The Lancaster Pistol was a multi-barrelled (2 or 4 barrels)
handgun
A handgun is a short- barrelled gun, typically a firearm, that is designed to be usable with only one hand. It is distinguished from a long gun (i.e. rifle, shotgun or machine gun, etc.), which needs to be held by both hands and also braced ...
produced in England in the mid-late 19th century, chambered in a variety of centrefire pistol calibres—chiefly
.38 S&W,
.450 Adams
The .450 Adams was a British black powder centrefire revolver cartridge, initially used in converted Beaumont–Adams revolvers, in the late 1860s. Officially designated .450 Boxer Mk I, and also known variously as the .450 Revolver, .450 Colt ...
,
.455 Webley
.455 Webley is a British handgun cartridge, most commonly used in the Webley top break revolvers Marks I through VI. It is also known as ".455 Eley" and ".455 Colt".
The .455 cartridge was a service revolver cartridge, featuring a rimmed car ...
, and .577 inch. The designer, London gunsmith
Charles Lancaster, began his career in 1847 as an apprentice to his father, Charles Sr. During the 1850s he invented
oval bore
In firearms, rifling is machining helical grooves into the internal (bore) surface of a gun's barrel for the purpose of exerting torque and thus imparting a spin to a projectile around its longitudinal axis during shooting to stabilize the pro ...
rifling and the gas check bullet.
[Lancaster pistols](_blank)
/ref>
Description
It was a modernised version of the pepper-box
The pepper-box revolver or simply pepperbox (also "pepper-pot", from its resemblance to the household pepper shakers) is a multiple-barrel firearm, mostly in the form of a handgun, that has three or more gun barrels in a coaxially revolving m ...
pistol popular in the early-mid 19th century.[Myatt, F, ''19th century firearms'' (London 1989) ] Unlike these earlier guns which had percussion cap ignition, the Lancaster was chambered for the more modern brass cartridges..410
The .410 bore is one of the smallest caliber of shotgun shell commonly available (along with the 9mm Flobert rimfire cartridge, and the less common .22 rimfire shot shell). A .410 bore shotgun loaded with shot shells is well suited for small ...
shotgun shell
A shotgun shell, shotshell or simply shell is a type of rimmed, cylindrical (straight-walled) cartridges used specifically in shotguns, and is typically loaded with numerous small, pellet-like spherical sub- projectiles called shot, fired thro ...
s. It had a faster rate of fire than the standard-issue Adams revolver
Robert Adams (1810–1870) was a 19th-century British gunsmith who patented the first successful double-action revolver in 1851. His revolvers were used during the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the American Civil War, and the Anglo-Zulu War.
C ...
and was often fitted with a Tranter-type trigger to overcome the heavy pull of the revolving striker.Howdah pistol
The howdah pistol was a large-calibre handgun, often with two or four barrels, used in Africa and India from the beginning of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century during the British Empire era. It was intended for defence ...
, the Lancaster pistol enjoyed popularity with British officers in India and Africa during the British Raj owing to its faster rate of fire and increased reliability over contemporary revolvers. It was highly prized by hunters and explorers for close range defense against big game such as tigers or cape buffalo. Unlike revolvers, it does not leak gas when fired since there is no gap between the chamber and the barrel. One rare variant, made for the Maharajah of Rewa as a hunting weapon, took the form of a four barreled rifle.
Use in Sudan
Its ammunition had greater stopping power than the contemporary Beaumont–Adams and Colt Navy revolvers, making it ideal for colonial warfare. When facing charging tribesmen like the Zulus or Ansar (the so-called Sudanese Dervishes), more modern ammunition tended to go straight through the enemy who would keep going. What was needed was a heavy lead bullet that would lodge in their body and bring them down.Lieutenant Colonel
Lieutenant colonel ( , ) is a rank of commissioned officers in the armies, most marine forces and some air forces of the world, above a major and below a colonel. Several police forces in the United States use the rank of lieutenant colone ...
John Montague Benett Stanford
The Lancaster Pistol was a multi-barrelled (2 or 4 barrels) handgun produced in England in the mid-late 19th century, chambered in a variety of centrefire pistol calibres—chiefly .38 S&W, .450 Adams, .455 Webley, and .577 inch. The designer, Lon ...
(1870-1947), who killed a fanatical assegai
An assegai or assagai (Arabic ''az-zaġāyah'', Berber languages, Berber ''zaġāya'' "spear", French language, Old French ''azagaie'', Spanish ''azagaya'', Italian ''zagaglia'', Middle English ''lancegay'') is a pole weapon used for throwing, ...
-wielding Sudanese Ansar with a Lancaster pistol while working as a war correspondent at the Battle of Omdurman.
It was eventually displaced by the various Webley revolvers in the late 19th century as revolvers became more reliable and faster to reload, thus removing many of the advantages of the multi-barrel design. A few were still in use as late as World War I, and they were well known to be solidly built and easy to maintain.
In popular culture
A double-barreled Lancaster howdah pistol with a unique spring-loaded blade is the weapon of the big-game hunter Remington in '' The Ghost and the Darkness''.The guns that killed the man eaters of Tsavo
/ref>
The Lancaster pistol exists as the Howdah Pistol in the 2016 video game ''Battlefield 1
''Battlefield 1'' is a first-person shooter game developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts. It is the tenth installment in the ''Battlefield'' series and the first main entry in the series since '' Battlefield 4'' in 2013. It was rele ...
''.
References
{{Multiple Barrel Firearms
Black-powder pistols
Multiple-barrel firearms
Pistols of the United Kingdom
Victorian-era weapons of the United Kingdom
Hunting equipment