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Revolver making wasn't really the RSAF at Enfields forte either! The setting up was more difficult than the Bren Gun simply because ZB licensed Enfield with all of their previous engineering/production/material knowledge too. It was said of the No2 pistol that it was their smallest gun - that caused the biggest headaches!
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11-12-2014 10:09 AM
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Given Enfield's history of revolver manufacture (they made the Webley Mk VI in the mid-20s, if I recall correctly) you'd think they wouldn't have had too many issues with the Enfield No 2, surely? Especially since they basically pinched the design from Webley & Scott anywyay... 
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They had to start afresh with the No2 Colonel! No help or pirating existing machinery this time. Believe me!
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They had to start afresh with the No2 Colonel! No help or pirating existing machinery this time. Believe me!
I'd be interested to know what the explanation for the similarities between the Webley Mk IV and the Enfield No. 2 is - I just find it almost impossible to believe RSAF Enfield didn't take some cues from the Mk III & IV Webley .38 revolvers when designing the No. 2.
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They did! They'd call it wholesale pillage and plunder of patent and intellectual property rights now. Then they just did it and said '.....sue us if you dare......'. Sterling being another good example.
Too long to explain but the whole story is in a good little book called The No2 Revolver by Mark Stamps and Ian Skennerton
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They did! They'd call it wholesale pillage and plunder of patent and intellectual property rights now. Then they just did it and said '.....sue us if you dare......'. Sterling being another good example.
Too long to explain but the whole story is in a good little book called The No2 Revolver by Mark Stamps and
Ian Skennerton
I've got a copy - an excellent and worthwhile book. 
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They did the same to the little Sterling company. When they jumped up in anger, they replied with the same high handedness. So Sterling did sue, and won! But Enfield/Government/Ministry of supply STILL infringed their patent copyrights by continuing the manufacture of spare parts.
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On the down side, Albion were better at making busses and trucks than they were at producing postols and their output was far below that expected of them. So they reverted to doing what they did best.......... Making trucks and busses!
Mind you, being based in Glasgow, with a large gangland following, the pistols that 'remained' there didn't go to waste. Hundreds turned up in gangland feuds for 40 years after the war!
Interesting bit of history about the gangs. Probably why they shipped a whole bunch of them to the USA after England's gun laws got tighter. The Albion facility was probably an inefficient conversion to a pistol smith. I would think it would be a better aircraft engine producer or tank track factory or something. I will say though, that this no2 appears to be well made and the parts fit exactly. They probably had gunsmiths from Enfield at work or at least over watching every step.
@Webly discussion. The only difference between a Webly and a No2 is that the British military created a firearm with no interchangeable parts with a Welby so they didn't have to pay royalties. (It's clearly the same thing though) They also used a custom .38 S&W caliber round because they didn't want servicemen to develop bad shooting habits by flinching due to overbearing recoil. I hear most Weblys have been converted to .45 ACP. I wouldn't mind having one of those either.
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As an Armourer, admittedly with vastly more experience with the Enfield .38 than the Webley .38 I would say that the difference was similar to that between an MGB and a Triumph Spitfire. They are both 4 cylinder 2+2 sports cars with 4 wheels and run on roads but made at different places. They look roughly similar and feel the same but are totally different when it comes down to it.
While YOUR parts for YOUR No2 pistol fit exactly, that's because they are YOUR parts for YOUR pistol. Believe me, parts off the shelf might FIT but to get the pistol to work properly and PASS all of the tests before it will be passed by the out-inspector is something else entirely! THey were for the day when accurate hand fitting by 3 year apprenticed Armourers with an in-=depth feel for the pistol were the norm
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As an Armourer, admittedly with vastly more experience with the Enfield .38 than the Webley .38 I would say that the difference was similar to that between an MGB and a Triumph Spitfire. They are both 4 cylinder 2+2 sports cars with 4 wheels and run on roads but made at different places. They look roughly similar and feel the same but are totally different when it comes down to it.
Personally I think the similiarities between the Webley Mk IV and the Enfield No 2 are more than that and would suggest that the Concorde and Tupolev Tu-144 might make a better analogy.
My understanding of the subject* is that after World War I, the British realised the .455 Webley round was probably a bit big for the sort of wars the Empire was likely to be fighting from thereon in. The round had been designed in the heydey of the Empire, when the brave lads comprising Thin Red Line found themselves facing a lot of angry natives who weren't too keen of having their countries pinched by Whitey. These same natives were generally armed with spears, animal hide shields or (maybe) antique - even by Victorian standards - flintlock longarms. The .455 round needed to be able to stop one of said natives in his tracks when he was charging at the chap with the revolver, and by all accounts it was very good at doing this. The same philosophy was behind the .45ACP cartridge I believe; the US were in he middle of fighting the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines and needed a hard-hitting, large-bore round to put charging enemies down and keen them there.
The thing is, by the time World War I rolled around most of the European armies were using considerably smaller cartridges - for example the French had the 8mm Lebel Revolver, the Germans 9mm Parabellum and the Russians the 7.62x38R Nagant cartridge (admittedly with special guest appearances by the .44 Russian cartridge as well). And as anyone who's fired a .45 calibre handgun can tell you, they pack a lot of punch and it takes a bit of time to get used to them.
After World War I, a lot of the people in the British military who had the training and could shoot the large-bore Webleys properly were... unavailable** so there was something to be said for following the European fashion and getting a smaller cartridge which was easier to A) teach people to shoot with and B) better suited to combat point/instinct shooting.
The work of gentlemen such as Fairbairn and Sykes (of Commando Knife fame) in the 1920s and 1930s seemed to lend a lot of creedence to the idea a smaller calibre handgun with more manageable recoil could be employed by the military and police without compromising the effectiveness offered by the larger bullet found in the .455 cartridge.
So, when the British decided in the early 1920s to adopt a smaller calibre service revolver, Webley & Scott pulled the armaments industry equivalent of "and here's one we prepared earlier..." by submitting the Webley Mk IV .38 pistol, which basically took everything Webley & Scott had learned about the .38 S&W/.380 revolver cartridge from their successful Mk III .38 police revolver (which had been around for a few years at that point) and incorporated it into a scaled down Webley Mk VI, with a few other relatively minor tweaks thrown in.
It certainly appears to me that RSAF Enfield - who had been producing the Webley Mk VI revolver for a few years in the early-mid '20s - looked at the Mk IV .38 design, studied it intensly, went away, mucked around with it a bit, then came back and said "Oh, look at this, we too have a .38 calibre top-break revolver which looks a lot like the one you have. What a coincidence, but they're not the same gun at all, so no royalties for you and thanks for playing. Don't forget to stop by the gift shop on the way out."
Webley sued them, lost - the official decree was that RSAF Enfield developed the Enfield pistol by themselves with only some minor assistance from Webley & Scott***, as I understand it.
Webley & Scott had the last laugh, though - besides eventually getting £1250 from the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors, they put the Mk IV into production for commercial and police sales, and when WWII rolled around and RSAF Enfield couldn't keep up with the demand for handguns, which respected British gun-maker just happened to have a top-break revolver available which was chambered for the official service revolver cartridge? Exactly.
And after the war, Webley & Scott continued supplying handguns to various police forces around the Empire/Commonwealth and were still producing the Mk IV well into the 1970s, while production of the Enfield seems to have finished - with the exception of an order for about 6,000 guns by Pakistan c.1956/57 - pretty much as soon as the ink was dry on the Axis surrender documents.
And a bonus observation If you're still reading after all this, as a huge fan of the Webley revolvers I've always thought it was a huge shame they weren't chambered for .38 Special - I honestly believe they'd still be in production today (much as the Smith & Wesson Model 10 still is) if they had been.
*And this is really the forum equivalent of "As you already know..." exposition in movies and so forth, in this case being for the benefit of folks reading along at home who aren't as familiar with the subject.
** An obvious and deliberately understated euphemism.
*** Trollollolol.
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