BSA Martin sight for Ross.

[Sapper740]

Here's a previously unknown, at least to me, sight for the M1905 Ross Rifle. I saw this while perusing gun sales on an online website, made by BSA Martin which is a collaboration I'm unfamiliar with. Martin made Galillean foresights for MLE and SMLE rifles at one time according to Rifleman.org side menu - animated with patents taken out in 1910 and 1915 for same which was after M1905 production ended. It appears John Martin of Glasgow is the Martin named on the sight but details are scarce other than for his Galillean sights. The base might have been made by others as there was lots of concurrent activity regarding sights for the various Ross rifles at that time. One sight base, which looks very similar (P. 258 The Ross Rifle Story) was developed by John Humphreys, a full blooded Cowichan Indian tribe member who owned a shop on Cordova Street, Vancouver, B,C, Canada. He never patented his sight base which would have allowed others to copy it. In any event, this is an interesting and apparently little known sight.

[tiriaq]

My II** has a BSA Martin rear sight, and was never fitted with a sight on the barrel. Has a plain aperture though.

[Surpmil]

My impression is the BSA-Martin was one of the more common of the imported sights on the Ross. Canada Tool & Specialty being the the most common overall, but of course not imported.

As the Mk.II Ross was pretty much the universal target rifle in Canada between say 1906 and 1914, there were quite a variety of sights offered even by makers in the UK. I came across one recently that I have never seen even a photo of before and there are no markings on it.

The Ross Rifle Story is incorrect to say that John Humphreys was "full blooded": his father was a British immigrant. We've discussed Humphreys here before. As to his mother's ancestry I don't think I looked into that, but there were many mixed marriages in the early days when Caucasian women were few on the West Coast. Some were "after the fashion of the country" and some were more regular and some that began as convenience were formalized later.

Some of his early work was pretty crude, but it got better as time went on. He was an Armourer Sergeant in one of the CEF battalions overseas in WWI and died in Vancouver within a few years of his return; his wife auctioned the contents of the house soon after and there the trail goes cold.

That short base is a common one, but I've never seen any that were marked by a maker so that tends to suggest that Ross made them up, unless perhaps it was C.T. & S. and they didn't mark them for whatever reason. There were several makers of bases as well and once chargers appeared so did bases incorporating charger guides.

Humphreys did mark some of his sights "Humphreys Pat." etc., but that and "patent pending" are common subterfuges after all.

Someone has foolishly scrubbed and steel wooled the rifle in the photos, thereby removing the patina and proof of originality it confers.