A weapon from the glory days of Birmingham gunmaking. The gunmakers in Birmingham turned out hundreds of thousands of weapons, from very basic guns to some of the finest ever made. As unlikely as it seems today, entire city blocks in Birmingham were taken up by gun factories. Restrictions on rifle ownership after WWI hurt the gun trade in Britain, and then came the Great Depression, and many makers shut their doors for good.
Webley (or Webley & Scott) made guns under their own name, and also made guns for other “makers” and also for various retailers. The snobbish London gunmakers always disparaged their northern gunmaking kin in Birmingham, but in truth more than one buyer of a London ‘best’ gun paid a premium price, and ended up with a Birmingham gun (which, fortunately for the buyer, were equal in quality to a true London made gun).
I had a history professor at Dublin University, he was such a cantankerous oul’ Orangeman from the North that he pretty much pissed off most of his students but he did drone on about the engineering successes of Belfast, one of my favourite quotes of his was “we made the greatest ships, unlike them’uns in Birmingham; making guns for black men to kill each other in Africa!”, given that the greatest ship ever built in Belfast was the Titanic and the context of his statement I don’t think he’d still have a job in modern day universities.