The first were built in 1907. The last were manufactured in the late thirties. They were among the British Commonwealth’s standard rifles until the late fifties,

In the hands of the “Old Contemptibles” – Britain’s tiny force of regulars in 1914 – they held off massed waves of Germans during the original blitz through Belgium. They fought at The Somme, Passchendaele, Second Marne, Dunkirk, Narvik, El Alamein, the Bramaputra and Cassino, Sword and Gold and Juno beaches, all the way across France and Belgium and Holland and Korea and the Suez.

A refinement of an 1888 design that had been tried and found wanting during the Boer War, Irish and Indian and South African reservists carried them well into the seventies and early eighties. After the AK47, they were the most common weapon in the hands of the mujahedin in Afghanistan early in their jihad against the Soviets. It’s still seen in the hands of reservists and policemen throughout south asia.

The SMLE reminded me of Winston Churchill; pug-nosed, but a smooth operator. I fired one at a range in 1988 (and a few more times thereafter). It was the rifle equivalent of an aged single-malt on a mahogany table; old-school in that way that all the great antiques are. The short-throw bolt action, worn down after goodness-knows how many people cranked it over the years (its receiver was stamped sometime in the late twenties, as I recall) was the fastest, smoothest turnbolt I personally have ever fired.

(Note: No, this is not the one I shot. I just pulled it off the net).

There were 14 million of them made (possibly including the “modernized” versions, the Mark IV and Mark V, from the forties and fifties).  Back in ’88, they were running for under $100. Yet another deep lifelong regret.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 6:02 am and is filed under Hot Gear Friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.