Rapid Fire Sword, Musket & Machine Gun: Britain's Armed History

57D, Hatton Garden, London.

An area more infamous for an audacious jewellery heist

than for inventing weapons.

But it was here in 1883

that an eccentric American inventor built a gun that shook the world.

The very first burst of automatic gunfire

was heard in the basement of this central London building behind me.

God knows what the neighbours would have thought.

AUTOMATIC GUNFIRE This was the Maxim gun,

a game-changer in the story of British weapons.

It was believed that this would be a weapon that would end all wars.

It brought an industrialised efficiency to the whole business

of killing people, and could fire up to 600 rounds a minute.

AUTOMATIC FIRE

The Maxim gun was the culmination

of a century of rapid technological change,

which took us from the Napoleonic Wars

to the weapons we recognise today.

This evolution of precision and firepower

was driven by the desire to defend our interests overseas

and expand the British Empire.

We developed ever more potent weapons

to stamp our will on the world.

These technical advances had all kinds of repercussions.

I'll explore how new tactics were pioneered

to use these weapons, such as the skirmish.

I'll discover how this quest for firepower

had a profound impact on our domestic law and order...

If you're the guy having to go up against

a criminal armed with the latest thing,

to know that the enemy have that

-is going to be a little bit frightening.

-Yeah.

..and I'll take part in an unprecedented experiment.

Could a silk vest have prevented the outbreak of the First World War?

Military technology is often seen as the dark side of innovation.

But in this era, some inventors believed

they could put an end to war if they created the ultimate weapon -

an instrument so terrible that no-one would dare use it.

But technology wouldn't be the saviour we'd hoped for.

When these superweapons were deployed,

when the world went to war...

..they would wreak a havoc no-one expected.

At the dawn of the 19th century,

Britain was one of the wealthiest nations in the world,

so good at making weapons

that it flooded the international market.

Britain was engaged in a long, drawn-out war

against its old adversary - the French.

Wellington was squaring up against Napoleon

to decide the fate of Europe.

And there was one musket that would come to dominate the battlefields.

We are an island nation

and we didn't want to put boots on foreign soil until we had to.

So we armed and financed our allies to fight Napoleon on our behalf.

This is the Kalashnikov of its day,

and we made over 3.5 million of them.

The Brown Bess musket.

The India Pattern musket,

or the Brown Bess, as it was affectionately nicknamed,

came into service in 1797.

It was a sturdy smoothbore black powder gun

and was the weapon of choice for the infantry.

The Brown Bess may have been named after Queen Elizabeth I,

or the 15th-century weapon the arquebus.

Like all smoothbore weapons, it was not famed for its accuracy.

GUNSHOT

To find out how soldiers made the best of this unpredictable gun,

I have enlisted weapons expert Mark Murray-Flutter.

-Well...

-How was that?

-That was amazing.

Quite a kick on it.

I want you to try and imagine

what it might have been like at Waterloo.

-Not everybody fires at the same time.

-Right.

You get this sort of ripple effect,

so you get this constant fire going downrange

and that's probably what creates that fog of battle.

Yeah.

The idea of everyone having the same weapon really makes me wonder

if that put an added onus on originality,

-in terms of strategy and tactics.

-I think you're probably right.

You must understand, at this time, virtually every army

used something extremely similar.

And they were very similar in performance as well.

So the only difference you can really have is how you deploy it,

how you use it, how you utilise it.

Well, if I was armed with this beauty and I was at Waterloo,

what would I be seeing coming towards me?

You would be on an upslope, you'd be looking down into a shallow valley,

and you would probably be seeing, coming up that hill,

that gentle hill, a column of Frenchmen in blue,

with little hats on. They would - with great elan,

shouting, "Vive la France!" or "Vive L'Empereur!" -

they would charge.

As the French were advancing, in a way, almost,

they're appearing out of the smoke, as they get closer and closer.

The traditional British tactic is to have a line,

and we normally trained two to a line

but I understand, at Waterloo, we in fact had four to a line.

Four to a line.

Their French officer did note that approaching the British line

-was like approaching a red wall.

-Hmm.

Very stoic. Very quiet.

And this was making the French very nervous.

-When am I allowed to fire?

-When your sergeant, or your officer,

your commander, will let you.

And normally we would expect you probably to engage

the first shot, the first volley, at about 70 metres. 50-70 metres.

But how did these soldiers hold their nerve

as the French hurtled towards them?

You had to hold your fire until you saw the whites of the enemy's eyes.

Firing any sooner was a waste of ammunition,

as the Brown Bess didn't have the accuracy.

This musket was an unpredictable weapon,

in part because the bullet in the Brown Bess was so unstable.

It only became potent in the hands of an experienced soldier.

Look at these tiny blocks.

They almost look like children's toys,

but in fact they were used to teach Napoleonic-era soldiers

how to drill with their Brown Bess.

Now, given that the British liked the French to come to them,

continuity of fire was crucial.

-MEN SHOUT:

-Vive la France!

With the Brown Bess, it wasn't realistic

to aim at an individual soldier.

The infantry just had to put up a continuous wall of lead.

With four rows of men at Waterloo,

the training must have been relentless

to avoid shooting the man in front of you in the head.

These blocks were an important aid in getting the timing right.

Now, if a soldier could really lock down a drill,

then his response to a drumroll

would be automatic on a chaotic, smoke-filled battlefield.

At the Battle of Salamanca in 1812,

8,000 men were killed or wounded,

but 3.5 million cartridges were fired.

That's just one shot in every 437 having any effect.

Almost every Brown Bess was finished by hand,

which led to huge variations.

Bullets sprayed all over the place.

We clearly we needed to bring some refinement to our arsenal,

but this regiment wouldn't come from our infantry.

It would come from the biggest hitters of all - the artillery.

BOOM

At the beginning of the 19th century,

British artillery were using canister shot

to repel infantry or cavalry attack.

This was a cylinder of thin metal filled with lead balls

which burst open upon firing.

But it was a short-range weapon.

All too often, friendly troops were hit

as the lead ball sprayed out from the canister across the battlefield.

But one ingenious idea by an ambitious young lieutenant

gave British troops an upper hand at Waterloo.

In 1784, a 23-year-old British artillery officer

began experimenting - in his own time and at his own expense -

with designs for a new weapon.

This British officer ploughed over £30,000

of his own private fortune into his military prototype.

He knew that the key to making canister shot

a devastating ballistic weapon was timing.

By modifying the canister so that it included a powder charge

and a delayed-action fuse, his design

gave the shell time to get to the enemy before it exploded...

..only then raining down death and destruction on them.

He called his design "spherical canister shot"

but it wasn't very catchy so it was soon named after him -

Shrapnel.

When Henry Shrapnel's invention was deployed

in the Peninsular Wars of 1808,

the enemy couldn't believe they could be engaged

with such accuracy and ferocity.

Shrapnel was quickly nicknamed "the black rain"

and to the French, it seemed from a future time.

French infantrymen were so terrified of the casualties from shrapnel

that they were often taken prisoner cowering, face-down,

but the effects were more than psychological.

The speed with which these twisted metal shards

exploded from the shell

was enough to rip your face apart,

and the British were even accused of poisoning their shells.

At the Battle of Waterloo, a very large percentage

of the French soldiers injured from shrapnel

never recovered from their wounds.

Shrapnel's death cloud turned the tide at the Battle of Waterloo.

Colonel Sir George Wood, commanding the artillery,

wrote to Shrapnel himself, saying that without it,

they would have lost the fight at the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte.

A crucial turning point.

The shell was enthusiastically adopted by

all of Europe's great powers.

The invention was so ahead of its time

that shrapnel was still being employed to deadly effect

during the First World War, over 100 years later.

In the Napoleonic era, the main problem

was the inaccuracy of infantry muskets.

With the Brown Bess, musket soldiers struggled to hit individual targets.

But away from the battlefield,

hunters, in their quest for prey,

had been using a gun that was much more accurate.

It was called the rifle.

But the rifle was prone to problems, and slow to load.

The army didn't know how to deploy it.

The rifle was first used by British forces

in the War of American Independence in the 1770s,

but it wasn't until the Peninsular War, almost 40 years later,

that we developed a unit designed to take advantage

of the range and accuracy of this new weapon.

And here they are.

The Experimental Corps Of Riflemen,

later known as the 95th Rifles.

This watercolour by Denis Dighton, painted during the Peninsular Wars,

shows them in action.

Often first into the fray,

this was a unit specialising in guerrilla warfare

and skirmishing.

They wouldn't stand around in massed ranks

wearing their bright red coast -

they'd lurk behind boulders.

What made them such a lethal force was their weapon of choice -

the short infantry rifle,

also called the Baker rifle, after its designer, Ezekiel Baker.

What makes the rifle so accurate

is the spiral grooves cut inside the barrel of the weapon,

which are known as rifling.

It's these carved grooves that cause the bullet to spin

and a spinning ball will travel straighter and strike harder

than one that sails without rotation.

The Baker rifle's unique selling point

was that it only went through a quarter-turn twist,

which reduced friction and gave the bullet a flatter trajectory.

Keen to test out the Baker rifle for myself,

to experience what it was like to sharp-shoot,

I've had to enlist in the 95th Rifles for the day.

MILITARY DRUMMING

GUN FIRES

The Rifle Corps' job was to find and disrupt the enemy,

weakening it before the main battle lines came to blows.

This new unit could shoot from such a distance

that you never saw the soldier coming.

MAN SHOUTS ORDERS

They became the Special Forces of their day -

the elite -

but the traditional field army was slow to embrace them.

The Rifles were initially sneered at by those in command

and they were seen as oddities by other units.

In fact, Lord Cornwallis once described the rifle itself

as "a very amusing plaything".

But the rifle marked a new era in the history of warfare.

From now on, armies would face off over far greater distances.

At Waterloo, Redcoats engaged at no more than 70 yards.

They could see the faces of their enemies.

They could watch them as they reloaded.

Now, new technology increased the range of engagement.

But what did that do to our ability to kill?

Major Rob Yuill was a rifleman

in the service of Queen Elizabeth II's army,

and now, in his spare time,

King George III's.

Ceasefire!

Were there any disadvantages of this rifle?

It sounds like a magical new weapon.

It was slower to load than a musket,

because you've got to force the ball down against the rifling

to get it to bite. But you're trading that time with space,

cos you're able to engage the enemy earlier

and put more balls into them before they can close on you.

Is it fair to say that it really changed the nature of warfare

-at the time?

-Most definitely.

Er, the concepts of fire and movement and dispersed formations

used by the riflemen in the 1800s

are exactly the same as are still used for fire and movement,

dispersed fighting in pairs,

that we teach at low-level infantry tactics today.

It feels quite modern as well, the uniform.

It's all black and it's green.

Yeah, the green stemmed from...

Yes, it was a slight version of camouflage,

but it was more to do with tradition that it came into the British Army.

The German Jagers that had been hired as mercenaries

in the American wars - "jager" means hunter,

and the traditional huntsman's clothing in Germany is green,

normally with red facings.

So the king himself was obviously German, Hanoverian,

King George insisted that they should wear green,

so British riflemen wore green.

Who were they trying to pick off? Who were their targets?

The riflemen were trained to, at range,

engage the leaders, the officers.

So they're looking for the fancy feather plumes,

they're looking for the gold epaulettes and gold on the uniforms,

because if you are able to take the head off the serpent, so to speak,

you're going to cause confusion further down.

That must take some skill, though,

being able to take someone out at a distance with one of these.

Yes, it is, and certainly the riflemen were trained to do it.

The most famous example is of a Rifleman Plunket

on the Retreat to Corunna who kills a French general

at what's estimated somewhere between 500 and 600 yards.

-That's extraordinary.

-He then reloads so quickly

that he then also shoots the ADC

that has gone to the aid of his fallen general.

So Rifleman Plunket was promoted to Corporal as a result of that,

but it does go to show that they could mark a man

and drop him at range.

GUNSHOT

ORDER SHOUTED

The Baker rifles transformed soldiers into long-distance killers,

outranging the enemy

and making it dangerous to stand out on the battlefield.

The tactics of standing in lines en masse, in red coats,

trading volleys at close distances,

were becoming outdated.

In this changing field of battle,

whether you were a drummer boy or a general,

if you were caught in the open, you weren't just visible.

You were a sitting duck.

All Britain's economic resources

were feeding the Napoleonic War effort,

but developing new weapons was an expensive business.

Back home, people were feeling the pinch.

Social tension mounted, and there were riots.

It was the right of every British civilian to bear arms,

but the authorities were increasingly worried

about weapons falling into the wrong hands.

The government was paranoid about order,

or more accurately, disorder of the lower classes.

The Luddites were running rampage,

wrecking the new machinery that had stolen their jobs

in the mill towns of the North,

and the French Revolution still lingered in the air.

There was genuine fear that mob rule could break out at any moment.

Against this backdrop, an ordinary merchant named John Bellingham

walked into a gun shop on Skinner Street in London

and purchased two 50-calibre pistols.

He had an audacious plan in mind.

Guns were readily available.

It was the job of the public to help with peacekeeping and defence,

and ownership of guns was commonplace.

It was a consumer item.

But everything had its proper place.

You wouldn't walk around with a visible firearm.

It wasn't integrated into everyday wear like the sword,

it wasn't chivalrous to carry a gun.

There were very few rules on buying and owning firearms,

and given that security was so lax,

you could walk into practically anywhere with a concealed weapon.

Even the House of Commons.

And this is what Bellingham did at 5:15pm

on 11th May 1812.

He had a specific target -

the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval.

Ever since Elizabethan times,

there had been a fear of assassination by firearm,

but no-one had succeeded in striking right at the heart of power.

Until now.

John Bellingham was waiting on a bench near here

for Perceval to come in.

No-one could have known that he had on his body

concealed the two pistols he bought earlier,

and that they were now loaded.

This document from the National Archives is morbidly fascinating.

It plots exactly what took place.

Circle number one is the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval,

having just entered the lobby,

and circle number two is his assassin, John Bellingham.

Without any warning, Bellingham got up from the bench

where he'd been waiting for Perceval,

calmly walked up to him and shot him point-blank in the chest.

GUNSHOT

Mr Perceval, on being shot, staggered backward

and cried, "Oh, murder! Murder!"

And then, in agony, he attempted to get into the House,

but fell at the mark

when he was "carried a corpse into the Secretary's room."

Now, these dotted lines explain what Bellingham did next,

and he simply turned around,

walked back to the bench where he'd been waiting,

and made no attempt at escape.

With the Prime Minister now dead,

Britain risked being left rudderless

with the mad King George III and an extravagant Prince Regent

until a new replacement could be found.

The assassination stunned the nation.

No British Prime Minister had ever been murdered before,

and fear quickly spread that it was a prelude to revolution.

For the next seven days before Bellingham was hanged,

hidden revolutionaries thought that a blow had been struck.

Bellingham became a celebrity, and something of a hero.

Even though Bellingham was a lone wolf,

the Treasury began to receive letters,

sparking fears of a wider conspiracy.

"My Lord, dreadfully are you deceived

"in thinking Bellingham had no accomplice.

"Beware the fate which waited Caesar on the Ides of March."

This small weapon, freely available and easily purchased,

sent tremors through the country,

but it was only the start of the political upheaval.

Britain had achieved victory over Napoleon at Waterloo,

but it was, so to speak, a double-edged sword.

There was now a glut of demobilised soldiers in the labour market.

Many were being informally used

to police a vocal working class calling for the vote.

Would the government now respond to the assassination

by turning its guns on its own citizens?

After the Napoleonic Wars,

there was a wave of bitter labour strikes

and agitation from the skilled working class.

Out! Out! Out!

For the radicals, the solution was not revolution,

but political reform,

and this new political activism terrified those in authority.

Meetings calling for political reform were repressed,

but this idea that anyone could suddenly

take part in the political process caught fire,

particularly in the industrial cities of the North.

In August 1819, these stirrings of radicalism

came to a head in Manchester.

What started out as a peaceful demonstration

by men, women and children for the vote

soon turned into a bloodbath

when the local mayor sent in the cavalry.

The actual cavalry.

For a few horrific moments,

the crowd must have felt

they'd been transported to a medieval battlefield,

as mounted troops charged them with sabres drawn.

15 people were killed

and it was estimated 400 to 700 were maimed.

The horrible events at St Peter's Field

were dubbed The Peterloo Massacre.

The term Peterloo echoed the Battle of Waterloo,

fought just four years before,

and was intended to mock those who had attacked unarmed protestors.

This was a volatile time, and the government

was not prepared to deal with this political insurrection.

After Peterloo, there was real concern

over using a standing army to control the population,

and certainly of arming one class to control another.

So in 1829, Peel's Act established

a system of paid, professional civilian constables for Westminster,

and crucially, they were not armed with guns.

While the rest of the country had the right to bear arms,

the police were issued with this -

a wooden truncheon -

and with this - a wooden rattle to raise the alarm.

RATTLING

Their uniform was deliberately chosen

to make them look like a civilian,

to make them look vastly different from the traditional image

of the soldier in red.

So in the midst of all of this political chaos,

the solution was a force much more sensitive and considered

than you might have expected.

We didn't turn our guns on our own people.

Even the truncheon was concealed in a hidden pocket

so as not to antagonise.

But if you drew it, you certainly had to know how to use it.

The truncheon is a defensive rather than an offensive weapon.

Essentially, it was a club to be used by the police

if they needed to defend themselves.

A police manual from 1889

includes a chapter on truncheon instruction,

and it's very informative.

It says to focus on the areas of the body

where the bone is prominent,

like the collarbone,

the forearm,

or even the side of the knee.

Although some of these truncheons were particularly beautiful,

symbolically significant for the policeman, for his station,

for his force,

in practice, it was just a hitting stick.

But the British didn't show the same restraint with their colonies

that they did back home.

Guns with greater and greater firepower were being used

to police the growing empire.

In the colonies, maximum impact, not minimum force,

was the order of the day,

as the British authorities were so outnumbered.

Superior firepower was the bedrock of imperial control,

enabling limited troops to suppress much bigger native populations.

And the latest lethal innovation

was discovered in the genteel surroundings of a giant glasshouse.

FANFARE

The Great Exhibition of 1851

was the very first World's Fair,

a celebration of the richness and diversity of empire.

This was an exhibition about faith in progress,

and weaponry was no exception.

Many of Britain's bishops were against the idea

of the inclusion of lethal weapons,

but Prince Albert insisted that weaponry played a part.

In fact, Albert's private secretary wrote to the organisers

of the exhibition, saying the way to preserve peace

was to perfect instruments of human destruction.

At the exhibition,

millions of visitors were amazed by a demonstration

from two American gun manufacturers.

Samuel Robbins and Richard Lawrence

wanted to show how new mass-production techniques

could be applied to gun manufacture.

Robert Tilney is a master gunsmith,

who's going to recreate this famous demonstration.

-Come in, son. Welcome to the gunsmith's.

-Thank you.

He'll show me how Robbins and Lawrence dazzled the crowd.

This is real Yankee pizzazz

Robbins and Lawrence, two Americans, entrepreneurs.

Lawrence, fantastic mechanic.

-Robbins was the businessman.

-Mm-hmm.

They came up with the idea of bringing six US Government muskets -

-off the rack.

-Mm-hm.

-At the show they would say, "Right."

Their gunsmith would take them to pieces and they would then go,

"OK, pick a piece out."

-I'm picking a piece out.

-"You, sir, pick another piece out."

"Do that, do this." And they put it together,

because every single part was totally interchangeable.

So you could make one rifle

-out of the parts from all of the other rifles.

-Exactly.

Now, I suspect, knowing the Americans,

they've got full-blown chatter going on.

"Look at this, I've just picked this barrel up. Will it fit this rifle?"

"Of course it will cos we've made them.

"They're all interchangeable."

"Hey, presto, sir - here's your new working gun."

Now, that was amazingly quick.

-How did that help the British Army?

-If you've got...

Let's say, in the course of combat, somebody's smashed their rifle

through the rest and somebody's got a blown up or a bent barrel -

take the stock off the bent barrel one,

put the ordinary barrel on that,

-you've scrapped one and you've still got a working one.

-Yeah.

So it's not just about repair, is it?

It's actually about manufacturing them in the first place

-and being able to produce them on a massive scale.

-Yeah.

British arms, they would be finished by hand. Very good, well-made guns.

Finished by hand, though. The Americans go,

"We don't need any of that. We can make it cheaper, better, faster,"

by making machines to make bits.

And they made them to such a degree of precision,

everything would interchange.

You can certainly see how something like that can change the world.

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a massive step forward in precision engineering.

So, essentially, it is the ultimate design of lock, stock and barrel.

Britain now mass-produced its own guns in a factory in Enfield,

North London.

Using the American system, over 1,700 came off the production line

each week and went straight to the imperial front lines.

One gun became the arm of empire - the Enfield rifle.

This weapon was precision engineering down to its very core,

including a unique bullet.

Pattern '53 Enfield.

-Have a look.

-Look at that.

That's a magical piece of kit.

So how did this shape the making of the British Empire?

It's a fantastic combat weapon.

People wanted rifle power and accuracy.

But you can't have the two.

You can either have speed or accuracy -

until a little Frenchman invented

-that thing.

-Aha.

-Which is the Minie.

And it's a hollow-based round.

For a kick-off, it's a bullet shape.

It's also undersized for the ball.

So it drops down the ball very easily.

But when you fire it...

the gas expands the soft lead into the rifling, so you now have a...

rotating bullet, so it's gyroscopically stable.

So you've got accuracy of the rifle

and the speed of the smoothbore musket.

So you've got rate of fire and accuracy.

'Robert Tilney has agreed to let me have a go at firing this masterpiece

'of engineering.'

You've got a centre kill,

just off at the middle but just below the dead centre.

If you look at the nine, you can see a strike.

Nine points. Whoo.

Britain was fighting battles from Suakin to Sevastopol.

Our empire encircled the globe, but we still wanted more territory.

Curator Peter Johnston is taking me into the vaults

of the National Army Museum.

-We've got something to show me round here, haven't you?

-Mm.

'In the early 1880s, the Mahdi Army

'unleashed a spectacularly successful jihad

'against British-backed rulers in the Sudan.'

'When combating an indigenous army on their turf,

'would the superior firepower of the rifle be enough?'

So you have the British soldiers here, very much crammed together.

It looks like they're about to be overwhelmed and in that respect

that's a kind of theme of Empire battles at this time, isn't it?

Absolutely, and so common of British warfare in this period where

your numerically inferior British

well-trained, well-disciplined but, more importantly,

well-armed would often go up against thousands more enemies from these

armies of the areas and countries they were trying to subjugate and

annexe, but relied on that firepower they could throw out to

really defeat them, their technologic superiority to overcome.

It's a very common theme for Victorian audiences.

And what I think's striking is that the rifle takes such a vivid place

in this painting, but this story's very much got two sides to it.

On the one hand, you've got a handful of British soldiers

fighting off an enormous host of Mahdists,

but even though they do that, they can't keep their empire.

No, absolutely, and what is actually happening here,

and what we don't necessarily get a sense of from the paintings,

is part of the British withdrawal in Sudan, actually deliberately

stepping back out of that and almost narrowing the borders of empire.

And this is a real sense of that,

that the Mahdi was probably too strong, supply lines were too

overstretched, there was no way the British could hope to really win.

This was a big psychological defeat for the British Empire

which had got too greedy.

Our only response to these indigenous armies

was more and more lethal firepower.

Without it, Britain's bloated empire was lost.

But could the right machine be more efficient that a skilled soldier?

In a basement in Hatton Garden, one man was developing a gun

that could be reloaded and fired at unprecedented speed.

In 1888, this thirst for new technology came to a head

with the invention of a weapon

that was unlike anything the world had ever seen.

It was believed that this would be a weapon that would end all wars.

It brought an industrialised efficiency to the whole business

of killing people and could fire up to 600 rounds a minute.

It rendered every other weapon that had gone before it obsolete.

This gun was the game changer.

It could fire far more quickly and more accurately than any soldier,

with just one press of a button.

It was named after its inventor, Hiram Maxim -

the Maxim gun.

With the Maxim gun, everything was automatic.

Cartridges were extracted from a continuous belt, fired, and then

the empty ones ejected by a mechanical process

in a continuous cycle.

Maxim also harnessed the recoil energy to load and fire it,

the natural force which drives the bullet forwards

and the gun backwards.

You didn't have to crank anything.

As long as you pressed the trigger,

it would keep firing until it ran out of bullets.

Maxim founded an arms company with money from the firm Vickers

to mass-produce these guns.

This is the improved Maxim Mark II, better known simply as the Vickers.

Maxim employed another technical innovation

to make the gun practically invisible.

The eccentric Maxim took his mechanical marvel on tour,

showing it off.

In one of his machinegun demonstrations,

he impressed the royal family by blasting the letters VR -

for Victoria Regina - into a target.

Prince Edward even had a go.

The Maxim gun was trialled throughout the Empire

and its reputation soon proceeded it.

Previously, offensive tactics were all about the charge,

but now the game had changed

and the British were ruthless in how they played their hand.

It was the ideal defensive weapon,

and it rendered obsolete the offensive charge,

so the British Army attempted to lure their enemy out into the open

so that they would charge.

In modern-day Zimbabwe, during the Matabele War, a small British unit

with just four Maxim guns utterly destroyed an army of 5,000 warriors.

The Ndebele warriors were well-armed -

they had Martini-Henry rifles -

but these were no match for the firepower of the Maxim.

As it was put by Hilaire Belloc in his poem The Modern Traveller,

"Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not."

The Maxim was able to psyche out the enemy just by its presence

in the theatre of warfare.

But many believed the Maxim gun wasn't just about firepower.

It could play a peacekeeping role.

The New York Times Magazine of 1897

even suggested that the mere existence of the Maxim gun would be

enough to convince world leaders to end their disputes diplomatically.

It says, "These are the instruments that have revolutionised the methods

"of warfare and because of their devastating effects have made

"nations and rulers give greater thought to the outcome

"of a war before entering into it."

And it ends with some wonderfully topsy-turvy logic -

"These are peace-producing and peace-retaining terrors."

The idea was that the Maxim gun would act as a moral deterrent.

Would any civilised nation dare to use it against its neighbours?

But on the street, the Maxim gun had the polar opposite effect.

It kicked off a mini arms race

for hand-held semi-automatic weapons.

This repeat fire began to seep down to the street - hard-hitting weapons

that fired repeatedly were the order of the day,

and none of them came more hi-tech than this.

This is the Mauser C96 and it soon became the must-have gun

of the criminal underworld.

And it was this weapon that took centre stage and what became

one of the most famous armed standoffs of the 20th century -

the Siege of Sidney Street.

The siege began with a botched jewellery robbery

by a cell of Latvian anarchists.

The unarmed police were at a grave disadvantage.

Three were killed and two others injured.

The anarchists had their ill-gotten gains to spend on the latest

technology and ammunition but the police by contrast prided themselves

in not being an armed force.

There wasn't a gun culture embedded in the police like there was

in the criminal underworld. In fact, there was, on average,

only two revolvers per police station in the Met in 1911.

An informant finally lead the police to the last two gang members -

holed up at 100 Sidney Street in London's East End.

By 2:00am, the police,

armed with their truncheons and what few revolvers they had,

had taken position in the houses either side of number 100.

They were armed with this, the Webley Revolver.

Outdated, cumbersome, inaccurate, weak -

but they had a bigger problem.

According to protocol,

they weren't even allowed to fire until they'd been fired on first.

The police just had to wait it out.

All night, in fact.

One superintendent was overheard to remark,

"If these are not the right men we will be a laughing stock."

As it turned out, the police had the right suspects.

But did they have the right weapons?

I want to try out for myself what the cops and robbers were using,

so I've come to meet Jonathan Ferguson

from the Royal Armouries.

What was the difference between these two guns, then?

Well, I think right away you can see that there's

a massive stylistic difference,

and that does reflect some superior technology in my left hand,

with the Mauser C96, 1896.

This is a fairly conventional revolver - Webley.

-Let me have a look at this one.

-Certainly.

If you pull the trigger, the chamber goes round for rapid fire,

such as you might need in a gunfight.

You can literally, as you say, pull through on the trigger,

it's quite a strong trigger pull, your shots might go stray.

So, yeah, you can see it's a bit of effort required.

-Well made but it pulls off every time you turn it.

-It does.

-And that's different with this one?

-The Mauser C96.

This is what's called self-loading, or semi-automatic.

-It looks slightly space-age in comparison with this one.

-Yeah.

It terms of how it operates, it's always - because it loads itself -

-it's always a light pull of the trigger.

-Mm.

-So that cocks itself.

You then pull the trigger again. So, in other words, bang, bang, bang.

So you'd fire this and it would carry on recocking itself?

Literally as fast as you could pull the trigger.

You might even think it's like a machinegun that's coming at you.

All modern pistols work in a similar sort of way.

Revolvers are really old hat by now -

even then, you know, the turn of the last century.

So the police would have been envious of this as well?

Absolutely, yeah. Possibly afraid of it.

It'd be very difficult for them, essentially going into battle,

with someone they know has got a better weapon.

If you're the guy having to go up against

a criminal armed with the latest thing - you've heard about it,

read about it Scientific American, for example. To know that the enemy

-have that is going to be a little bit frightening.

-Yeah.

So what effect did these weapons have on the ground at Sidney Street?

It all kicked off at 7:30 in the morning when the police decided to

attract the anarchists' attention.

Some pebbles were thrown at the second-floor window

and the anarchists fired back directly at the police.

One bullet went through an inspector's bowler hat.

The police were woefully outgunned and they had to call in the Army.

Troops from the Tower, the Scots Guard,

who brought a Maxim gun, and even Winston Churchill, who was

then in charge of law and order, all descended on Sidney Street.

By this time, Sidney Street was bristling with guns

from all over London,

including rifles donated by members of the public.

The climax to this extraordinary battle was caught on film.

The siege finally ended when the roof of 100 Sidney Street

caught fire, as a result of so many bullets being fired in.

The Latvian gunmen perished in the flames.

The siege had lasted less than 12 hours but its legacy

would continue for decades.

With gang crime on the rise, the Metropolitan Police

now bought semi-automatic weapons to match the Mauser C96.

Yet the basic principle of the unarmed bobby on the street

remained intact.

But this was 1911.

Europe was a tinderbox and it was almost inevitable that automatic

weapons would end up in the hands of politically motivated individuals.

On the 28th of June, 1914,

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie toured Sarajevo.

They'd been warned that their presence would exacerbate

political unrest but, despite the risks,

Franz Ferdinand and wife travelled in an open-top car.

Due to a wrong turn by the driver,

the car came to stop near Latin Bridge.

A teenager named Gavrilo Princip stepped out from the crowd.

He had in his hand a semi-automatic Browning Model 1910 pistol.

Princip wasn't an experienced marksman but he was only

about two metres away. GUNSHOT

He fired his pistol. GUNSHOT

These shots reverberated around the world.

The Archduke and his wife Sophie died within hours.

The First World War broke out just four weeks later.

But it was reported that Franz Ferdinand owned a bulletproof vest,

woven out of silk.

The man who designed these silk armours was a priest-turned-inventor

by the name of Casimir Zeglen.

Now, despite its appearance, a vest like this would come at a price.

This would cost a whopping 800 in 1914.

So it wasn't for the likes of you and me,

it was for European royalty, it was for heads of state.

Men like Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

This was confirmed by newspaper reports

the day after the assassination,

stating that the Archduke and his wife owned silk armour.

The Royal Armouries is conducting what I think is one of the most

important studies in the history of weaponry.

Using a replica bulletproof vest said to have been owned by

the Archduke, and exactly the same type of pistol used to murder him

and his wife Sophie,

Lisa Traynor aims to establish whether the Archduke's

bulletproof vest could have saved his life.

Now, had the Archduke survived,

could the First World War have been postponed or even prevented?

Tell me about the silk bulletproof vests.

How did you find out how they were made?

I came across a couple of patents made by Casimir Zeglen.

He was kind of obsessed with assassination

since the Mayor of Chicago was assassinated in 1891.

He dedicated his life to inventing

something to repel bullets.

Do we know if he was afraid of being assassinated, the Archduke?

Everyone was fearful of assassination at the

beginning of the 20th century.

And these are examples of your attempt to recreate those

-bulletproof vests?

-Yeah, these are examples of Zeglen's first patent,

which has about six layers to it.

So it has a layer of canvas, a layer of animal hair - or wool today -

a layer of silk,

a layer of something called pasteboard,

which is quite stiff, in Victorian book binding.

To my mind, a bit of canvas and wool and pasteboard is not going to

-stop a bullet, is that correct?

-That is correct,

-it's all about the silk layer.

-Ah!

How does silk stop a bullet?

Silk is very, very strong. The Japanese were using it in armour

way before Zeglen was making bulletproof vests out of it.

-It actually repels arrows.

-Right.

-So we do know that.

How did he test the vest? That's what I really want to know.

Casimir Zeglen, a very, very interesting man,

he used to test his bulletproof vests by borrowing cadavers

from the local hospital, wrapping them in his bulletproof cloth,

hanging them up and shooting them,

and then he realised that it did work.

-He then moved from cadavers to live dogs.

-Oh!

-It gets worse and worse.

-No dog was injured in the making of the vest.

-Good.

-And then when he was finally happy with that,

he started testing it on himself.

-The ultimate test.

-The ultimate test.

-The ultimate test for an inventor.

-Yes.

-Wow.

-And he survived.

What we're going to test today is Casimir Zeglen's latest patent

of the bulletproof vest, which, you know,

totally ignores the canvas layer,

it ignores the wool and basically it's just a vest made up of silk.

And you're certain, or as certain as you can be,

that this is very similar to the one that the Archduke...?

As certain as I can be.

We're going to shoot it against some ballistic clay that will

hopefully replicate the body.

If it does stop the bullet we can see the divot in the body

that would happen.

If it goes through we'll also see a great, big hole.

-Well, let's do the test.

-OK.

Lisa is recreating the exact conditions of Franz Ferdinand's

assassination for this test.

Crack shot Andre Horn is firing a Browning Model 1910 pistol,

manufactured in the same factory during the same month as the pistol

used in the Sarajevo shooting.

Was Casimir Zeglen's inch of silk strong enough to save the life

of Archduke Franz Ferdinand?

-Right, let's go and have a look.

-OK.

THEY CHEER

Look at that!

So that is a dent in the body.

It has stopped it!

-It stopped it.

-Silk stops bullets. That's proof.

That's amazing, well done. Well done.

That's magical. Proper bit of research, that.

-INTERVIEWER:

-How do you feel, Lisa?

Better.

So relieved. We were both really nervous.

We can now conclusively prove that a vest made of once inch of silk

would have stopped a bullet from a Browning Model 1910 pistol.

But, of course, Gavrilo Princip's shot did strike home.

Ironically, the bullet hit Franz Ferdinand in the jugular,

around one centimetre below

the collar of the Archduke's military tunic,

most likely above where the bulletproof vest would have reached.

1914 witnessed the clash of huge armies equipped with the most

advanced mechanised weapons the world had ever seen.

In the first five months of the war,

shrapnel-firing artillery was the main killer.

But when trench warfare became established, the Maxim gun

and its successor, the Vickers machinegun, came into their own,

as they could be hidden so easily.

But these advances in technology

lead to a stalemate that nobody expected.

None of these innovations alone could deliver the Holy Grail,

the end to the stalemate of trench warfare.

We couldn't simply outgun the enemy.

We were back in the same situation we found ourselves in at Waterloo.

Everyone was fighting with similar weapons.

We became locked in a long war of attrition.

During this stalemate, soldiers began to fashion crude weapons

for hand-to-hand combat, sometimes out of broken machinegun barrels.

The first trench raids with these weapons took place in 1914.

In the closed environment of the trenches,

when soldiers came face-to-face with each other,

superior firepower went out the window.

Soldiers were stabbing and beating each other to death

with mediaeval-looking weapons,

like gauntlet daggers - something a knight may have worn.

Or this, a brutal trench club made out of a spade handle

and an empty grenade.

And even though we were entering the age of air power,

with aircraft flying over the battlefield,

in the early years pilots would rain down iron arrows,

known as flechettes, on the enemy.

Not unlike the longbowmen at the Battle of Crecy in 1346.

As with the trench clubs, technical sophistication seemed irrelevant -

it was about whatever tool got the task done.

For centuries, innovations in weapons and the constant drive

to increase precision and firepower had defined Britain.

We'd use sword, musket and machinegun to defend our country

and build a global empire.

Weapons had shaped our science, industry and our politics.

But even with the most modern technology,

we'd struggle to win the deadliest war of its age.

When the firing finally stopped on November the 11th, 1918,

an estimated 17 million people had died,

and 20 million had been wounded.

In the aftermath of the First World War,

we now put increasing faith in treaties, international conventions

and diplomacy.

Surely we could never allow such carnage to happen again.