Snider-Enfield

Origins

By the mid-1860s the wars in Denmark and the United States had shown that the muzzle-loading rifle was out of date. The British Army had hundreds of thousands of nearly new Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle-muskets, and replacing them all would have been very costly. In 1864 a War Office committee asked gunmakers for ways to convert the Enfield into a breech-loader. After trials, the system put forward by Jacob Snider, an American inventor from New York, was chosen. The converted rifle was approved for service in 1866. Snider himself died that year, before he had received much reward for his work. The cartridge was as important as the breech. It was developed at the Royal Laboratory, Woolwich, under Colonel Edward Boxer, and it gave the rifle a self-contained, centerfire metallic round.

Design & Construction

To make the conversion, workmen cut a short length from the breech end of the Enfield barrel and screwed on a new steel receiver, called the shoe. A solid breechblock was hinged along the right side of the shoe. The soldier put the hammer at half cock, flipped the block open to the right with his thumb, dropped a cartridge into the trough and pushed it home, then closed the block. A firing pin ran at an angle through the block and was struck by the original side-lock hammer. After firing, the soldier opened the block and pulled it backward along its hinge pin. This drew the empty case out of the chamber, and a turn of the rifle tipped it clear. There was no ejector.

The early Boxer cartridge had a case of coiled brass foil on an iron base, holding a black powder charge and a heavy .577 lead bullet. The first rifles were all conversions. The Mark III of 1869 was newly made, with a steel barrel and a latch that locked the breechblock shut. The Snider was issued as a three-band long rifle for the infantry, a two-band short rifle for sergeants and rifle regiments, and as artillery and cavalry carbines. A trained man could fire about ten rounds a minute, roughly three times the rate of the muzzle-loader, and accuracy was at least as good as before.

Combat Use

British troops first used the Snider in battle during the Abyssinian expedition of 1868. At Arogye on 10 April its rapid fire broke the attack of Emperor Tewodros's army in a short time. It was the British infantry rifle in the Ashanti campaign of 1873 and 1874, and Canadian militia carried it against the Fenian raids and in the North-West Rebellion of 1885. The Martini-Henry Rifle was approved in 1871 and reached British regular infantry from 1874, but the Snider stayed in use with volunteers, colonial forces and Indian regiments for many years after.

The rifle had a second career in Japan. Japanese domains bought Sniders and Enfields from foreign traders during the civil war of 1868 and 1869, and in the 1870s the new conscript army made the Snider its standard infantry rifle. It was the weapon of most government infantry in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. The rebels had some Sniders too, along with older muzzle-loaders, but they lost their means of making cartridges early in the war. At the Battle of Shiroyama on 24 September 1877, Snider-armed conscripts made the final assault on Saigō Takamori's last position.

Legacy

The Snider was a stopgap, but a very successful one. It gave Britain a sound breech-loader quickly and cheaply, and the Boxer cartridge pointed the way to all later military ammunition. In Japan it was replaced from 1880 by the Murata rifle, the country's first home-designed service rifle. In India and elsewhere it remained a police and second-line weapon into the 1890s and beyond, and Kipling's verse mentions the sound of a Snider in the jungle. It belongs with the other British Arms & Weapons of the Victorian army and is widely collected today.