for what amount of choke, the ultimate aim being to produce a spread of shot covering a citcle of 30 ins. diameter, the shot all arriving at the same time and evenly spaced all over the circle, at 30/35 yards for a plain cylinder barrel and 40/45 yards according to choke. When cordite was introduced it was eagerly adopted by sportsmen because of the absence of smoke and many guns were sent back to the makers to be taken to the proof house for the new test, ‘NP’, nitro-proved, to show that it could

take the more sudden shock of the new explosive. What took longer to realize was that cordite, burning so fast, did not require a 30-in. barrel to develop its full charge; 24 ins. was long enough, but this was not fully understood until the 1920s. 25 ins. is likely to be the shortest barrel made or sold now, however. because the new 1963 Act makes a

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24-in. barrel liable to a police permit as a ‘firearm’, while anything longer is free. It’s the law, I didn’t make it. Here I may reminisce that the best shooting I have ever seen in

my life was by a youth of 84 years, with a little 24-in. by Dickson. While the birding gun shortened into the fowling-piece and then again into the shot-gun, nothing above 12-bore, wildfowlers kept the long piece and tended to make it bigger. Many of these wildfowling guns are still in use after a hundred years or more, because they might not be fired ten times a winter, whereas with driven pheasant a man

might well fire five hundred shots a day. Ten- and eight-bore were standard for wildfowling, and even four-bore, a formidable weapon to fire from the shoulder. Because of the recoil, it became common to mount

the gun on the punt instead of the person, and so the puntgun came into being: a very long, light barrel, shooting up to 4 lbs. of swan-shot at a discharge. Punt-guns are now barred in U.S.A., and in Britain are restricted to a muzzle

bore of 12 ins., which allows a maximum charge of 24 ozs.

of shot. Usually these are ancient muzzle-loading guns, with percussion-cap locks which may have been converted from flint; although one keen wildfowler of my acquaintance has recently converted his to a detachable breech with a

firing-pin striking a +32 revolver blank as a detonator. One can’t but admire those chaps who are happy to paddle about

in a punt for a winter’s night on the off-chance of getting one shot. The beauty of a punt gun from the collector’s point of view is that being a smooth-bore and definitely over 24 ins. long in the barrel, no permit is required, while it is a most formidable cannon to hang at the base of a trophy of arms.

7

Breech-loading Revolvers and Automatics Ir 1s sArp that the enterprising Samuel Colt was offered a patent for cartridge-loading revolvers by Rollin White, and refused it. This may have been because Colt was not so young then, or it may have been that White’s patent included some quite impracticable ideas. Be that as it may, the patent was acquired by a new partnership, Smith and Wesson, in 1856, when Samuel Colt’s patent had only a year to run. By autumn of 1857 the Smith & Wesson cartridge breechloader revolver was on the market. Strangely, it was at first made only in the smallest bore, -22. It may be that they distrusted their own product and wished to minimize possible claims for damages to the user.

In 1860 they introduced a -32 which was immediately successful. Later they proposed a heavy -44 for the American Army, and one of the officers sent to test it was George Schofield. The committee did not think it was quite suitable as a military weapon, although small numbers were ordered, but Schofield joined the company and brought out a considerable number of improvements, using his military experience to produce a weapon for rough conditions. (I

will not use ‘rugged’.) This was widely popular in the Wild West, used by Wells Fargo and the American Express for their guards. Still the Colt single-action retained its almost mystical fascination. Owners would have their muzzle-loading Colts

BREECH-LOADING

REVOLVERS

AND

AUTOMATICS

I1I9

bored through the cylinder in order to take the patented cartridges. Colt, having missed the boat, had to wait for the next, when the Rollin patent expired. In 1873, Colt produced the famous Peacemaker, a single-action -45 breech-loading cartridge revolver, with the solid frame which had defeated

him in the competition with Adams for the British Army contracts. Somehow or other, when practically every other revolver was double-acting, people seemed to /ke the singleaction Colt. A double-action was introduced in 1877 in two bores, -38 and -41, but they were never popular. Smith & Wesson had the market for a double-action +38, and those

who liked the heavier Colt seemed to prefer the single action. General Patton always wore a pair of silver-plated ivory-handled Peacemakers during both World Wars; he may even have fired them for all I know. In Britain, John Adams,

brother of Robert Adams

of

Beaumont-Dean-Adams, patented a breech-loading revolver that was approved by Ordnance, whereupon he inaugurated the Adams Patent Small Arms Company to make this revolver on his own. The following year, 1868, Webley

brought out a somewhat similar revolver, which found favour with the Royal Irish Constabulary and _ several colonial police forces. In 1872 the Ordnance produced their own Enfield -455, which nobody really liked, and in 1893 it was replaced by the Webley of the same calibre. This was a magnificent service weapon for the personal defence of officers: double-action,

with a hammer

which

could

be

cocked separately and a neat rebounding action; the greatest strength and simplicity, ensuring fire under any conditions; and a bullet that would stop a tiger. It remained the trusty friend of the British officer until well into the Second World War, when it tended to be replaced by the lighter -38 Smith & Wesson, although officers actually in contact with the enemy preferred to use the same arms as their troops. It was long observed that in the discharge of a revolver

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there was a great deal of surplus energy, which either made a lot of noise at the muzzle or recoiled against the hand and wrist, putting off the aim for the next shot; at the same time,

the double-action meant a fairly heavy pull on the trigger. Many people will recall competitions to snap a Webley a hundred times in quick succession, and beyond that wrist and finger began to droop. Why not use the wasted energy of the discharge to do the heavy work of reloading and cocking? There were many attempts, but the first which really worked was the Borchardt in 1893, very much more familiar under the name of Liiger. Unchanged since its first production, it is regarded by almost all enthusiasts as still the vety best automatic pistol. An eight-round magazine was contained in the butt. The cartridge was locked in place by a toggle joint. On firing, the whole barrel moved back on the recoil, and by the time the bullet had left the muzzle the toggle was kicked up by a shoulder, allowing the body to go back, throw out the fired cartridge, allow another to

rise from the magazine, lock it into the breech and cock the firing-pin for the next shot. This toggle-recoil mechanism was copied for the famous Vickers machine-gun. There were, on different principles, the Mauser in 1898 and the Browning in 1897. In 1911, the American Army adopted a Colt version which is still extant. Because of its ease of Operation and its flat proportion it became the favourite personal weapon, especially in small sizes. During the first quarter of the twentieth century there were few heroines of

the blood-and-bed school of novel who did not carry ‘a tiny jewelled automatic’ in corsage or stocking-top. Ladies and their harness must have been different then; there was

a period when I thought fit to carry the smallest available ee a +25 Browning, and it caused my tailor many a

sigh. There were two distinct types of automatic action, the

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recoil and the blow-back. The recoil system has already been described, as it applies to the Liiger, and other recoil

systems have the same general principle: the breech is locked until the bullet is well on its way down the barrel, when the recoil of a substantial part of the body does what is required. In the blow-back system, as soon as the cartridge is fired the empty case recoils, pushes back the bolt, ejects itself while

another cartridge comes up to be pushed into the breech by the returning bolt, while the firing-pin is caught back ready. In practice it became clear that the only system for a serious weapon was the recoil, the blow-back being only suitable for -22 rifles and light automatics, the -380 Colt being the heaviest to employ this system. Controversy will always exist between the devotees of

the revolver and the automatic, which is not made easier by comparing the best of one with the worst of the other type. Comparing two bests gives a fairer comparison: take the Liiger and the Webley. The automatic is incomparably the finer piece of machinery, containing a great many parts, some of them quite delicate; much of the shock of the recoil is taken up by the reloading mechanism; all the trigger finger has to do is to press the trigger, very lightly; it is accurate and in the long-barrelled version sighted up to 800 metres; the perfect weapon. Buys, if any grit gets into it, or if there is a misfire in any one cartridge, the shooting stops. The revolver has comparatively few parts, all sturdy for their size; it kicks hard, throwing the muzzle sharply upwards each time, and the trigger is a very heavy pull. Buf, grit is no matter, and if one cartridge misfires you just pull again and fire the next one. In two great wars, the German Army, completely expert, preferred the automatic, and the British Army, completely expert, preferred the revolver. There

must be some great truth hidden here, if only I could see it. The British amateur who wishes to collect these historic but still potent weapons is going to have a number of dis-

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cussions with the police, and is many times to envy his American brother, still in that happy state laid down by our

House of Lords in 1830 that it is the indefeasible right of every citizen to possess in his own house whatever arms he pleases.

18

Maintaining the Collection For THE formation of a collection of firearms it is by no means essential that you should be able to use them or to repair them, but if you can do both your collection will

be the better for it and more cheaply acquired. The ability to use firearms will enable you to judge much better of the quality, which consists largely of how well the weapon is

adapted for use—how sweetly it comes up to the aim. If you can repair them, you can buy unserviceable arms, which

are always very much cheaper than those in working order. Failing both, you are best to make an arrangement with the nearest skilful gunsmith, preferably one who is not himself a dealer in antique firearms. I use the expression gunsmith

because that is what they always call themselves, but pedantically a gunsmith is a man who makes guns, whereas the man

who repairs and improves them is called an armourer. The

highest flight of the art is that subtle tightening and slacking of the relation between stock and barrel in a target rifle, which ensures that the gun will shoot true to its aiming every time. There are not a dozen armourers in Britain who possess this most delicate of all crafts, beside which the

work of the eye surgeon is mere axemanship. This is work which no amateur can hope to do, and which no expert would dream of trying for himself. There is, however, no reason why anybody with a good eye, clear

head and steady pair of hands should not undertake almost

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any tepair to the action, given a reasonable small kit of simple tools. You are not going to try to repair barrels, which is altogether beyond the equipment you are likely to have or to be able to use, but there is nothing about the lock which need dismay the amateur mechanic so long as he provides himself with the proper tools. These are not

many nor large. A complete set of small spanners, preferably rising in size by 1/64 in., very hard steel, and a set of screwdrivers of best quality, covering a good range of width and thickness, plus a few small files, is sufficient for a start. If

you few the you

ate going to take a lock to pieces, you will require a spring-cramps—tweezerts with screws, which compress spring while you remove it and remain in place until put it back. This is the only essential specialized tool; it may be possible to take out a spring and put it back with a pair of pliers, but it is better not to try. If you want to do more extensive repairs, you must have a tiny lathe, usually called a watchmaker’s lathe, and a little jig-saw, both of which may be power or treadle driven; there is a lot to be said for the more primitive propulsion. Also necessary is a fairly extensive outfit of small stocks and dies. With such an outfit you can not only repair a lock, you can make a new one; but restraint is necessary and the fewer new parts the better. The value of your weapon consists of its antiquity, and every single new screw you cut for it is reducing that value. If you want to make a more modern weapon altogether, by all means do so, but let it be a complete new lock or whatever you want, and retain the old section quite complete. Thus a friend of mine, an ardent wildfowler, decided to convert his ancient muzzle-

loading percussion-cap punt gun to breeching-loading with centre-fire cartridges; nothing whatever was available for purchase. Undismayed, he constructed the breech, a superb piece of machining, and turned the cartridges (re-loadable of course) out of solid brass bar, with a -32 revolver blank .

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to fire the black powder charge. At the same time, he retains the original stock and lock, so that if anyone wishes to reconstruct it as original he can do so without any difficulty. In the case of screws, especially external screws, you must remember that for good quality firearms all screws were, and are, cut specially for the position, and so threaded that when just quite tight the slot in the head lies parallel with the barrel. This has been a point of craftsmanship for centuries. If you have to replace one, therefore, you have to be willing to turn and thread quite a few until you hit it exactly. Having done this, you have then to file off the head to shape, for it is comparatively seldom that a screw-head is holding down a flat surface; when you are turning your screw-blank you must allow for this shaping. When turning and threading screws it isn’t at all necessary to use high-tensile or other hard strong steel; quite the contrary. All stresses are taken up by the fitting, and the only purpose of the screw is (or should be) to hold it in place; for this purpose iron is far superior to steel. The very best iron, if you can get it, is wrought iron bar of that quality which is used for marine purposes to make ‘best best best’ anchor chain. In fact, a very few links of old anchor-chain will keep you in all the iron you are likely to require in a lifetime. This has a sufficiency of elasticity to allow a little latitude in tightening-up to the parallel, and will hold firmly under conditions of use when a hard steel screw would start. Expecially if you are fitting it into an existing thread it is important that the screw should be no harder than the socket. Even if you are a competent small mechanic, it is most unlikely that you are an engraver, now one of the rarest as well as one of the most highly skilled of crafts. You will generally find that the weapon you are repairing has some neat, pretty engraving, especially about the screws, and this

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falls in with the general decoration of the piece. Never try

to do the engraving yourself; you are no doubt a very handy

fellow, but you are not an engraver. They are not so easy to find nowadays, and the best way to track one down is to

ask a jobbing printer. The principal work which engravers have is cutting blocks for calling-cards and letter-headings, with inscriptions on presentation silver as a second string. The jobbing engraver, when you have run him down to earth, or rather sky, usually is found on the top floor of a very high building with no lift, and very seldom a telephone. If you explain quickly that the engraving you want is to be done on iron and not on steel, and get him interested as an artist, not as a tradesman, he will probably undertake to do

it for you in a month or two, so long as you do not pester

him about it, when you are very liable to find your job sent back untouched. When you have found a good engraver, ‘grapple him to thy heart’ and make much of him. If you have a good collection, get him to come and spend a day on it, cleaning and sharpening up the old engraving. He will do it no harm, he will not spoil its value as antiquity, he will do for it what an expert picture-cleaner would do for your family portraits. The commonest major fault is a broken spring, usually the mainspring, the leaf type, and usually it breaks a little

way from the bend; I need gical reasons for this. If one the only thing is to take it successor of the maker, and

not expatiate on the metallurregards it as a serious weapon, to a gunsmith, preferably the get him to put it right; but if

it has only an antique value you can have the spring repaired

well enough for all the snapping it is likely to get. The first thing is to take the temper out by heating it white-hot and letting it cool very slowly, which may very conveniently be done in an open domestic fire by thrusting it among the coals and sifting it out in the morning. Next you take it to the tinsmith or motor engineer and have the break

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welded; if it is necessary to fill up the division at the root of the spring, very well, but have a nice clean job made of

it. You have now to restore the temper, which you can have done for you or you may amuse yourself by doing it your-

self. It is simply a matter of heating and quenching, in either water or oil (not inflammable oil, please). You heat it first

to the dullest red glow and quench it. Then you heat it to a brighter red and quench it; then to a dark yellow and so on. But if you are only making a weapon to snap instead of not snapping, a high degree of temper is not required. Needless to say, any shaping or adjustment must be done before you start to re-temper. Making screws and repairing broken springs are quite major jobs. In many cases the repair is a very simple job indeed. The most frequent fault of all, especially with flintlocks, is that the cock will not stay put, either at half- or full-cock, but either falls down immediately or on some slight movement. More often than not, this is simply due to dust from the flint or carbon from the discharge having accumulated in the notches of the tumbler. All that is necessary is to clean out the notch. Sometimes the flint dust has caused wear on the nose of the sear, when it is necessary to re-shape the nose and the notches by a very few passes of a knife file. Sometimes it’s necessary to make a new tumbler or sear, and this is not at all as formidable a task as it might appear. After all, your tools and choice of materials are probably much superior to those of the chap who made it in the first place. Mild steel of the exact thickness should be chosen,

and the rest is only a matter of drilling and filing. If it is desired to make a real weapon the steel must be hardened,

and the whole operation is very much more difficult; but if it is only a matter of snap or not snap, mild steel will answer very well, for some hundreds of snaps. We are not talking of high-class gunsmithery, which is absolutely the

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top class of metal-working; we are talking only of making something work which was not working before, and it is indeed a most interesting pursuit, giving an insight into the ways of the old gunsmiths which cannot be had in any other way. If, of course, one has serious weapons, whether for sport or defence, it is very inadvisable to ‘do it yourself’. There is too much at stake. Just as a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for his client, no sensible shot will repair his own guns. Prescribe for your own pains, drill your own teeth, but turn your firearms in to the armourer. If you are sufficiently expert, he may tell you what is wrong and what he is doing about it; but in any case let him do it. Very often it may be a very simple matter. I knew a gun which twice had an accidental discharge, one of which might very well have been fatal, the reason being a grain of sand in the groove of the firing-pin; and I have spent a very unhappy hour walking a hill-side looking up (quite frequently) into the barrels of a gun which had already killed three men by accidental and inexplicable discharge. There was an eccentric who used to keep his guns with a pawnbroker when he was not using them, on the grounds that the pawnbroker was by law obliged to look after them with every possible care; this I do not agree with, nor do I wholly approve of leaving one’s guns with the armourer except when one is going to use them. By all means let the armourer give them a thorough check; but have them otherwise in your own care, continually handling them in season and out of season, so that the weapon becomes a potent extension of your own powers. Whatever you do yourself to firearms must be done with the greatest care and discretion. Force must never be used.

If a screw does not turn on moderate pressure, give it a dose of loosening oil and leave it for a few days. Never

force; you will only break the slot of the screw, and possibly

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have to bore it out and let yourself in for making a complete new screw and socket. It is quite surprising what loosening oil can do, given time. I once had a rusted-in screw, which

I tried with a carefully-fitted screw-driver once a week; it wouldn’t give, so I desisted and gave it another drop of loosening oil; it was three months before it gave. On a tight screw it takes a long time for even the best loosening oil to make its way down the thread. For rust the classic remedy is boiling water, and no doubt this does serve, if followed up by friction and paraffin and friction and whale

oil; but there are modern

de-rusters

which are much easier and just as effective. The great thing to remember is that you must eventually remove the rust.

This is usually an oxide of iron, quite a different substance from iron or steel, and doing no good whatever. You must get down to the bright metal, and if in doing so you wear away too much, then you must replace the part. For ordinary maintenance of guns in use, it must be remembered that cordite is more corrosive than black powder. If you are shooting single-handed with one gun (the best sport, in my view) it is quite a good thing to blow down the barrels before reloading; it may not be dignified, but it prevents the last products of combustion, and the

most corrosive, from settling in the barrel. For either tem-

porary or permanent care of the barrel I have always used B.S.A. Saftipaste (I think that is how they spell it), cleaning the barrel thoroughly with dry rag and then putting through a rag, not too tight, with Saftipaste on it with a spiral action, repeating twice; I then use the rag to rub up the outside of the barrel and all the exposed metal work. For all the working parts I use three-in-one oil, not too much. There are no doubt many other preparations and methods which ate just as good if not better, but these I have used for years with every satisfaction. With Saftipaste you are invited to leave it in the barrel even when you start shooting, but my I

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view is that there should be nothing whatever inside the barrel when shooting, just the dry, shining metal. Whatever the firearms you have, it is imperative that you maintain them in the best working order, clean and bright inside and outside. Whether they are fifteenth-century

wheel-locks,

eighteenth-century

duelling pistols or the

latest London guns, they represent the summit of human mechanical ingenuity and should be treated accordingly.

Glossary Armourer:

in firearms, the craftsman who repairs and adjusts

the weapon. Compare ‘gunsmith’. Arquebus: an early match-lock musket. Also harquebus, hacquebus, hackbut or hagbut.

Barrel: the tube that directs the missile; from early cannon. See Bombard. Bayonet: a dagger to fix on the muzzle of a musket or rifle. Plug bayonet: to fix in the muzzle, preventing firing; 17th century. Socket bayonet: to slip over the muzzle and fix, to allow firing. Blunderbuss: a short heavy weapon for scattering shot at close range. Bombard: a primitive type of very large cannon, fabricated from iron staves welded and hooped round like a barrel, hence the term (q.v.). Bore: the internal diameter of the barrel. Break: to take a breech-loading shot-gun apart into its three components, for cleaning or casing. Also, to open it partially against the guard (q.v.) for loading or safety. Guns should always be thus broken before a fence or other obstacle. Bridle: a small side-plate providing a second bearing for the pivots in a gun-lock. Butt: see Stock.

Caliver: a light, handy type of early match-lock musket. Carbine: a cavalry firearm, shorter than an infantry musket.

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GLOSSARY

Carbine bore: a bore somewhat smaller than musket bore; about 65 in.

Cartridge: originally a paper bag holding bullet and charge for a muzzle-loader, the paper serving as wad. Now a complete primed charge in a brass or cardboard-brass case, for breech. Chamber: in early cannon, a detachable breech to contain the charge of powder. The part of the barrel in which the charge is exploded. The breech end of the barrel shaped to fit the cartridge. Charcoal: produced by controlled combustion of wood, or distillation. Mainly carbon, with various ash residues. Essential ingredient of gunpowder (q.v.). Chase: in early cannon, the barrel as distinct from the chamber. Chasing: a method of decorating metal, in firearms usually called chiselling (q.v.). Chiselling: cutting metal with specially hardened tools, to leave a pattern in relief; a high point of the art, favoured for ‘best’ weapons in 16th and 17th centuries, gradually superseded by engraving Choke: a reduction of bore at the muzzle of a shot-gun. Cock: an arm with jaws to hold match, pyrites or flint in early weapons; sometimes erroneously called hammer. Half-cock: a partly-raised position from which the cock cannot be released; used also of hammer guns similarly set. To go off at half-cock means an accidental discharge (used also figuratively of an ill-controlled temper). Full-cock: fully prepared for firing on the pressure of the trigger. Used of all firearms. To cock: to set at full-cock. Cordite: a propellent, of nitro-glycerine with a mitigant; smokeless; the usual propellant for modern small arms. Must NOT be used with old firearms. See nitro-proof. Pressed into cord before granulating. Corned Powder: gunpowder damped to form a cake, which is then minced down to a granular form, according to purpose: very coarse for cannon, fine for priming. All gunpowder has been corned since early in the 16th century. Cossaqué: pillaged by Cossacks.

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Damascus barrels: barrels fabricated from tapes of damascus iron, spirally; highly ornamental. Also called twist barrels. Drift: the tendency of a bullet to move laterally from its aim. Engraving: incising metal by means of a hard sharp tool called a gtaver, capable in skilled hands of producing very delicate patterning, monograms, coats of arms etc. Found at all periods, but became almost the sole decoration of highgrade weapons after 1800. Flush: when two surfaces are perfectly level with each other they are flush. To flush game, to cause it to fly or run from cover. Frizzen: the striking-plate of a flint-lock, combined with the pancover. Fulminate: a salt of mercury with fulminic acid; HgC2N2O2; explodes sharply on being struck. There are fulminates of other metals, seldom used. Fulminate of mercury is the basis of all percussion locks and caps, and the detonators of modern cartridges. Greek Fire: originally liquid fire prepared with crude petroleum and other materials, later various mixtures including sulphur and saltpetre. Guard: a part of a firearm not essential for its use but for safety; e.g., trigger-guard. Also, in breech-loading sporting guns, the detachable piece forward of the lock, below, which

limits the opening of the gun when loading, and contains the ejector mechanism. Gunpowder: a mechanical mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, the usual proportion being 7;—-15—10. Explodes on ignition. Superseded about 1880 by cordite, which should NOT be used in old firearms, for which gunpowder now usually called black powder, is essential.

Gunsmith: the maker of firearms. Compare armourer. Hammer: the shaped arm that strikes the firing-pin in hammer guns, or the cap in percussion guns. Also the striking-plate of a snaphaunce lock.

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GLOSSARY

Inlay: decorative materials let into parts of the gun, as ivory inlays in stocks in the 16th and 17th centuries, wire inlays in pistol-butts in the 18th century, and gold or platinum aiming-lines and touch-holes on the barrel in fine 19thcentury pistols. Lands: the spiral-cut ribs that project inside a rifled barrel and grip the bullet, to rotate it as it is propelled up the barrel by the charge. Lock: the mechanism,

attached to the stock, which fires the

charge in the barrel. Hence the phrase ‘lock, stock and barrel’ meaning the whole thing complete. It was at one time usual for the lock, the stock and the barrel to be made by different specialists. Mainspring: the powerful leaf spring that operates the cock or hammer. Also applied to the spiral spring of a bolt-action firing-pin. Match: a cord soaked in a solution of saltpetre and dried; smoulders very slowly when ignited and is hard to extinguish. Matchlock: a musket fired by a match, above. Musket: a smooth-bore heavy shoulder-piece, the main infantry weapon for centuries. Fired by match, wheel or flint. In 16th and early 17th centuries very long and heavy, nearly 5 ft. long in the barrel; reducing by successive stages to 3 ft. 3 in. long in the barrel during the Napoleonic Wars. Musket bore: a calibre of about -75 in. Musketoon: an early heavy type of cavalry carbine. Musketry: the art of shooting with musket or rifle; also, the

organised fire from a formation of musketeers. Nitre: see Saltpetre.

Nitro: a term generally applied to the hundreds of explosives deriving from nitro-glycerine, cordite being that usually used as a propellant in small arms.

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Nitro-proof: having stood proof (q.v.) with cordite, the explosion of which is much more sudden and powerful than that of gunpowder. Cordite should NEVER be used in weapons not clearly stamped ‘NP’.

Pan: in early weapons, an indentation on top of the barrel, above the touch-hole; later, a pan built on the side of the barrel

and connecting with the touch-hole. The receptacle for the priming. Flash in the pan, to ignite the priming without firing the effective charge—hence figuratively used. Pan-cover: a cover for the pan in early weapons, superseded by the frizzen (q.v.). Petronel: a long horse-pistol or small carbine, of peculiar form. See pp. 26 et seq. Pike: a spear, usually about 18 ft. long, widely used in war before the bayonet. A ‘stand of pikes’ would be ‘interlaced’ with musketeers. The pikes were essential to protect the musketeer during the slow business of loading the musket. Pivot: a pin on which a working part turns. Prime: to fill the pan with gunpowder. Priming: the gunpowder in the pan, usually of a finer grain than the main charge. Proof: to prove a gun is to discharge it with a much heavier load both of powder and shot than it would have in actual operation. Formerly done at the Tower of London, now in Proving Houses in London and Birmingham. Proof Mark: the mark stamped into the barrel by the proving officer; usually a P surmounted by a crown, or a pair of crossed keys. See also View. Nitro Proof, mark NP, has been proved with cordite. Cordite

must NEVER be used in a barrel not so marked. Pull: the pressure on the trigger required to fire it, usually ascertained by a spring balance and stated in pounds. 7 lbs. is fairly usual for military rifles. One does not pu// a trigger but press it, although for the heavy Webley trigger pu// might be appropriate. Pyrites: a metallic (yellow) iron disulphide, FeSz. Called ‘fools gold’. Used in wheel-locks. See Chapter 4.

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GLOSSARY

Recoil: the backward movement of a firearm on discharge, cor-

responding to the forward movement of the bullet. Rifle: a musket with a rifled barrel. Also, to cut in the interior of

the Rifling: the Rocket:

barrel the spiral grooving that constitutes the rifling. the spiral grooving inside the barrel of a rifle that grips bullet and rotates it as it passes up the barrel. a self-propelling projectile.

Safety-catch: a catch, which when applied makes the weapon safe from accidental discharge, either by (a) positively locking the hammer or firing-pin, or (b) locking the trigger, the former being very much preferable. Many accidental discharges take place although the trigger is locked, but none if the hammer or firing-pin is locked. Saltpetre: nitre: potassium nitrate, KNO 3. An essential ingredient of gunpowder, supplying the oxygen which facilitates combustion without air. Amateur chemists who think of trying potassium chlorate instead are advised not to; it has

been tried before. Sear: the pawl or pin that holds the tumbler and hammer in the cocked position, until released by pressing the trigger. Sear spring: the light spring that holds the sear in position; its resistance to the trigger pressure determines the weight of the ‘pull’ (q.v.). Small shot: used for small game, the common sizes being from No. 7 for snipe to No. 4 for hares. In the No. 5 size, there are about 250 pellets to the 14-oz. charge for the standard 12 bore gun. Spanner: the winding key for the wheel and mainspring of a wheel-lock. Also the well-known tool to grip a bolt-head or nut.

Stock: the whole of the wooden part of a firearm. Butt is used of that part of the stock which is behind the lock. Sulphur: a non-metallic element, S, an essential ingredient of gunpowder. Has some affinities with oxygen. Found usually in volcanic regions, as Sicily or Mexico, or associated with gypsum, as in Poland. Known supplies limited and decreasing.

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Tang: a tongue of metal, a prolongation of a larger object, for fixing purposes; as the tang of a barrel, the tang of a triggerguard. Touch-hole: the small hole which when filled with powder connects the priming in the pan with the charge in the barrel. In the earliest firearms the hole was touched with a hot iron. Tower: the Tower of London, formerly the national arsenal. Most early military weapons have the word “TOWER” stamped or engraved on the lock-plate or the tang of the barrel. Trajectory: the parabolic path of a bullet after firing. Sometimes applied to its maximum rise for a given distance. Thus the bullet from an S.M.L.E. rises and falls about 4 in. at 200 yds., but 15 ft. at 1,000 yds. Beyond this range the parabola steepens very rapidly, and unless the range is definitely known there is little chance of hitting. In target shooting it is possible to shoot with great accuracy at 1,200 or even 2,500 yds. when the precise range is known and other factors can be allowed for. These remarks do NOT apply to the Medium Maching Gun. Trigger: the small lever which is pressed to disengage the sear from the tumbler and so fire the weapon. Tschinke: an early North German sporting rifle, having a short straight butt and a distinctive appearance. Se plate facing page 17. Tumbler: the indented wheel fixed on the same shaft as the cock or hammer, which accommodates the sear at half or full-cock

and provides a bearing for the mainspring. Sometimes the tumbler mechanism is worked on the pivot end of the hammer itself. Turn-off pistol: a pistol having the barrel made to screw off for loading; also called Queen Anne pistol and screw pistol. The splines in the muzzle to take the spanner are sometimes mistaken for rifling. Twist: a rifle is said to have a right-hand or a left-hand twist according to whether the rifling is clockwise or anti. Twist-over: a very early type of revolver, in which two or more barrels are pivoted to the lock; after firing the first, the barrels are twisted over to bring the next one up to the lock.

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GLOSSARY

View: to examine a firearm with great care in every part, to ascertain that there is no apparent defect before it goes to proof (q.v.). View mark: after viewing, if passed, the viewer stamps the barrel with the View Mark, usually ““V” with a crown or crossed keys above it.

Wheel-lock: a lock to fire by producing sparks from a springdriven wheel. Any weapon fitted with such a lock. See p. 20 et seq. Wrest: the winding-key of a cross-bow or wheel-lock; also spanner.

Index

Index (g) denotes a gunsmith

Adams, John (g), 119 Adams, Robert (g), 103 America, 51 Anglesey, Marquis of, 25 Arblast, 12 Archery, 12 Arquebus, 16

Byzantium, 9

Arrows, iron, 13 Ascham, Roger, 12

Campbell, John (g), 65

Cadell (g), 65 is, 13

Caliver, 18, 19, 29 Campbell, Alex. (g), 65 Cap, percussion, 85, 86 Carbine, 29, 44

Bacon, Roger, 9 Baker, Ezekiel (g), 57, 93 Baker, Sir Samuel, 111 Batutta, Ibn, 10 Bayonet, 42 et seq., 58

Bavaria, 49

Carpin, 10 Cartridge, 43, 107, 113 Casanova, 62, 66 Catalonian Lock, 16

Cavalry Tactics, 17th-century, 25 Cellini, Benvenuto, 20, 28 Charles I (Brit.), 60, 72 Charles V (Emperor), 24, 35 Chassepot (g), 106 Chatham, 2nd Earl of, 84

Beaumont, Frederick (g), 104 Berthold (Schwarz), 10 Birmingham, 40, 64, 115 Bis, Nicholas (g), 77 Bissell, Isaac (g), 65 Black Watch, 63 Blow-back action, 121

Chaurmette, Isaac de la (g), 53

Blunderbuss, 79 et seq. Bombards, 13 Borchardt (g), 120 Bogue, Captain, 12 Boutet, Nicholas Noel (g), 71, 78 Boxer, Colonel, 107, 113

Crécy, battle of, 13

China, 10 Collier, Elisha (g), 100 Colt, Samuel, 101 et seq., 118 et seq. Congreve Rocket, 10 Cordite, 116 Crimean War, 92 Cromwell, Oliver, 18, 19 Cross-bow, 12

Branicki, Count, 66

Brown Bess musket, 42 et seq. Brunswick Rifle, 88 et seq.

Damascus barrels, 77, 78

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INDEX

Delvigne (g), 90

Hessian riflemen, 52

Denmark, 49

Holland, 31, 52

Deringer, Henry(g), 96 et seq. Dog lock, 39 Doune Pistol, 62 et seq.

Howe, Sir William, 53

Dresden, 20, 26

India Pattern musket, 45, 46 Invention of Firearms, 10, 11

Dressler, Lorenz II (g), 26 Dreyse (g), 105 ‘Drift’, 109 Duelling, 65 et seq., 95 Duelling pistols, 68 et seq., 96

East India Company, 45, 56 ‘Ecossaises’, all-steel pistols, 64

Edward I (England), 9

Egg, Durs (g), 54, 56, 78 Egg, Joseph (g), 70, 78 Enfield, 93, 106 English lock (flint), 40 Engraving, 126

Jacob, Major John, inventor, 90 Jager Rifle, 48, 49 James II (Scotland), 14 Joyce, Frederick, 85

Kalthof (g), 101 Kentucky rifle, 51

Lancaster (g), 90, 113 Lee, James (g), 108 Lee-Enfield rifle, 110

Ferguson, Captain Patrick, 54, 55, 86

Flint locks, 38 et seq. Forsyth, Rev. Alex., 82 et seq. France, 49, 52 French Lock (flint), 39, 41 Froissartt, 14

Game, small, 73 et seq., 115; big, 48, 94, 111, 112 George IV, 64

Greek Fire, 9 Greener, William (g), 78, 91, 115 Gustavus Adolphus, 18, 25

Hamilton, Duke of, 66 Handgun, 14 Hawker, Colonel, 85

Hayward (Winchester) (g), 85

Hennem, J.(g), 41, 56

Henry VII (England), 24 Henry (Edinburgh) (g), 107

Lee-Metford rifle, 109 Leicester (Dudley, Earl of), 29

Le Page (g), 71

Long-bow, 12 Lorenzoni (g), 101 Lovell, George, 88

Liger automatic pistol, 120, 121

Mangonel, 13 Manningham, Colonel Coote, 57 Mannlicher Rifle, 112 Manton, Chas. (g), 78, 87 Manton, John (g), 78

Manton, Joseph (g), 70, 76, 78, 85 Manton, Thomas, 78 Marlborough, 1st Duke, 18, 25, 43 Martini (g), 107

Martini-Henry Rifle, 107 Match-lock, 16 et. seq. Maximilian I (Emperor), 26, 47 Marquette, Simon (g), 35 Metford, W. E., 107 et seq. Mexico, conquest of, 16

INDEX

Minie, Colonel, 91 Miquelet pistol, 35 et seq. Mohun, Lord, 66 Moira, Lord, 84 Monson, Sir William, 28 Moore, Sir John, 57 Morat, battle of, 16 Mortimer, Henry (g), 70

Multiple fire, 98 Murdoch, John (g), 64, 65 Musée d’armes, Brussels, 35

Napoleon I, 57, 71, 78, 84 Navy Pattern Colt, 113 Neale, Wm., 12

Nitro-proofing, 116

Nock, Henry (g), 41, 56, 70, 98

Nirnberg, 20, 24

“Patch-box”’, 50 Paterson, New Jersey, 101 Patilla (miquelet), 35 Pattern of small shot, 116

Paully (g), 105 Peabody (g), 107

‘Peace-maker’ Colt, 119 Pennsylvania rifle, 50 Peru, conquest of, 16 Perugia, Italy, 14

Petronel, 26 et seq. Pikes, 18, 25 Pizarro, 16 Polo, Marco, 10 Pritchett (g), 92

Punt gun, 73, 117

Pyrites, 21

Recoil action, 121 Richards (g), 71 Richmond, Duke of, 56 Rifle, first, 47 Rifle Corps, 57

Rouen, 13

Runes, Dr. (collector), 26 Rupert, Prince, 61

Saratoga, 52 “‘Scent-bottle’ lock, 83 Schwarz, Berthold, 10 Scottish all-steel pistol, 62 et seq. Sharps, Christian (g), 106 ‘Single-action’ Colt, 118 et seq. Small shot, 72, 73, 76, 116 Smith & Wesson, 118 et seq. Smythe, Sir John, 12

Snaphaunce, 31 et seq. Snider, Jacob (g), 107

Spain, 35, 52, 77

Springfield Rifle, r1o0 Stewart, Lt.-Col., 57

Thouvenin (g), 90 Thynne of Longleat, 81 Titchfield, Marquis of, 59 Tools for firearms, 124 Touch-hole, 14 Tower of London, 40 Townshend, Viscount, 54 Turnips, introduction, 74, 75

Volunteers, 45 Versailles, shooting in 1666, 74

Wade, General, 63 Wall guns, 23, 29 Washington, George, 52 Webley, 119 et seq. Westminster, 1st Duke of, 115 Wheel-lock, 20 et seq. White, Rollin (g), 118 Williams, Sir Roger, 27

Willoughby (‘brave Lord’), 19

Rigby double-barreled rifle, 111 Rockets, 12

143

Ross Rifle, r11

Zollner, Caspat (g), 47

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