英國皇家軍械博物館 英國皇家軍械庫 間戰期英國陸軍1型路易斯輕機槍訓練仿聲器

Hello everyone, Jonathan back once more with a not-so-mystery weapon for you It is of course a Lewis-like machine gun, Mark I It is quite an early example, quite a nice piece in itself But the reason we've got it here today is, well, you've probably seen what it is Even if you're not following along over on social media and taking a guess What we have attached to this on the side here that I'm going to demonstrate for you in a moment Is a fairly hilarious piece of interwar British military equipment And it's called the Rattle, Lewis, 303-inch machine gun Mark I Now if I'm interpreting my backwards British nomenclature correctly It's the Mark I Rattle or the Lewis 303-inch machine gun I hope I've got that right But the idea of there being more than a Mark I of this is pretty mind-boggling We'll come in and show you the only marking on this Which is the Enfield monogram It's worth knowing if you ever look at rifles or any other bits from Enfield And you see a D with a tick in the middle of it That's actually the E, the F and the D of Enfield Which is already a short form of Enfield, but you know what I mean You'll see the E, F, D as another form of the marking And this one's dated 1926 We do actually have a sealed pattern of this thing And it's introduced a little bit before that So completely official device Why am I getting so excited about it? Well, it's just how dad's army this is Now without further ado, let me show you how it works So a little bit awkward from this angle But very simply, we don't worry about any of the working parts back here We grab this handle and we turn it And that gives you hopefully an idea of what this thing is How it works and how well it actually does that job Because that's pretty loud Yes, you've guessed it This is in fact a one-up from shouting bang As you run around with, in this case, your Lewis gun Now we've heard a number of stories over the years From different armed forces in different countries That when ammunition is in short supply Or they're just trying to save some money The interwar period in the UK Being a case in point They will have soldiers shout bang Rather than firing off real blank ammunition There's also a question of blank adaptation If you don't have the ready means to fit a blank adapter To your gun Another way to make a realistically loud noise So everyone knows roughly what's going on in your training exercise Is to fit one of these Now for those of you in the UK Possibly elsewhere You're probably thinking football rattle And that's very clearly where this comes from Although there were also rattles for other purposes Like the police We actually have one in the collection The collection does veer a little bit into Law enforcement bits of kit Truncheons, notably, they are a form of weapon Police helmets, of course, are a form of armour And so we have the odd set of handcuffs And rattles So a Victorian policeman Might be running down the street Swinging a rattle around to make a loud noise It used to be very common at football matches To see people swinging rattles around Not something I've seen for some time So that same basic technology Which is a metal cog, essentially And then a rigid Another rigid piece of metal And they are twanging The cog is essentially twanging the plate Very simple And then metal block Sorry, wooden block to mount it to Steel straps and a wing nut on this side To clamp it on to the barrel jacket Over the radiator That's over the barrel of this Lewis gun So as much as I'm mocking this thing There are probably practical reasons for it Being introduced The reason I don't think we've seen or heard much about this From veterans or from history books or so forth Is it's introduced in the mid-1920s When war is hopefully a distant memory Sadly that turned out not to be the case When money is extremely tight And by the time we might have seen this The Second World War has kicked off And we are already tooling up and issuing the bread And we are very much committed to buying blank ammunition And using blank ammunition Or even live ammunition in the right circumstances In training So this is This is probably a rare sight It was officially adopted It would have been officially used I've yet to see any photos or video in use If you've seen any of that Please do let us know in the comments And we will make a note of that So this is the star of this particular show But I can't not mention a couple of other features of this Lewis Because sometimes in this collection There's more than one thing going on So it's a relatively early BSA made Mark 1 Lewis gun as mentioned It has the Belgian markings That remind you who invented this We'll show you the markings on there It's never been out on service I think we can safely say It doesn't have the Mark 1 star mod With the oil bottle in the butt there Probably other features that Other machine gun knowledgeable people Wouldn't pick up on But this bipod Is another unusual feature Now unlike the rattle I'm not 100% sure On whether this was ever adopted The sources we have available to us Readily at least Don't include it It's perfectly possible that it was We know that it was patented by BSA The same people who made the guns Incidentally you've seen the Lewis gun And heard of BSA On the TV series Peaky Blinders They did a reasonable job there With the firearms history And how that related to At least the war Maybe less so the running around the streets With the Lewis gun But nonetheless This is not something you'll see On a standard Lewis gun either It's quite heavy It's deceptive picking this up Because this drum Or this pan or pannier Is loaded with drill rounds Which adds a lot of weight The rattle adds a lot of weight But this thing is a hefty piece Of blue steel as well So the innovations here Are a pair of handles That you can pull together And carry the gun One hand probably on the butt On the wrist of the butt there And then grab these handles I guess you could also Grab them separately And hoik the front of the gun around To position it In theory this is meant to be A two man team gun Seems a little superfluous to me As someone who's never had to Use one of these in anger The handles are also A means of adjusting the legs And they are very much like The Maximal Vickers tripod In that respect There's a series of teeth On each On the face of the leg And on the face of the mount That interface together in a clamped shut For stability And then you undo them To allow you to then Move the bipod leg Back and forth So I could if I wanted to For some reason position it there And then do up the handle Obviously we don't want to do that You could fold them up Were it not for the Comedy football rattle Strapped to the side of the gun For now I'll just cinch that back up So it doesn't collapse So an unusual And excessively hefty And excessively expensive bipod design I would suggest It also pivots It's partly why it's so heavy So it pivots left and right To allow you to Traverse the gun Without Now normal sort of Doctrine I suppose with Machine guns with bipods Especially light machine guns with bipods Is you lift the gun up To let the tripod sit correctly And drop it back down So you're not forcing the gun onto target And messing up your accuracy You do want accuracy with machine guns With spikes on the feet there To have it bedded in Potentially even sandbagged in If you're trying to give more Sustain fire for whatever reason And you swing the gun back and forth Within an arc So it's an interesting Tactically flexible design But heavy, expensive If indeed it wasn't adopted As I suspect it wasn't You can sort of see why And the final feature Is one that we can't really show you Except for a marking on the back here And that's that this is chambered in 303 rimless Now something I see quite a bit online A lot of chat about The rimmed 303 cartridge And what a nightmare that must have been And a complete disaster and why on earth Didn't we move to a rimless cartridge Well there are various good reasons why not Articulated by people better qualified Than me to comment We won't go into that argument But suffice to say That in the margins they were absolutely Looking at a rimless cartridge Both replacing the 303 caliber Entirely and at least Two attempts to Keep the 303 projectile And redesign the case To make it rimless Although I gather in this case The 303 rimless we're talking about Around about 1917 Was actually semi-rimless So for more on that You can head over to British Military Small Arms Ammunition Which is a Google site page Set up by the late Tony Edwards who was very knowledgeable On ammunition And it's really quite nicely set out You can page on the left hand side Through the different types of ammo And 303 rimless It's quite a long write up in there At one point the RAF Or RFC at that time Were going to convert over All their Lewis guns In theory to 303 rimless And we would have adopted The pattern 14 Which we did But in 303 rimless Not in 303 standard 303 British as it's often called So an absolutely standard gun Fitted with Three different interesting Things about it One of which you could not possibly have guessed Two of which you might have Thanks very much for watching guys There are various ways that you can Engage with the collection Here at the Royal Armouries This being one of them You can also head over to the Gamespot YouTube channel for more of me Talking about guns We have our own social media outlets Twitter, Facebook, Instagram There's our website of course Our online collection that you can peruse Most of all though We'd very much like you to come and visit us At one of our three sites here in the UK Up here at Leeds Down at Fort Nelson on the south coast Or indeed at the famous Tower of London where all of the Arms and armour you can see there Are ours, which is nice So we'll see you again next time