Date of commercial BSA Lee Enfield.

[Thunderbox]

Generally the BSA commercials are hard to date - BSA used all sorts of number sequences to give some sort of commercial secrecy to their output.

As it happens, you happen to have one of the few "known" batches. BSAs with 5xxxx numbers were a batch made for the Gulf States/Protectorates back in the 1930s - exact year currently unknown. Recently, someone bought all these rifles back from Bahrain and released them to the surplus trade. Your rifle probably has (a) a brass butt disk with a rack number in large font (b) a cut-off (c) a "narrow" pattern front piling swivel (d) dark - almost purple colour - walnut furniture. Most of the rifles ended up with a mismatched bolt (also in the 5xxxx range) as apparently these were delivered separately and not much effort was made to match them up.

IMHO, these are some of the best quality Enfields around: despite the wear they've had, they are nearly all unmodified since they left the BSA factory, and they exhibit the top-class materials, finish and fit typical of an inter-war commercial trade gun.

These two rifles are from the same batch:

Information

Warning: This is a relatively older thread This discussion is older than 360 days. Some information contained in it may no longer be current.

[Ridolpho]

You described the rifle perfectly right down to the very dark walnut. Thanks very much for the reply and for including the photos. My bolt handle is a matching number to that on the reciever and barrel although the seller told me he suspected there had been a Birmingham re-fit at some point in it's life. In any case the barrel is in excellent shape and it looks like it will be a good shooter, possibly with a spare "Central" aperture sight installed.