Yesterday's Weapons Forums

I just got a very nice thank you email from the Technical Historian of the REME Museum.
I'd sent them an email to tell them I'd spotted a Bannerman .303 built on a Springfield receiver in there collection misidentified as an experimental Enfield.

The Historian said the rifle had been labeled improperly many years ago and they hadn't investigated it till I told them what I'd obsevered. They were very pleased to find they had such a rare example and hadn't known it till now.

Guess that shows that it pays to go ahead and let people know what you think.

whats interesting here is that at the time the pattern 1913 rifle was being developed enfeild had some springfeild M1903s for 'experimental' work in the developement , the P13/14 rifles are a slice of each the enfeild and the springfeild[mauser] combined , the culmination of that converted to 303 in the pattern 1914 that was contracted thru eddystone , remington , and winchester , and later to 3006 in the model 1917,

while not suprised to find a misslable in a museum collection i am disapointed to here this is not one of those 'experiments' misslabled ,

gun nut , im not in any way disputing what you access this to be , i think you are correct , and aplaud your efforts ,

i thought it interesting that the timing of this particular rifle coincided with a real military effort that involved combining the characteristics of the enfeild with those of the mauser/springfeild ,

its true the P13 was designed around the 276 rimless , that developement began in 1910 incidently , and its also true that the P14 change to 303 was a result of war needs of WWI , so it could be related to this rifle and thats why i mentioned it , but its definetly not part of the P13/14 legacy to have one - even an experimental one - look so much like the mauser/springfeild in the receiver area ,

im quite certain you are correct in your bannerman connection , and its immpressive that you were able to get the museum staff to reveiw the situation , nice to know there is someone who cares in charge of preserving our history these days ,


NOW - if we can get him to change that stupid notation of "emergency reserve arm" on the eddystone P14 id be real happy ,

say give me his addy ill write him off a quick note .......

The problem with FN was that in a rush to dry the wood they used salts to leech out the moisture. Unfortunately it wasn't very good to the nice FN metalwork I had a T-bolt that suffered from this type of stock

my immediate question would be "what exactly do you discerne the 'R' on the remingtons to stand for ? and the 'W' on the winchesters ? and what of those few 'vickers' that were produced ? " its all about research really , isnt that the requirement for historical accuracy ?

it would then be worth asking why then are the early M1917 eddystones still carrying that british 'emergency' designation ? we didnt use that terminology , yet they are still marked the same as the P14s the change to full name stamoings happened into production ,

while remington [illion , new york] is the remington rifle manufacturer ,

its remington [delaware] that ran eddystone , confussing for sure , ERA is Eddystone Remington Arms , and refers to the delaware parent company with eddystone being a location where baldwin locamotive built plants for rifle and ammunition manufacture , and in fact a VP of baldwin was in charge of construction and equipment ,

this was a seperate entity from remington , and in fact remington delaware was absorbed by midvale steel while the M1917 contracts were in process ,

in total eddystone produced nearly two and a quarter million rifles of P14/M17 contracts far more than any other manufacturer [even combineing some] 2/3rds of the americans in WWI france were carrying eddystones , our M1903 couldnt be produced any faster than the SMLEs ,

it seems a bit less than respectfull to relegate the memory to Emergency Reserve Arms , although its not without precedent in the brit nomenclature for their EY arms designation ,