Osprey - Weapon 19 - The Webley Service Revolver.pdf

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THE WEBLEY
SERVICE REVOLVER
R O B E RT M A Z E
© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
THE WEBLEY
SERVICE REVOLVER
ROBERT MAZE
Series Editor Martin Pegler
© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
DEVELOPMENT
Britain’s modern revolver
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USE
A sidearm for Empire and World War
IMPACT
The Webley legacy worldwide
CONCLUSION
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
INTRODUCTION
After Col Samuel Colt perfected the revolver’s fundamental design in
1836, armies started to embrace the handgun as an effective means of
close-quarters personal defence. By the last half of the 19th century, a trend
emerged in the British Army – more military personnel were carrying
revolvers. Until the
Dreadnought
era arrived in the 20th century, it was
sailors who had most frequently carried pistols, because of their
participation in boarding parties, but by the 1870s more land-based
soldiers carried handguns. In the Army the pistol was no longer the
exclusive domain of the officer. Non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and
even wagon-drivers were now armed; the ability to defend oneself and to
kill a lame or wounded horse mercifully were equally important.
‘The Sun Never Sets on a Webley Revolver’; or so the engravings read
on the last commercial .38in Webley revolvers sold before the closure of
the great firm in the early 1980s. It may have been a marketing gimmick,
but gimmick or not, the engraving bore out the truth. It hearkened back to
an era when Britain’s possessions covered the globe and the larger .455in
ancestors of the little .38s were carried in the four corners of the Empire.
While possibly not as overtly charismatic as the Colt Peacemaker, the
Webley – specifically the various models of the hinge-frame .455in service
revolver – had a working life and distribution far outstripping those of the
Colt. It was carried as a useful tool both in conflict and in peacekeeping
missions for more than 60 years, and in all of the areas of the globe to which
British influence had extended. The large .455in revolver was immortal,
too, on the silver screen, whenever the film industry required a ‘typically
British’ revolver in the hand of a star acting out a passage from a period of
history, even a period in which the Webley might never have existed.
From before the battle of Omdurman (1898) until after World War II, the
Webley .455in revolver served British, Commonwealth and colonial soldiers,
sailors, airmen, police officers and even African hunters well, when their lives
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© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
depended on it most. This revolver progressed through six configurations, or
‘marks’ as the nomenclature reads. During this progression, it underwent a
transformation that transcended the development of warfare, evolving as it
was called upon to respond to ever-changing enemies and the tactics used to
combat these new foes. Whether the fighting happened in a desert wadi or
in the trenches of the Western Front, the Webley was present.
Conflict was not only restricted to the battlefield, but also existed in the
back streets and gutters of cities, where police officers doing their day-to-day
jobs wielded the Webley against vice and villainy. Curiously, the tactics of
close-quarter fighting that developed in the depths of the trenches of World
War I were taken up, recycled and refined by notable (ex-soldier) law-
enforcement officers, like Eric Sykes and William Fairbairn of the Shanghai
Municipal Police (SMP). Used in inter-war urban China to police the opium
dens and gangster-strewn streets, these close-quarter fighting techniques
carried through to World War II, when they were used for the training of
elite Allied soldiers, such as the commandoes and airborne troops, and the
agents of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American
Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Now, more than 90 years on, modern-day
elite Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams of police departments and
elite military organizations around the world employ methods of personal
defence and close-in combat that were developed initially for trench raiding
in World War I, in which the Webley played a major role.
The .455in Webley service revolvers came into existence, as with most
things of any significance, in a time of change. The change was in the way
wars were being fought and in the engineering methods and capabilities of
a country whose industrial revolution had hit its stride. After the American
Civil War (1861–65), the concept of linear warfare – employing lines of
armed men standing to win the day or fleeing to lose it – was rapidly
disappearing. For Britain in the latter half of the 19th century the thin red
lines of Wellington’s day and the Crimea gradually faded into a khaki-
Able Seaman Joe W. ‘Ginger’
Scotcher cleaning Mk VI revolvers
(and a M1928A1 Thompson
submachine gun) in the armoury
on board a British destroyer at
Rosyth during World War II.
(Imperial War Museum A 8363)
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