LOOPLESS L42 TRIGGER GUARDS ........again!

[Peter Laidler]

The hoary old question of ‘should they v shouldn’t they’ regarding the action cover loop on L42 trigger (and others…….) trigger guards cropped up the other day at work. If I was computer literate I’d link this in with the old thread – but I’m not so I’ll start again….

IT cropped up when the leading hand at our large parent workshop asked whether I wanted a small boxfull of No4 trigger guards, about 20 or so. I commented on how come they still had so many assorted types but interestingly, many with the action cover loop broken off. Ah….. he replied and went on to explain that they’d kept those ‘defective’ trigger guards for use on the old L59 DP rifles that were doing the rounds for many years while the ‘with-loop’ serviceable guards were used on the service No4’s and until the 90’s, the L42’s and to date, with the No8’s

The opportunity was too good to miss, so I asked about the missing loops. It transpired that the missing loops had caused a lot of in-house head scratching and correspondence between the Inspectorate (the old Maintenance Advisory Groups) and the inspection team at the Command and Base workshops. The definitive answer was that the only OFFICIAL trigger guards to be sanctioned on SERVICE No4’s and L42’s (and No8’s incidentally) were the serviceable ‘with-loop’ types. The ‘without-loops’ were permitted on the DP rifles only and even then, this relaxation in standards had to be approved from on-high as a miscellaneous instruction.

This was then officially sanctioned under EMER C-509/8 but there was a further twist in the tale…… Because it had been officially approved for a service weapon (don’t forget that the DP L59 was still a service pattern weapon of course…….) the ‘loop-less’ trigger guards had to be provisioned for at Ordnance and in the parts list, as an amendment.

It’s all getting out of hand isn’t it? But this is the way the system works…….

The parts list was not amended because the loop-less trigger guard was simply an ‘alternative pattern’ in much the same way as the battle-sight-less ‘T’ backsight and in any case, it was simply an alternative pattern approved for the DP L59 that could be fitted with the loop type OR the loop-less type in any case.

There, that was the OFFICIAL line. Whether you took any notice of it was a matter for the individual workshop but when I spoke to Roger XXXXX the old and wise inspector and later, boss of the Armourers shop at a big Base workshops ‘somewhere in the South of England’ he just shrugged his shoulders and said to me ‘…….. I remember it going on…., what a palaver. To be honest, it (the No4’s, L59’s No8’s or L52’s) went out with whatever it came in with. But the Marines at Lympstone wouldn’t accept a returned L42 without the loop……. We argued that while 509/8 said that the DP (the L59...) COULD have the loopless trigger guard, it didn't necessarily say that the others MUST........' It's getting confusing now!

Officially, a service rifle SHOULD have a loop unless it was covered by the relaxation in EMER standards. Here endeth the lesson and another useless bit of long lost Enfield information for your memory banks

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