The 1800s was a time of innovation. Often times the latest and greatest was only such for a short time. This was quite typical of arms. In particular, rifles and the shorter carbines. For decades, the best sort of rifle was a muzzle-loader or what is frequently called a musket. These required a laborious amount of time to reload and often put the somewhat static reloading soldier at peril. What was needed was a gun that fired a cartridge type of bullet and one that was not loaded through the muzzle. During the 1860s, these sorts of breech loading rifles were developed and radically changed military warfare. Now the time between shots was the time it took to remove the old cartridge and insert a new one.

However, these early breech loaders had issues. One is that the breech was not air tight and frequently the man with the gun would find issues with powder burns as the flash of detonation leaked out of the breech. A soldier with one of these guns would not want to hold it close to his face when firing, so held it away, making a major dent in accuracy. It also diminished the amount of pressure that went into sending the bullet out of the barrel.

Then there were issues with ejecting the old cartridge. A jam here would turn a gun into a machined club.

The British Army held a competition in the early 1870s to develop a rifle for their soldiers. The requirements were rather stiff for the times, but there were a goodly number of entries. None of them met the requirements, but two of them were close. These were Henry and Martini. Each had major benefits over the competition and so it was decided to combine these features into one rifle, hence the Martini-Henry.

As is the norm with weapons there was a time to properly develop it and even once delivered, field use discovered areas for improvement, so the rifle went through several upgrades. It was proven very useful in campaigns in the Sudan, Afghanistan and the Zulu wars. However, the rifle did have one major drawback in that it was a single shot and after only about a decade of use, the repeating rifles made their appearance and the single shot rifle was made obsolete.

However, the Martini-Henry had made its mark and was still in use many years past its 'use by' date, in areas where fast firing rifles were not important. Author Stephen Manning does a great job of providing us with the history leading up to the rifle as well as its initial development and it continuing upgrades. Of equal interest is the description of its use in various campaigns in many parts of Great Britian's large empire of the late 1800. It all makes for a very good read and one that I have no trouble recommending to you.

July 2013

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