Great Britain was one of the few countries that went into World War Two with virtually no submachine gun development. Not every country had an issued SMG by 1939, but virtually everyone had at least been working on experimental concepts - except the British. It was only with the outbreak of hosti...

Captain Percy Fraser, DSO was born on January 22, 1879 and died in Ypres on the night of February 23, 1915 while attempting to aid men wounded outside their trench. His unit of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders would suffer horrendous casualties at Ypres, and today we will look at his Webley-Fo...

The DeLisle carbine was a conversion of a standard SMLE rifle to the .45 ACP cartridge, feeding from modified 1911 pistol magazines. It was fitted with a 7" (175mm) barrel and a very large integral suppressor. The combination of the subsonic cartridge, the large suppressor volume, and even a soun...

The Korsac EM-1 (not to be confused with the Thorpe EM-1, which is a completely different rifle) was a bullpup light machine gun based on captured examples of the German FG-42 patatroop rifle. It was developed between 1945 and 1947 by a team led by Polish refugee designer named Korsac.

It was ...

The EM-1 was one of the British post-WWII rifle development projects with the ambitious goal of replacing both the infantry rifle and the submachine gun with a single select-fire weapon optimized for combat within 600 meters (as opposed to the prior doctrine of 1000m effective ranges). The design...

The British military started using training rifles in 1883, with the .297/.230 Morris cartridge in adapted Martini rifles. This would give way to the .22 rimfire cartridge for training shortly after the Boer War, and a substantial variety of rifles converted to .22 rimfire. Standardization would ...

Developed by BSA immediately after World War Two, the No7 MkI training rifle was the only one of the British Enfield trainers to use a magazine. Only 2500 of these rifles were produced, contracted by the Royal Air Force and delivered in 1948. Their magazine is a commercial BSA 5-round magazine mo...

Initially intended to be used only by the British Army (the Land Service), in 1950 the No8 rifle’s role was expanded to cover all three services. Unlike the other trainers made up to this point, the No8 MkI was designed as a target and competition rifle, instead of a service rifle reduced in cali...

In 1942, the British government instituted a development program to design a new simplified rifle to replace the No4 MkI Lee Enfield. The CSAD (Central Small Arms Department) came up with a design using a quite simple receiver machined form a small steel billet. It was a rifle wholly distinct for...

The Webley company used the “WG” (Webley Government) nomenclature in its literature starting in 1883, but the first revolver actually market as such was the WG Model of 1889. These revolvers were made primarily for the military market, as officers were responsible for supplying their own sidearms...

James Kerr formed the London Armoury Company in 1856, manufacturing Adams patent revolvers (Adams was one of the founding investors) and 1853 pattern Enfield rifles. The rifles were the better business and the company rather quickly decided to focus on them, which led Adams to leave with his pate...

The BESAL is a simplified redesign of the Bren light machine gun, developed by a BSA employee named Faulkner. The design of the gun was motivated by the disastrous retreat of the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940, where they abandoned a huge amount of weaponry and war material, including most of ...

William Soper of Reading, England designed this "Direct Action Breech Loader" and attempted to have it tested for British military adoption - but he was one day too late to have his rifle included in the tests and the Martini-Henry was ultimately adopted. The intent of Soper's system was to have ...

The main British sniper rifle of World War Two, and arguably one of the best looking military sniper rifles of all time, the No4 MkI (T) was something the British military knew they would want even before the No4 MkI rifle had gone into real production. The first No4 snipers were built on leftove...

William Pritchard was a Birmingham gunsmith in the mid 1800s who offered both firearms and air guns, and this particular ball-reservoir air gun is a fine example of the latter. Air guns have existed in Europe nearly as long as firearms, although they have never had the popularity of their powder-...

Adopted in 1880 to replace the Adams revolver, the Enfield MkI was based on an extraction system patented in the 1870s by Owen Jones of Philadelphia. This was similar in practice to the Merwin & Hulbert, with the barrel and cylinder hinging forward while the cartridge cases were held to the back ...

When the British military adopted the FAL (L1A1 SLR) in 1960, they adopted the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge along with it. While the Brens guns were converted to the new cartridge, efforts at converting the Lee Enfield into a precision rifle were not successful t the time. However, civilian target sh...

This is a really interesting and probably unique Webley - a single shot, flat sided version of the WG Target revolver. It has a WG Target frame and grip and WG Target adjustable sights, but a monolithic barrel block with a single chamber and ejector in place of a cylinder (rather like a Colt Camp...

Signal flares were an important communications tool for aircraft during World War Two, and a multitude of flare pistol types exist with mounting brackets for aerial use. The introduction of pressurized fuselages made this a much more difficult proposition, however. These two flare pistols were de...

Captain Patrick Ferguson was a British officer who designed and patented a breechloading rifle in 1776, which would actually see service in the American Revolution at the Battle of Brandywine. Ferguson presented two rifles to the British military for consideration, one of them being this specific...

During World War Two, the British spent several years developing a silenced version of the Sten gun for special operations commandos and for dropping to mainland European resistance units. This is a recreation of one of the experimental types, based on a MkII Sten with the receiver lengthened int...

Until the middle of the 20th century, the most powerful automatic pistol made was Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax's Mars pistol. With the .45 caliber version approaching the energy of a .45 Winchester Magnum, it was quite the accomplishment for a gun designed initially in 1898! Well, RIA has a very earl...

Charles Lancaster started his gunmaking business in London in 1826, and it would survive more than one hundred years, being run after Charles’ death by his sons and then by an apprentice who bought out the firm in 1878. The company had an excellent reputation for quality, and did some pioneering ...

The first repeating rifle adopted by the British military was the Lee-Metford MkI, or as it was later redesigned, the Magazine Rifle MkI. This design combined the cock on closing action and detachable box magazine of James Paris Lee with the rounded-land Metford rifling pattern. Formally adopted ...