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here was once a famous saying by a designer at Rolls-Royce who said “if it looks right, it is right” and How correct he was. This rifle known as the Short magazine Lee-Enfield or the Smellie or the “Long” rifle and 5 inches longer than the “carbine”. Charger loading enabled the magazine to be filled with 2 chargers of 5 rounds each, thus allowing 10 round to be very quickly swept into the magazine. Coupled to the fantastically quick bolt action, many German Soldiers during the Great War thought that every British soldier was issued with a machine gun!!. An armourer friend has, on many occasions seen factory workers at Enfield on the test ranges, fire over 60 shots per minute including refilling the magazine every 10 rounds!!.

The backsight was graduated from 200 to 2,000 yards with lateral adjustment for windage as well, while the long range aperture sights fitted to rifles prior to 1914 allowed ranges from 1,700 to 2,800 yards. Once fighting on the Western Front became snap shooting, often at very short range, the long range sights were omitted along with windage adjustment as was the magazine “cut-off”, a pivoting shutter that shut off feed from the magazine so that single rounds could be fed into the chamber while allowing a full magazine to be reserved until rapid fire was ordered. This simplified rifle was introduced at the start of 1916 but all types of “smellie” were used throughout both wars and indeed a wire bound version using a grenade “cup discharger” was issued for lobbing Mills grenades using ballasitite blank cartridge well into the 1970’s.

This rifle earned the deep affection of all those who used it and to call anything “my best friend” when weighed down with masses of kit where “going over the top” could and often did result in slithering into shell-holes and drowning was really praise indeed.