THE UGLY DUCKLING  
 
from the collection of
  
 
Ken Levey
  
 
There was some interest in a strange looking revolver in my display of Australian Military Training Firearms at the recent Darwin Show.  Since then, I have been ‘leaned on’ by certain ‘heavies’ from
  
 
the  Committee  to   
divulge classified  
information on  
the  piece!  
  As for the provenance of the
  piece; no, it did not fall off the back
  of  a  truck.   All I know is that it was
  purchased from a W.A. dealer by a local
  gunsmith whence it fell into my tender care.
  I have also gleaned other anecdotal evidence
   around  the  traps  that  the  type  was known in
  Australia  although  never  adopted  in official  service.
 
The firearm in question is a standard Webley Mk VI revolver with the .455 cylinder removed.  Thereafter, a .22 tube was inserted in the barrel and a separate .22 RF cylinder fitted.  The barrel insert also secures an independent rear sight made necessary by the large differential in muzzle jump compared to the .455 service load.
 
 
According to my copy of The Webley Story by W.C. Dowell, this particular conversion was developed by Parker Hale at the suggestion of a Captain W. E. Robinson following World War 1. The good captain wanted to use .22RF ammo instead of the .297/230 rounds previously used in military revolver conversions other than those of single shot capability.  There can be little doubt that the impetus was one of making use of the increased power, and above all, cheapness of the .22 long rifle round.  However, the idea was not as simple as it may seem and thereby hangs a tale.
  
 
The Parker Hale conversion used in our revolver incorporated a ‘Morris’ tube.  Again, my trusty Webley Story informed me that it was one Richard Morris who patented the sub-calibre insert tubes which commonly bear his name.  Beginning in 1881,  his patents covered rifles and pistols and
  
continued in later years for machine guns
and artillery.  Other designers took up
the idea and there were
a number of examples
of this genre around
in the early 1900s.
However, the only
examples of
.22RF in
 
revolver conversions were
restricted to tubes extending  through the cylinder with the
 
indexing pawl removed or altered to prevent rotation.  The problem, of course, was having the striker hit the rim instead of the centre of the cartridge base.  One might imagine that there would be a number of ways of to
  
 
overcome this problem:
why not adapt the striker,
for instance?  Not a bit of it,
PH drilled a new cylinder with
chambers on a slope in relation
to the line of the barrel!  It is tempting
to muse that only a Pom could have come up
with such a design but we have to remember that
it worked.  What they got was not a gun which shot
around corners but one with satisfactory accuracy.
Evidently the rotational stability imparted by the rifling was enough to counter the distortion caused to the projectile by the sudden realignment in the forcing cone.  However, a little bird told me that the revolver has a preference for the old round nose ICI ammo rather than the more tapered nose of the stuff common today.
To end our story with more avian analogy; our ugly duckling did not turn into a swan but turned out to be an even stranger bird than it looks.  But isn’t that what we wanted to hear?  Surely one of the pleasures of our hobby is the unexpected stories that we hear when we delve into the details.