A Courteous Reply

[Alfred]

Received this some months back

From: Senior Curator
Sent: 15 December 2008 08:02
To: Technical Historian
Subject: FW: Spotted misidentified weapon in your photo collection


.

(name redacted)

Thank you for your observation on our web site entry for weapon 122. Our original information came with the collection several years ago from the REME School which trains armourers. The collection was once used to show the trainees how guns had developed over the centuries and the captions were provided by instructors, some of whom were gun enthusiasts. However their knowledge was in some cases less than perfect as we are now finding out. To be fair much more has been published on weapon history in recent years.



Much of our collection is stored in a military armoury on this site and next time I have a need to go there I will check out this carbine to see exactly which markings are on it and to try to make sure of its identity. I gather the Bannerman weapons were sent to Britain in 1915 but were not considered up to the required standard for issue as operational weapons. If this does turn out to be one of them it must be a very rare survivor. If I can settle this when I have seen the gun I will redraft the caption.



Thank you for drawing our attention to this.



Sincerely, Brian Baxter, Technical Historian

Well nobody is perfect. Memorys of events of over twenty years earlier can get blurred.

The REME couldn't help with the British Surplus Rifle Warning, but I sent an enquiry to the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. Doubt they would put much effort into looking into a Ministry Of Defence document from the 1980's during wartime but its worth a shot.

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