The Martini Henry grenade launcher mired in controversy, with firearms expert Jonathan Ferguson

foreign [Applause] thank you very much uh bear with me I'm uh it's my first time with the Britney Spears style microphone so it shouldn't Theory be better but um yeah we'll see I've I've pre-gloved because there's nothing more Awkward than trying to get on a pair of nitrile rubber gloves in front of a few hundred people and of course because we have the real star of the show this item um so I suppose I should start with a bit of a story I started here in 2009 that's a long time ago frightening a long time ago quite a few more gray hairs on my head since then and looking amongst the collection I think I've said before when I've written about this thing that I've I found it in in a back room I didn't mean to say I discovered it it had been cataloged the ministry of Defense pattern room I don't know how many of you are familiar with that but it's a predecessor collection to ours they had collected this thing and the previous the custodians of that of that collection I guess to them it was a curiosity they weren't too interested so it was in a back room and as I was I was there looking at something else and I saw this absolutely insane essentially Blunderbuss looking thing and I just I was immediately drawn to it for obvious reasons and it is a bit stable I mean not technically because it's not like it doesn't project lasers or anything and there's no actual steam involved however it's definitely a Contraption it's an Edwardian contraption I'm very sure that some of you have spotted the the back end is well what is the back end I'd be very disappointed if we hadn't managed to answer that one yes so um the back end is pretty straightforward so this is a bit of a mullet of a gun sort of business in front more business in the back no it didn't really work [Laughter] for those of you that somehow don't know the martini Henry rifle standard service rifle of the British army for well front line not for that long because the technology was moving so fast but very straightforward so opens up shoving a great big milk bottle-sized cartridge 450 caliber um pretty pretty potent for for the time but in this case it's just a blank cartridge because the really interesting stuff is happening at this end and I guess there I need to um dial it back a little bit and talk about we're going to throw up our first image that's convenient there we go this is from our archive we don't have a huge amount of photos in our archive but we do have some it's actually a stereoscopic um image two of them side by side we cropped it so if you have a viewer you can see this guy in 3D and all the other photos anyway why he's there is that we have a number 24 rifle grenade sorry number 23 rifle grenade sticking out the end of an smle number one rifle that's on a brass Rod that goes down the bore if you're not familiar with these things so this the idea here this is the first world war of course almost right away in 1914 the authorities realized that you need something well people have essentially gone to ground so dug in both sides stalemates already happened late 1914. and it's suddenly very hard to hit people in trenches so you can run up to a trench or into a trench and Bowl in a hand grenade but reach is really important and so I think what they said that a novice could throw a hand grenade something like 20 yards an expert was expected to throw it something like 45 yards which I definitely couldn't but with the old cricket cricket throw so how do you reach probably a German in in a trench at some distance away well the rod grenade was or the cup launch grenade was they were the two options so rod down the barrel and a cylinder fragmentation cylinder full of explosives on the end of it or they did what we ended up with spoiler alerts for this thing is a cup containing essentially a Mills bomb and that would get punted out and those would reach out to allegedly 200 yards so from a novice throw to a grenade launcher you know massive massive increase in range but how do you aim these things well if you've seen his setup was a bunny pod attached to the rifle that's that's unusual typically it would just be braced upside down into the ground but in the ground because if you don't do that you're going to break your shoulder the amount of mass being punted off the end of the gun try and fire it from the shoulder you know the movies mislead us because everything's fired with blanks recoil is a thing and The Recoil of a few pounds of metal and explosives flying off the end of your gun is bad news so you brace it into the ground if you look at photos of World War II Like Home Guard guys there's a great one on the iwm Imperial Museum collection site there were various methods for bracing it into the ground behind you so casually reclining on against the bank a Convenient Bank not sure how practical that is when you've got a German tank approaching because by this point rifle grenades are really mainly for killing tack well I say killing tanks annoying tanks with so that's that's the background to this we we've already uh We've reintroduced hand grenades because they were not a thing at the beginning really at the beginning of the war we have come up with a way to project them off a gun but you can't shoulder fire them so you can't really properly aim them you're looking at punting them into the vague area of the enemy they do develop sighting systems later but again you've got to awkwardly lie so the butt is braced against them you know the trench wall or whatever so this was the other potential option come up with a system that will allow you to shoot a grenade from from the shoulder now some of you who are more familiar with the modern period will be thinking well why didn't they just create an m79 grenade launcher you know clunk bloop away it goes well they hadn't invented them yet finally you know however a couple of guys and the other one is for another day because but almost the same time two different guys invent shoulder Fire Grenade launches I guess it's like buses you know to come along so we can actually and this is what I had to do when I researched this we can read the object but explain how it works and we can also read the markings now weirdly if see this on camera but these markings are upside down and I don't know why I don't know why they're upside down just in case they're a bit hard to see it says Blanche and then there's a weirdly stylized hyphen small in fact what it is is a letter I from some sort of stamp kit that's been rotated to act as a hyphen Chevalier system so that gave gave me my initial bit of jump off point for the research who were Blanche who are Chevalier it's a Herbert John Blanche is of the John Blanche limited Gun Company set up in the late 18th century very famous very capable mainly made sporting guns and Guns for civilians um eminently capable of producing this bit and sticking it onto this bit so that's the Blanche bit of the name um Chevalier is where it gets very interesting not that John Blanchard interesting but Chevalier is Arnold Luis Chevalier and he is Swiss or half Swiss half British his mother was British but they were living in Switzerland and he um immigrated to Britain end of the 19th century and is naturalized a British citizen in 1896. and he is actually quite prolific um he's not a sort of John Browning he doesn't have huge success but he has at least 20 unique patents all to do with Firearms either new systems or new sighting systems that kind of thing published books he published articles he and I have both published articles in the field magazine weirdly like a hundred plus years apart um so I was oddly pleased by that anyway [Laughter] I think a good footsteps to follow in um so they're they're the Firearms get named in different ways in this case it's the maker and the designer smash them together you get the Blanche Chevalier grenade discharger is its formal name which I also love and is also very steampunk and Edwardian um and also is called a bomb thrower I've got an image I'm going to show you later that I found in the magazine arms and explosives which sounds like my sort of magazine um I wasn't familiar with it before I don't think we don't seem to have copies in the archive anyway they called it a bomb thrower That's Not Unusual grenades were typically called bombers in the first world war time frame and there were various more artillery ways of throwing them that make more sense if you like something handheld was typically called a discharger or a projector project is the later British term we can call it a launcher I don't mind however there's more there's more on this object so again see if we can catch this on the main camera for you there we go just about the lighting it's so shiny isn't it let me read it for you very heavy as well as you can probably tell so n over e-n-e-v-e-r which is a name another not hyphen and Chevalier again so our designer is involved and it's shorthand but it's patent automatic Small Arms Company Limited PT automatic sa c y l d so this is great this gave me all the clues I needed to start doing some desktop research to figure out who these guys were already told you about Blanchard Chevalier who the heck is eniver well he's absolutely fascinating um would you like to hear about him first or would you like to learn how this works up to you I don't mind but let's do the math let's get the people out of the way first so enova wow what a guy absolutely astonishing story um there's a there's probably the best source on this if anyone's interested afterwards there's a newspaper article that we can uh we can post online or something and you can read the whole thing I'm not going to read the whole thing for you but this guy was what they called at the period a company monger it's a weird term but it was it was a very live issue in I believe in like 18 60s onwards initially with Railways and transportation Investments like essentially like monster or Flame or um I don't know vultures to a carcass or something depending on how good the company was doing these guys would pop up and offer Investments just to some he offered investment to to Chevalier um but they would also own all these companies that didn't actually ever do any business or if they did business it was very very minor so this goes Edwin Alexander enova he was also based oversea well born overseas he was British Indian um or Indian British he was a white Britain in terms of ethnicity born and bred in in India part of obviously part of the whole Imperial setup and came he also came over so he um Chevalier was born in 1878. just give you an idea of how all these guys are around about 1915 when this is being worked on and another was born in 1872 so they're roughly the same generation they've both come from overseas um another coming from India and he arrives um early 19 or very early 1900s or at least he's around by then he's a super Shady car a guy so some of the details of his story are a little bit hard to find out anyway he is not mentioned on the patent for this thing um which is curious because he is mentioned on a subsequent patent but this company that was set up is one of enova's many companies so the the end of a Chevalier automatic Small Arms Company Limited patent I missed a word out was one of this guide companies but what his stocking trade as it were was not there was a second wave of these um fly-by-night company mongers as they were known in this period 1880s 1890s onwards to I guess about 1920 and they were investing in automotive stuff but but mainly mining um various overseas operations extracting mineral wealth that kind of thing and what another would do among other things he preyed upon um wealthy widows so it's a bit of a picture in the sort of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels type character for those of you who are old enough like me to watch that but he also preyed upon Ministry veterans army officers who had a sort of not bad pension from the Armed Forces but weren't necessarily hugely well off and he would take their money and I either give them a bit of a bit of initial investment if it was a company they were trying to set up and then never anything else and then sell the shares keep all the money use the existence of the company as a bankruptcy cover essentially so that only the company was liable for the bankruptcy result not him although having said this was a common form of scam apparently until the laws were all tightened up but he did get he declared bankrupt four times so he was he was sued and prosecuted as early as 1912 and 1913 he was declared bankrupt in 1918 again in 1920 again in 1922 I think I think I've miscounted because he then gets sued a final time in 1940. uh sorry sorry guess declared bankrupt rather for another occasion in 1940 huge wave of time and the authorities don't seem to be able to fully deal with this guy but he is jailed twice for this um first time is 1923 they put him away for three years and that's for selling fake investment shares in Chinese Minds he would he would make out that he was he had all the contacts he knew the East because he was from there and he had all these contacts and then he would go and use the money on wild parties at his um Knightsbridge flat it's just astonishing he moved around all the time as well he had like six different addresses within a few years absolutely astonishing real mustache twirling kind of villain um in fact uh an incredible quote from the 1923 court court case he juggles with money as easily as the as does the flirt with the hearts of men was what the judge said at his trial which is incredible the newspaper the main newspaper article that gives most of these details I've been harvesting others since I wrote the initial article for arms and armor very nearly 10 years ago um they they use some Choice language as well they called him a Dapper little rogue they called him a monocled Rogue called him a rogue again um also all sorts of uh derives of language aimed at this chat so what's the specific relationship well that's where the story Falls slightly flat because we don't have any juicy details of the relationship when they bashed in the doors of this guy's office slash luxury flat that he had an Escape Route out the back of by the way so that when the wealthy widows came knocking on the door he could scarf her out the back yeah when they came knocking there was a plaque on the on the door of several of these bogus companies that didn't really exist this one wasn't wasn't featured um it seems like they severed ties with this guy Blanchard Chevalier Chevalier in particular relatively early on either because they realized what a flyby 90 was or they just weren't getting that any more investment they maybe got an initial pot of money to make this and one other which I'll show you a picture of in a bit so we we here at the Royal armories we love uh we love technology but we also love the historical stories and the the two together I just think this is this is my favorite object for that level of detail of social history and even even touching on um imperial history and all sorts of other aspects as well the guy is fascinating um oh he's sorry he's jailed again um so after his 1922 bankruptcy he goes to jail for three years after his 1940 bankruptcy he goes to jail for another six and that's for again selling for fraudulent investment stuff so the law is tightening up all the time and that's sort of the last gasp of these things I managed to track him down only recently as to where he ended up so he by 1930 he had scarpered out his out his fire escape or whatever it was secret tunnel um to South Africa he'd married a poor unfortunate woman called Willamina um which I tracked her down online through some genealogy type searches so Willamina eneva she's uh Dutch boa extraction and they he they have five children I don't know in what space of time but by 1940 he's back in London running scams and she's not there she stays there she lived to at least a hundred because I found an article from a local newspaper in South Africa Cape Town where um she's still alive at 100 and there's a picture of her astonishing to look at a picture of this woman that was married to this absolute Maniac criminal that I'm researching it's connections like that are yeah well they're as good as getting hands on the real thing that's kind of my point and I think that's a enough from him for now but I can't resist telling you ahead of time I found a photo of him so and that's actually well it's worth saying that because we don't have any photo I mean John Blanche I could probably we could probably find a picture of him but the key player here Chevalier no photo exists that I can find unfortunately if you're interested have a look on Google patents and or espasnet the European patent website search on Chevalier and you will find his various patents which include some very sjogren-like inertia operating systems this is where it gets a bit techy I'm sure I'm amongst friends in that respect but so inertia in other words something stays still something else moves to affect the reloading of the gun well it's not going to reload this is it this this is muzzle loading you have to put a bomb in the front of this and it isn't going to magically reload the back end either because it's a martini and you have to open it up shove in a cartridge and close it up so what if I'm telling you which I am that Chevalier is using his inertia system on this how on Earth is he doing that well if we throw up the next picture and I'll stop waving this around for now I can start to hopefully explain how this works now I'm full of full disclosure I wrote a full peer-reviewed article on this thing 10 years ago I wrote a shorter version for the firearm blog even even longer ago no that was 10 years ago the other one was slightly less around the same time and I didn't actually figure it out properly so I I intuitively realized that this was a recoil dampening system I think you can see that massive coil spring in there there's then the martini Henry Barrel is cut off so that extends wouldn't normally look down the front of the gun but we have we have checked this clear multiple times and it is about on this one it's about roughly not quite half so you cut off your rifle barrel that's giving you the motive the propulsion propulsive force from the blank cartridge you definitely don't want to shoot a bulleted cartridge through this thing by the way that would be really bad and then on the front of it sorry could we have that back again I was a bit too previous um wait can you see B Item B right in the middle behind the grenade that's that's supposed to be a grenade that looks like I drew it will come into that in a moment that is and there's mentioned of asbestos in the patent and I had a moment of oh God I didn't tell conservation that no this has no asbestos in it because that that was meant to be added as an optional extra something you'll find if you study historical patents is they start listening it's like a laundry list of things you could do with my with this design but we haven't yet anyway so that is a sliding piston I thought it was a platform I thought it worked like a p8 launcher payout launcher is essentially a giant spring that is there to absorb The Recoil of the massive bomb that you fire off the off the projector and then the great big firing pin recocks against that strong spring preventing it from mashing your shoulder to a pulp and also recocking itself that's how the payout works it's not a big spring that throws the bomb off um I think Matt Moss is here somewhere check out his work on the pier it's great stuff that's not so that's not exactly how this works in fact I was messaging him frantically the other night about it because I realized I hadn't actually got to the bottom of it so this is new information that you're getting here it is not a platform that Springs back because how could it spring back the barrels in the way the martini Henry Barrel is in the way of the platform so I'm scratching my head thinking is this just a really bad patent drawing so if we throw out the next image remember the grenade I'll cover that in a moment so there's the coil spring this is an x-ray of our gun seems like a logical thing to do there's a if you go on our collections online website there's a slightly wider shot version of this that gives you it doesn't give you much more you can see these latches here which I'll cover in a moment but otherwise it's just this so there's that Martini Henry 45 caliber Barrel there's the great big piston you can see the ring there where you would put something this is how we know it doesn't have asbestos in it um you could see the the it's like a piston ring on a if you're familiar with car engine pistons or the piston on the front of an AK rifle that works the mechanism they have rings around them and well it's supposed to work the same way so it's not the platform definitely recoils against the spring but what's it doing how is it getting past that Barrel well the answer that took me probably an embarrassingly along several hours to figure out is that the whole back end of this gun recoils out of itself does that make sense so so the platform the the that sits under the grenade is about here well as it was in the drawing the barrel is fixed to it so it's on the end permanently attached this should slide I did try when I first when I had a tearful reunion with this behind the scenes earlier I was going don't want to break it I think it would break me first to be fair but sadly no it does not slide anymore not without a bit of wood and a big hammer which we're very unlikely to attempt but it's that's how it's supposed to work so there is in fact a separate try and show you that there is a this is a separate piece to the action the whole little little relatively little Barrel comes sliding out the back of the gun the whole assembly would then effectively bottom out so spring is at full compression quite a stout spring in there as I'm sure you saw from the drawing and well more so from the X-ray so it would come to it come to a stop the gun has concertinaed out and then once the bomb has gone downrange and you're questioning your life choices it constantineers back together again absolutely insane but very clever because how else are you going to soak up that tremendous recoil to allow you to fire this from the shoulder that's the only the only way you can do it is by absorbing The Recoil the m79 does it in a using the ammunition which was way ahead of what these guys were doing So to that end we also have a flip up rear sight which is unmarked that's not unusual for a prototype in fact I should probably say it's even possible that this was never fired because well we I certainly can't figure out what sort of grenade they might have used in this nothing in the inventory at the time fits um literally fits and doesn't match that drawing either that very vague drawing behind that I don't know if you noticed was a wooden well you can't tell it's wooden to drawing but there's meant to be a Sabo to stop all the gas of firing from blowing past so the little egg-shaped grenade fits in that cup essentially and is loaded down the front of course you wouldn't ever want to pre-load the blank cartridge because then you've got an extremely dangerous weapon on your hands and there's no manual safety catch on the martini either so we're already into some problems with the design the mechanism as I've described it concertina ring apart well you're I'm holding this bit with my right hand I'm holding this bit with my left hand it's like a trombone not not conducive to accuracy you know don't fancy that much uh so you've got the ability to fire from the shoulder that's going to increase accuracy a lot you have a sighting system I imagine based on this that there would have been a slider for different ranges that's probably better than the if you've seen the the cup launcher they went with the number one mark one it's a rotating ring and even in the instructions it says quarter turn for 110 yards or it's not quite right but it goes from 80 yards up to the full 200 based on some very vague settings and so potentially better than that but yeah it's it's a great idea it's ahead of its time but I'm not sure that it was viable let's put it that way and certainly we don't see it go anywhere um there's no there's no trials that we can find any evidence of there are only two examples that we know were made as ever it'd be lovely to get more information but let's just cover off the a few details I've missed so I briefly pointed out sorry going that way these latches see those that Noobs and if I turn it that way see how that works pinched together those are clearly for retaining I don't know if it would be the Sabo or the grenade but it's it's certainly doesn't fit any grenade that we're aware of and then the only other accommodation for the actual projectile is this cover is it for a flyoff lever for a grenade who knows so if we just have the I think the last picture here's the man I wanted to save him to finish on because he just I just couldn't believe this was literally the other night thinking is there anything I can add for anyone who's managed to find the article and read it and up Pops this guy I just could not believe it so pleased to find it and to immediately spotted The Monaco and the phrase mono called Rogue you know popped into my head from that newspaper article absolutely astonishing and there he is with the gun I then got extra excited thinking that it was this gun it's not this gun I don't know if you can see the differences but the barrel is longer Slimmer the sight is way taller and there are a few other details that are different as well but on the I was then still quite happy because it meant that we knew they'd made two and then had a moment of oh I should probably check that it's the right guy molecules weren't that common um by 19. 15 16. so this is from December 1916 so the date of 1916 is correct for this we so I've probably some stuff but you know there is an article you can dig out on that um this normally lives up on floor three in our first world war display where I shamelessly crowbarreded in hey it's relevant it's the they were trying to solve the problem of the Trent of trench warfare from a certain angle so yeah you can get up close to it behind glass sadly but you know that's that's how we have to do things up there uh that's probably it I probably won't find out anything more about this story but it's a lot more than we know about most of any historical collection so I'll stop rambling hopefully there are some questions and that there will be people with microphones and things as well so I hope you enjoyed that fit [Applause] um yeah thank you all for your attention that was absolutely fascinating Jonathan um I have never seen the picture of the monocle Rogue I couldn't believe I think we spoke last week and there was no picture of the monocled road we weren't doing that for suspense that's I thought of you about third I thought monocle big gun Jackal love this I did um so as Jonathan mentioned we're going to go into a q a session guys so um there are some people with microphones going around so if you do have a burning question for Jonathan whether it's about the Blanche Chevalier whether it's about himself or just the topic of arms and armor if I could ask you to keep your questions as precise and short as possible because we are probably gonna have a lot of people to get through um and uh we will go from there so please raise your hand if you have a question um so if we go for this gentleman up the front here next to the lady with the amazing hats hmm so my question might not be relevant but I want to know as a fellow Jonathan who goes by John why Jonathan and not John ah um I do actually have a quick answer to that Jack will be pleased to hear so I I started going by John relatively young um but then when I entered the world of work my boss at Imperial War Museum Duxford John Delaney um great guy was called John and so whenever someone said John so I thought well do you know what I don't I don't dislike my first name it's just a little bit unwieldy so that'll be my professional name because it's also my name uh the gentleman with the glasses thanks very much just wondering the obvious answer you know first world war why it's not based on a Lee Enfield is any information on that that's a very good question and one I probably can't give a a very coherent answer to except that I mean this is speculation so I have it's something that has occurred to me the advantage I suppose of a martini action is it's it prevents you from having a live round in a magazine uh for getting sort of out of sorts with whether you've got a Grenade loaded and how have I got five cartridges and no grenades or and they were very conscious at the time that soldiers were not necessarily going to be of a certain training level right look at the magazine cut off thing I mean admittedly very quickly in 1914 that becomes a safety device and they're not safe they're not saying they don't trust the soldiers but we are coming from a long tradition of you have a set of jobs to do and we're not necessarily going to expect you to be able to manage a newfang or grenade launcher with a fight with a 10 round magazine or even a five round makes sense so that's my speculative answer on that there's no obvious reason why you couldn't it might be harder to sort of breach this thing up against the grenade launcher Barrel assembly the martini does offer that very big flat base to the action body but they didn't write it down so we don't really know anybody from this side of the room yes I was just wondering um do did the British army use the martini to create any kind of projector or launcher like how the French use the grass to make um I think they were grenade launches but I think they might have been Flair projectors as well and did we do the same a similar thing or was it just this contraption Contraption is the right great question um no it despite the obvious thing to do but I suppose there's no patent and no money in it is to marry up a martini type rifle if if for whatever reason you think that's appropriate it there's a reason they did go with the Lee Enfield with a simple cup launcher and maybe it's cut down this sort of size and format and you carry it as a Grenadier that that's the sort of obvious way to do it except that you've got to come up with a recoil dampening system whatever you use Martini or or any field but no no there's no I've never come across anyone attempting to create a cup launcher because you might think maybe they're reusing Martini methods or enfields with cut Launches on them because again you don't you only need the one launching cartridge so good use of spare martinis but no not not that we've ever come across but never say never anybody from the middle uh gentleman in the front sorry Leanne as far away as possible I feel like I need a picked cap um it's certainly is there any clue to the provenance of the martini and might I also suggests that martinis you could get hold of enfield's wall needed um is fairly close to the Providence uh the Providence of this particular barrel of action good question no I didn't speak too much about that um just to fill in the detail on that there's no provenance information but there's some information on the action body as you might imagine it is not a military rifle action it's uh it's brendelin it's a brendelyn martini so it has the crossed Penance and the B of the Brendan company it's something you could buy as a civilian well still can't in fact so cross Penance B Martini's patents and the the sort of double M Martini logo sort of his patent logo as it were is on there as well but that's it it's just like the military Martini Henry but it is not a military one which stands to reason this these guys are not part of the military system so they're just they just bought one ah I did check the serial number so the serial number would suggest mid-1880s production so it's a surplus Martini that's lying around already by 1914-15 when they're experimenting and they chop it up and do unspeakable things to it um but I'm kind of glad they did but no unfortunately um I guess we could potentially find purchase ledgers that would cut that would have a serial number and work out who it went to First but I don't think that would help us very much with the overall story but yeah very open to suggestions like that I'm good question uh so we have a question from the live stream it's from Morton who is a good friend of the show oh yes hello Morton sorry you can't be here um so Morton asks whether the Blanchard Valley could be field stripped or would this be purely for a quartermaster to kind of take apart yeah well needless to say we didn't want to get into stripping stuff in a live audience situation for a number of reasons but also because it wouldn't really tell us very much we have the X-ray we have the drawing for this bit and stripping the martini isn't going to help very much you can strip down the martini action of course you can even I can do that it's actually an incredibly well designed system stripping this this is a tool room prototype the main screw down the end of the platform I don't actually know know what that's going to do if we undo it and it's chewed to heck as well so that would be a challenge we'd have to involve our conservation colleagues to to pull that off these screws around the grenade Barrel that hold it on those look like they've come out quite easily so we could probably get the barrel off the this collar here I don't know if you noticed but in the patent drawing the collar was sort of radiused it was much more obviously something that stayed still while the barrel went away from it and came back again partly how I figured it out this doesn't have that this just has a what looks to be seized in place a cylinder inside a cylinder so so yes you could strip it feel strip it absolutely not there'd be no need you could clean the the action bit very easily take the breech bolt out if you were or the bridge block sorry if you're an armorer that's so I could have just said no sorry Morton the answer is no uh anybody from this side of the room gentlemen right now yeah um when it comes to obscure firearms and firearms that never really went to the mainstream of production what is your personal favorite and why well at the moment it's this again as it was about 10 years ago but I do Bounce Around um a couple of us were talking about the the Kratz earlier with the bicycle chains and the weird reciprocating Barrel that's well up there as well um I think football pups so the the srem with the pump cocking grip that's of there there are too many but I think for the for the sheer sort of social history aspect of the story this thing has to take it fantastic uh we're back to the middle and we will go this person just here with a checkered shirt will you be doing an Ian McCullen and firing it in a future video so I didn't quite didn't quite catch the last bit I heard Ian's name oh good grief no I can give a definitive answer to that one and unfortunately it is no um we would need a very good reason to fire the only one that exists because we so we know they made two but we also know that only this one exists so if this were to blow up and the chances of it blowing up with a great big bomb in it I mean even if you went even if you went for something inert which you would you know be like a small Nerf football or something or can a bit no definitely not a Canon beer oh god I've compounded the uh the sin there but um we just can't afford to do it um it'd be fascinating to do it but then the value the sort of academic value of the answer is is perhaps questionable we already know it failed so I guess the the research question would be could it not have failed and yes I'd love to try that out but the way to do that is to raise a huge load of money from somewhere have a have a replica made you'd have to strip this down to do that and then test that out and then maybe put it in a rig on a field firing area with the Army and shoot a grenade that you've also designed and made the field of explosives out of it I can't see any of that actually happening unfortunately Well we'd love to obviously we'd love to but first and foremost we don't want to damage these things so we'll open a crowdfunding to have a replica made what have I done if anyone has a beer on them the last time I said something like that I ended up with a whole set of Steel 3D printed parts John thank you you know who you are um who sent them to us and that's for the automatic garage rifle So in theory we could now put that back together and shoot that and even that would need some very careful thought because again that's the only one that exists um incidentally I knew I'd forget to say something the whole recoil thing and the concertina nonsense they obviously weren't that confident it was going to take out enough recoil because there's a thick rubber butt pad as well it's gone hard over time but it is there anybody from this side of the room up there your hand went straight up a work of fiction but in the battlefield 1 video game you probably know how this is going their method of ground it's out based on anything in real life or is that just an invention of a video game that's substantially correct yeah I mean if you've seen footage from conflict zones like um Libya certainly they did what the British army didn't they they get things like shotguns single shot rifles and shotguns and they weld together simple metal cups that go on the end and all you then get like a jam tin bomb with a fuse an actual fizzing fuse on the end that you like with a cigarette lighter shoved down the end hope you remember to put a blank cartridge in your Shotgun and then you punch in the direction the enemy and that's essentially what was done um back in the in the first world war but with proper engineering an adjustable range so yeah that's entirely how you would do it and all you can do is drop it down there's no there's no fancy retention system all you do is you for the standard cup launcher number one mark one which I think is what they use in that you screw on a gas check which is a plate that matches ish the diameter of the of the cup and that pumps the bomb off the end of the gun thank you for mentioning Battlefield 1 because I forgot to mention that one of one of the highlights of my career that probably shouldn't be is seeing that they'd put that this in the game based on the nonsense that I'd written about it so now I know how Ian feels and they unfortunately get it wrong because I didn't explain how it worked properly so it's probably a bit late now to fix it they made up a grenade for that by the way that's like a cylinder with a with a fuse on the end that's not based well might be based on a Japanese design I think anyway sorry Jack going off peace back to the middle uh we've got someone right at the back way over there are there any good asides to the SAA story that you could cover in a future episode uh well yeah um probably stuff reprise from the book because there's a lot in there um and I don't expect by any means people to go out and buy that so we will definitely be revisiting some some bits from that the slight problem we have with the what's this weapon is it's meant to be a guessing game so when people request stuff I have to kind of put it at the bottom of the list and then hope people forget about it so but yes we're going to be we're going to be covering that we do have our series up in arms as well might involve some object movements but um I'm sure we could pull that out so yes we'll be covering that and the more I will I'm finding out stuff all the time you know you net you never write just like it's like science but not as important you realize over time that stuff's either not quite right or completely wrong hopefully not or you just find whole new stuff like I've shown you here like how this works and the guy that scammed the inventor um there's about to be stuff that comes up and we're never getting away from bullpups or the sa80 um anybody on the left uh let's go person down here at the front oh I love the T-shirt thank you I didn't notice it before [Music] criteria for adding New pieces to the Royal armories collection if I think it looks cool no not really not not at all in fact um quite the opposite so uh I would have done that with this but so there is there are in fact two committees and several reams of paperwork required so we obviously we have a hope a fair bit of sway in terms of recommending what we think is good so it can be stuff donated by by private individuals um the Amaze ones in people's ethics still um obviously more so on the antique side but not always auctions dealers the police obviously we're you know Americans who visit the collection researchers who visit the collection wow why did why does a British Collection have so many guns well it's part of the environment you know it's it's we have a very different attitude to to firearms in this country and so you have a lot of eggs in one basket um so it's Case by case but we have a collections development policy that highlights a few specific areas for example stuff used in crime if we if we get off with stuff by the by the authorities that was used in a known crime we won't necessarily be able to display it right away but we will keep that for future display in however many years when it's not too soon anymore so that's that's one area if we are lacking stuff from a certain country you get the idea it's a fairly tedious document but it's it's like a shopping list I suppose but if that reality does not care about your Administration so or bureaucracy so stuff just pops up and we take an assessment I have a small team um that work for me and we have a bit of a conflab um and we put it forward to the to the first committee and usually we get it obviously money is a big a big problem in various ways so we have time for two more questions so we'll take one from the middle uh um let's go person kind of in the middle this yeah keep that the green there's a green sleeve yeah that that sleeve yeah thank you you mentioned uh Chevalier being a somewhat prolific designer does he have any other systems or designs you find particularly interesting from this period yeah uh something I nearly went down a rabbit hole on and realized I needed to just read my own article on this before today is the whole series of recoil operated Firearms so this this company that's written on the side of this is not set up to create this gun as I say I know there isn't even mentioned on the patent where he is on two other patents which are all to do with this recoil operated rifle so there are at least three distinct designs they look a bit like a Chagrin with a big sliding breech block thing on top so very much worth going down that rabbit hole and seeing what he what he came up with how it compares to the sjogren might it have been any good unfortunately we don't have any examples though so it's difficult for us to cover it's part of this but not to say that I won't try and get my head around trying to figure out how things work just from the patent is a massive challenge but quite a fun one if you like me okay one last question uh we will go with the green t-shirt So based on where you found this and the nature of military procurement well the odds of this is actually just effectively the mock-up model that they've submitted very interesting question what I failed to tell you is where it actually came from so there's whilst there's no provenance on the rifle gentleman's question over here there's probably immediate problems for this object so this came to us not from Mod but from the bati prop house started by Major Philip bapti and I think 1919 and then run by the dinely family who are wealthy collectors and and dealers of weapons as well so either Mark or Peter dineley presumably collected this where he found it we do not know this is always the frustrating thing nobody writes down where they find things even when we have to research provenance to buy something and we ring them up and go can you tell us where you got it oh uh I think it was probably uh Pudsey Arms Fair uh maybe 30 years ago and we just put that forward and hopefully that's enough to satisfy um that it's not in any way a problem I'm not blaming them for that you know unless they deal with museums all the time they're not going to know so point is it's from the civilian World already by the time we pick it up in the historical record but I think you're probably right uh we know we know two existed I mean it's not a model in the sense of a wooden model or one made out of brass or something brass might be more expensive actually but my my feeling looking at this and thinking we've no idea what the grenade was there's no grenade in the picture he's just this could be a model just to just make just one that would work if you fired it but they're treating it as a essentially as a model I wouldn't call it a model because it's a working firearm but yeah so I think I think you're right fantastic well thank you everybody for all of your questions um we are now going to say goodbye to the firearm and we're going to say goodbye to Jonathan so could I please ask you to put your hands together once more or Jonathan Ferguson [Applause] and The Blanche Chevalier foreign

Channel: Royal Armouries

Views: 55,531

Keywords: gun firingroyal armouries, arms and armour, armour, war, museum, bts museum, armor, guns, swords, knives, jousting, history

Id: IxMtxn9eSNs

Length: 53min 19sec (3199 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2023