Back when pistol shooting was still legal, in the UK, I used to shoot 22LR pistol, one night at club a local gun dealer offered me a 22 single shot pistol made by Jurek. I could not afford it, sadly. I hope it went overseas and was not scrapped in the pistol ban post Dunblane.
I see several of those have made it to the sanctuary of the Royal Armouries collection. The one I handled (but never shot) looked very nicely made. However, as a 'Standard Pistol' shooter I needed a semiauto, so I first owned a Browning Target and then a Pardini Fiocchi.
I hate how the legality of handguns in the UK was decided before I was born all due to the actions of a paedophile in Scotland... We all suffer due to the actions of the deplorable.
Back in the 90s when handguns was legal for competition shooters in the UK,a colleague of mine had a "Grey Ghost" P38. According to historical sources, these were assembled by the French with leftover parts at the end of WW2
When those began to come into the US in the 1980s that same creation history for the Manhurin Grey Ghosts was mentioned in almost every Shotgun News advertisement by the importers, so it is probably correct. Supposedly they were assembled after the war in the old German Navy sub pens.
It is fascinating that while the 1911 tilting barrel design is still by far the most common mechanism for modern handguns, the Walther P38's locking block actually had some good influence, too. Most famously, the Beretta 92FS/M9 uses the P38's locking block operating mechanism. Hell, it's very visually similar to the P38 if you simply extended the P38's slide all the way to the end.
Thanks very much, Jonathan and team. This is one Webley I've never seen before, but I did own and shoot a P38 for a while. In engineering there is an old saying, "if it ain't broke, fix it until it is". I wonder if this design is an example of letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, by overcompensating for minor disadvantages of the P38. In particular, the use of a Browning style lock-up would remove the inherent tendency of P38 (and later Beretta) slides to crack in service. By 1951, Beretta had already produced their first P38 variant. However, I doubt that there would have been much enthusiasm in the British military establishment for the adoption of foreign made (or designed) pistols. Canadian made Brownings would have been just about acceptable I guess.
Thankyou Johnathan. I did read that Jurek eventually finished the design only to have the army requirements changed to "and a high capacity magazine" at which point he threw up his hands and gave up.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries I'm afraid not. There was an excellent series of part works/profiles (20 years ago) about various firearms (Colts/Walthers etc) and one was about webley automatics. It had a picture of the webley jurek but I think the safety was missing in the picture. The one you have is the only complete one I have seen. Excellent presentation on a unicorn gun.
I realised the similarities with the P38 when guessing the Webley by Jurek, but I thought it was sort of coincidental and not a direct copy. Nice to hear more about it! Edit: You mention the long service life. My father carried the p-38 in the Norwegian army in 1976-77 as an electrician and medic. Then in the 1980s the remaining Kongsberg 1914s, Husqvarna, Lahti, Luger and p38s were replaced with Glock p80s!
I say go for it. There are so many good places to go shoot guns that you can rent for a fun session of "I don't know what I'd do with it but I want one!" shooting. As a matter of fact many people at gun ranges are willing to let you fire their guns if you show interest and are friendly enough with them. I thankfully live in one of those areas. Gun people around here are, for the most part, pretty good people.
With the Browning high power in the army, we found you could release the magazine safety with your finger, or trip the hammer sear, so you didn't have to put the magazine back in to fire the action after unloading.
Good work Jonathan! I really appreciate your effort and consideration, and consistency in making these videos! 🙂 keep it up, from the manufacturer of the high power 🇨🇦
Unfortunately this looks to be a classic example of the better being the enemy of the good. The P38 was solid enough, the "improvements" made only made things more complicated for both good and bad results. Also over 20 extra parts is a demonstration of an engineer who never learnt the KISS principle. Or did and just ignored it. Fascinating to see, as always.
Please do a video on the early 1980s Stirling .38/.357 revolver. I got a chance to shoot one (briefly) in an abandoned train tunnel in Wiltshire back then.
Interesting... Was that in Mr Brunel's Birthday Tunnel* at Box by any chance? 🤔 *As something of a Vanity Project to show everybody how clever he was, Mr Ismbard Kingdom Brunel built a railway tunnel through a hill in Wiltshire (the Box Tunnel) so that on the mornings of his birthdays (until leap years eventually changed the date of that perfect alignment, but not in his lifetime...) the rising sun would shine straight through the full length of the tunnel, and therefore straight through the hill, creating a small patch of warmth and light in an area that would otherwise have remained in darkness for another hour or so 🌞👍
in Canada we only replaced the Hi Power in 2022 i used it in service i liked it i'm certainly a Hi Power fan, but i really like the P38 its a very visually appealing weapon only shot one once but it shot pretty damn well, just relocate the spring to the grip and you have a pretty nice pistol on your hands
I used to work in a shooting range in cape town where they had reloading equipment that I was allowed to use almost infinitely. During the quiet time I used to reload hundreds of rounds for the old p38 that was the ranges self defence pistol. It never malfunctioned and I simply don't know why they discontinued production
They never stopped loading RG 9mm ball to Mk II Z specs. It will fracture the slide on a Browning L9 at the extractor cut out in the end. Fortunately this causes a failure to feed rather than anything drastic. It's probably worth having the slide on any broad arrow stamped HPs in your collection x-rayed if you intend to live fire them.
Ha, noted, thank you :) Everything gets inspected and classified by a REME-trained armourer and we play it safe with ammunition specs, so hopefully we have avoided that assiduously and not by luck.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries It's luck! Every APWT with a HP it was at least one of the older Mk 2s that broke at the extractor cut out. Having said that a lot of the pistols were hand me downs from slightly more dashing types who had put a lot of rounds through them.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries Noooo. More like the CP wing and 14 Int Coy. They moved over to Sig 229s in the mid 90s (strangely two tone matte stainless ones) and the rest of us normals inherited the cast offs. Quite a few HPs with ambi safeties and 3 dot sights showed up in late service along side older Mk IIs with tiny controls and sights.
I love seeing this stuff. It's why I'm here, really. There are people that want the latest and greatest iteration of a firearm. Others value the earliest prototypes of the model. I understand those that occupy either end of that spectrum. But I think that both sides can agree that their interests can converge at serial #2. Thank you for showing this to me.
It's a shame there are only two ever made , I'd love to take a Jurek out to my range and give it a side by side shooting comparison with my P-38 . I am also curious to see if the fit and finish is as good as my Webley Mk4.
I was just wondering, early in the video, how it would do with a steady load of MK2z ammunition, then you addressed that. Cool. I know some of my own 9mms don't much like 'Zed' cartridges in that they get hot quickly and the recoil is somewhat stouter than some commercial loads. Then again, some of my pistols don't seem to care and don't get too hot after a dozen quick rounds. So on this pistol, if I am understanding your demonstration, if the gun is loaded with a round in the chamber and the magazine is removed, then there is no way of unloading the gun until a magazine is reinserted. On my pistols to unload I remove the magazine, then clear the chamber. This can't be done on this gun if the hammer is locked in the down position. I don't like that. Clearing the chamber, then removing the magazine sets the stage for an accidental re-chambering before the magazine is removed. I have seen UDs happen from that when people do that in companies and units where the gun is turned in at the end of a shift. Polish P64s can have similar trigger pulls (for a different reason) although the highest I have seen so far was 27 pounds. Thinner steel in the Jurek;s mainspring might lighten that trigger pull. Of course lightening the mainspring will probably also increase felt recoil when firing Mk2z ammunition as the slide will recoil a little faster then. The requirement to be able to handle a steady diet of Mk2z ammunition probably had a lot to do with why the mainspring is so stiff. I am curious why Mr. Jurek did not double stack the magazine at least somewhat. Even 10 or 11 rounds would have been a more marketable improvement. All in all, it is an interesting pistol.
Jurek had a workshop ij G'ham later on and made some lovely sliding block single shot target pistols - mainly in 22lr - but there may have been some 38spl. I fired one as a young fellow - and have always wanted one since.
Cool video. Now that you've done a video on a German pistol copied by a Polish designer, maybe you could do a video about a Polish pistol that was manufactured by the Germans - the Radom VIS 35. JAT
I remember watching one of Forgotten Weapons videos on the 1907 US Trials pistols and one of the entrants had a similar slide locking lug design but, if I recall correctly, it was manually cammed into engagement by the shooter instead of the more sensible arrangement here, probably for patent reasons given the time period.
I have a peculiar, late-war mashup of a P-38, with a finished, proofed, but completely blank/unmarked, Walther HP (commercial) slide on an AC-45 frame. It's the oddities that tend to have the most interesting histories.
I wonder whether it would be possible to attach a lanyard to the hammer loop hole and use the action of raising the arm to cock the hammer with each shot if necessary.
17:55 Ah, the Universal Disassembly Tool! 😀 26:20 I wonder why they didn't try to improve the design using the imput from this trial. Double action mechanism seems to be a significant enough advantage over Browning HP (although FN apparently thought otherwise), with luck Webley could've won the contract, if FN would have played by the rules, of course.
The one thing I didn't have time to check was Richard Milner of the Webley archive, but I doubt there's anything in there. Gordon Bruce speculates that Webley just gave up knowing that the BHP was already in service and popular.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries Isn't it basically the story of pretty much any small arms project started by Polish and Czechoslovak engineers in the UK?
A whole lot of luck would have been needed. The HP had a many year head start on development behind it. Also active combat service to reveal any remaining bugs, and hopefully get them remedied. The Webley-Jurek pistol was a clean sheet design with exactly two produced. Not to mention that the British armed forces already had a fair number of HPs on hand, and they appeared to do a satisfactory job of punching holes in enemy troops. The cost effective way to phase out the revolver would have been simply to make the HP pistol general issue, keep what you'd already bought, and then acquire enough new ones to replace the existing stock of obsolete handguns.
@@reubenpickering7777 HP was far from the only service pistol in the UK. Setting aside the old Webley semi-automatics, there were M1911s in RAF & SOE, Llamas & Ballester-Molinas in SOE etc. And even the eventual adoption of HP as L9A1 didn't make it the only one either, as there was still room for L47A1 (Walther PP) in RAF and MI6 service. So, the adoption of one and only service pristol wasn't the path that was followed. And since NATO standartisation of firearms wasn't happening anyway by the late '50s, there was no particular need to adopt anything more made by FN without proper examination of other alternatives. Double action, when sufficiently improved, could be an ace up the Webley's sleeve, especially given that the preceding revolvers were either DA or DAO. And let's be frank here, UK was no US or Germany (either of them, really), no service pistol was adopted widely enough to seriously consider its familiarity to the troops.
@@F1ghteR41 If double action had been seen as of overarching importance, the P38 was already a mature design fielded by a no longer hostile power, which could have been produced under license. So the Webley pistol still most likely goes goes nowhere. It clearly had a lot of flaws. It would have taken years to iron them all out, much as it had taken FN with the HP, or Colt with the 1911. In any case, apparently that feature didn't offset the HPs higher magazine capacity.
Good overview of the Webley. Doc Jurek admired the P38 but was adamant it was flawed. (btw he insisted he was a doctor of chemistry). Testing after the war showed P38 slide cracking with UK 2Z ammo plus there was no way the British would adopt a German gun at that time, the over engineered slide lock up was included to strengthen that area. Shooters of a certain age will remember his different models of single shot target pistols, I had a .22 Jurek rifle, with an ambidextrous bolt of another 0unique design.
Interesting firearm and possibly not one I'll be able to find one to add to my P38 collection! Question, the magazine looks very similar to the P38 one, are they interchangeable?
I liked the browning i carried one on duty as armskote storeman in the Army, i also carried one for a year or two as a ppw but as a ppw was a bit awkward to carry in the summer months , then we carried wathers 22 ppk and 9mm p5 wich i though was and excellent weapon
That a heavier trigger than the Philippines Colt. 😳🤯 Awesomely interesting pistol today! All that juicy history is why C&Rsenal episodes are an hour long. 🤣
Walther P-38 and Beretta 92 series pistols have a tendency for the slide to crack at the locking wedge engagement area where the slide is thin. That may be a reason for going to the Browning locking system in this pistol.
Hi Mr. Ferguson! 3 minutes in and I already love the story behind it. That trigger is a very interesting thing, slightly funny. I don't know why but the first thing that came to my mind was draw weights of longbows from Mary Rose, lol. I must have seen some documentary lately.
I had a pair of CZ50 pistols and they were the heaviest DA trigger I've ever experienced. I wasn't able to get a good trigger weight reading on those. The SA trigger (hammer cocked) on the CZ50 was still heavy but with a much shorter travel and about half the weight of trigger cocking. I wasn't able to find your review of the CZ50. Odd--the CZ75 has a very good trigger in either mode of fire.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries Thanks Jonathan, I've been wondering for a while now, what firearm designs were let down by materials techonology of the time not being up to the job, that may now be possible with newer materials/processing?
@@mickymondo7463 Interesting question - I'm not sure anyone's seriously looked into that. Probably the self-loading rifle pre the 1920s when metallurgy was just all around worse? Springs wore out, parts peened, wore, and broke. I think there's a reason all the early ones have a way to disable the recoil system and revert to straight-pull.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries Thanks Jonathan, I have often wondered whether some of the older designs that didn't work back in the day, would be viable now with more modern materials and manufacturing capabilities, it is something I see in other areas, like Motorcycles, which were revolutionised with modern plating techniques like Nikasil plated aluminium cylinder bores for example.
Thank you very much, this is a fantastic presentation of a subject I previously knew nothing about. I love learning new things about firearms history and design. Keep up the good work! 👍
It's a pretty recent change, but this is (arguably) not the last Webley Pistol Since 2020 Webley & Scott have been producing, in India, pistols for the Indian market
I hate my p38. I love it and hate it lol. The DA trigger is god awful so it has become a forever display piece and does not get used. One of the best looking handguns IMO though. 32 pounds is insane, I would've canned it as soon as I felt that.
I don't find the DA pull on my post-war commercial P 38 to be overly bad. Heavy yes, but it just requires a strong grip and concentration - although at more than maybe 10yds it would probably be tough to keep on a torso-sized target without taking way too long to aim, squeeze, and fire.
Jonathan, I'm a Brit that lives in the US. I just picked up a Webley MK1 with Navy markings but it's really odd. It has a threaded barrel which looks like it's original to the gun and the barrel is completely smooth, no rifling what-so-ever. I can't find another example like this anywhere else online or in books. I posted in all my usual military surplus group and a few people said they had actually owned that exact pistol before but couldn't find anything on it either. Any help? Looks like it was possibly used for flares?
@@Loweko1170 When not stealing countries from people the British colonial types were busy cataloguing the flora and fauna of the world's tropical rain forests. This meant getting up into the canopy so you need a line thrower.
You can still own a pistol in .22 calibre in Ireland but you have to be a member of a pistol shooting club and jump through a number of other hoops, it's expensive too get one but it's possible and I don't see anything wrong with someone owning a pistol for competition shooting.
Dr Jurek was one of those annoying competitors who, if four minutes was allowed for the string, he would be firing his last shot at three minutes fifty, regardless of how many other people were rolling their eyes and tapping their watches.
Possibly just my eyes misreading the images, but is there a little greater angle to the grip on the Jurek, the P38 is such a natural pointer but this appears even more so
9:35 Considering that on-screen text corrections can often get missed by people who are primarily listening while doing other things; I think such a relatively major correction would have justified rerecording that segment lol
I agree but unfortunately production schedule didn't allow for it. We film with a crew of two and I can't just get them back in every time I miss something. And without wishing to play for sympathy, I have a day job to do as well!
A combination of well known features... P38 overall shape and recoil spring system, TT33 hammer and grips, Browning locking system. Still, the modified Browning/Petter/Glock locking action is much simpler.
A question. Ignoring the commercial effects of there being no safeguarding of intellectual property, if current designs of pistols (or rifles for that matter) were unaffected by patents and could just use whatever design worked best what difference would that make to current designs? Would we just have "the" pistol, "the" carbine and "the" rifle for any particular use (because the best designs were obvious to everyone) or would there still be a wide diversity of designs for particular uses?
So, not only does the safety not decock it, so one has to pull the trigger to decock it, but you *have* to have the magazine inserted to do this. So you cannot clear the pistol amd ease springs without taking two actions that increase the chances the user will screw up and cause an Unintended Loud Noise. Yeah, I gave away a pistol *specifically because* of this issue. It's bad enough in a Browning High Power, but you don't expect a single action pistol to have a decocker (sorry, Radom), and at least you know you have the pistol in the "fire" setting before doing this (which discourages dumb privates from thinking, "Oh, it's on safe, so I can snap the trigger with it pointed at my buddy!") As for the trigger pull, that's worse than my surplus Polish P-64, which I measured (using a *fish* scale, as it was far beyond the limits of my trigger scale) at 26 lbs in double action and 3.5 lbs on single (which resulted in an unintended double fire the first time I shot it, as my finger slapped the lightweight SA trigger during recoil after healing on that Magilla Gorilla DA trigger pull. Huh... I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that the British Army didn't jump all over this. 😆
LOL. The Webley revolver's triggers are so bad that we refer to all others as a percentage of a Webley. Glad to see that there foray into semiautos carried on that tradition.
It is interesting how both the US and the UK wanted to adopt a version of the P38 post war,(the Americans developed the Smith and Wesson Model 39). I assume this was due to the DA/SA design, yet both models were rejected by models already in service.
Although the capacity isn't huge, this looks like, especially for the time, a nice concealed carry or officer's pistol. The grips look awesome and extremely comfy. The 32lb 2x action pull could, possibly, be trained around as the printed note stated the pistol will NOT fire with the manual safety on, mag in, and hammer in single action mode. I don't know how the British military would handle training but the pistol could be treated like a cz75, untended to be used cocked and locked but with 2x action as a backup for light primers, etc. Though the hammer dropping to, um, something (1/2 cock notch?), when the trigger is pulled w/ manual safety engaged, wouldn't win any awards for design. Can the hammer be recocked if it's dropped in 1x action with the manual safety engaged?
Yes, my colleague made a mistake there, apologies. Although we can claim Anglicisation since as zoiders notes above, in English the male spelling is 'Marion'.
honestly there must have been that many p38s captured at the end of the war they could have probably just straight up adopted that and recovered captured tooling
Back when pistol shooting was still legal, in the UK, I used to shoot 22LR pistol, one night at club a local gun dealer offered me a 22 single shot pistol made by Jurek. I could not afford it, sadly. I hope it went overseas and was not scrapped in the pistol ban post Dunblane.
I see several of those have made it to the sanctuary of the Royal Armouries collection. The one I handled (but never shot) looked very nicely made. However, as a 'Standard Pistol' shooter I needed a semiauto, so I first owned a Browning Target and then a Pardini Fiocchi.
@@derekp2674 That's nice to know.
I discovered that some of those single shot pistol came in United states but just a few of them
One can hope
I hate how the legality of handguns in the UK was decided before I was born all due to the actions of a paedophile in Scotland... We all suffer due to the actions of the deplorable.
Back in the 90s when handguns was legal for competition shooters in the UK,a colleague of mine had a "Grey Ghost" P38. According to historical sources, these were assembled by the French with leftover parts at the end of WW2
When those began to come into the US in the 1980s that same creation history for the Manhurin Grey Ghosts was mentioned in almost every Shotgun News advertisement by the importers, so it is probably correct. Supposedly they were assembled after the war in the old German Navy sub pens.
It is fascinating that while the 1911 tilting barrel design is still by far the most common mechanism for modern handguns, the Walther P38's locking block actually had some good influence, too. Most famously, the Beretta 92FS/M9 uses the P38's locking block operating mechanism. Hell, it's very visually similar to the P38 if you simply extended the P38's slide all the way to the end.
Indeed, especially since the Beretta 92 is derived from the Beretta M1951, which very much has P38 DNA, too.
I like Browning's designs...except the tilting barrel pistols.
The beretta even has the hammer decocking saftey that the P38 had
1:27 "A lot of borders changed at the end of the first world war and we'll leave it at that." Holy understatement, batman!
If you cut Germany into little pieces and give it to hostile neighbors, someone will come along to reunite the Reich. Only fair and reasonable.
@@Willy_Tepes Versailles nothing, look at what they did to Hungary!
Thanks very much, Jonathan and team.
This is one Webley I've never seen before, but I did own and shoot a P38 for a while.
In engineering there is an old saying, "if it ain't broke, fix it until it is". I wonder if this design is an example of letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, by overcompensating for minor disadvantages of the P38.
In particular, the use of a Browning style lock-up would remove the inherent tendency of P38 (and later Beretta) slides to crack in service.
By 1951, Beretta had already produced their first P38 variant. However, I doubt that there would have been much enthusiasm in the British military establishment for the adoption of foreign made (or designed) pistols. Canadian made Brownings would have been just about acceptable I guess.
When you think you've seen everything Webley, then Jonathan says "look what I've got" 😁. Excellent video!
Good stuff! Thank you and take care
Always a pleasant surprise when yall upload thank you again!
One of my favourite episodes of WITW. Really interesting background information, and such a fascinating artifact in and of itself.
Thankyou Johnathan. I did read that Jurek eventually finished the design only to have the army requirements changed to "and a high capacity magazine" at which point he threw up his hands and gave up.
Interesting - do you recall where you read that?
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries I'm afraid not. There was an excellent series of part works/profiles (20 years ago) about various firearms (Colts/Walthers etc) and one was about webley automatics. It had a picture of the webley jurek but I think the safety was missing in the picture. The one you have is the only complete one I have seen. Excellent presentation on a unicorn gun.
@@grahamchalk4727 Thanks Graeme! It really is a fascinating piece that has caught my eye many times so it was great to dig into it a little.
No scooters in this mans shed.
Rocker all the way.
❤😁 from the USA. 👍
I realised the similarities with the P38 when guessing the Webley by Jurek, but I thought it was sort of coincidental and not a direct copy. Nice to hear more about it!
Edit: You mention the long service life. My father carried the p-38 in the Norwegian army in 1976-77 as an electrician and medic. Then in the 1980s the remaining Kongsberg 1914s, Husqvarna, Lahti, Luger and p38s were replaced with Glock p80s!
I carried one (then called the P1) in the German Bundeswehr in 1987, and though it isn’t produced anymore since 2004, it’s still in use in some units.
Best looking handgun never made!
Fantastic presentation.
Thanks Josh!
Maybe one of these days I'll be able to make a trip across the pond for a visit. There are many places in Europe I'd love to visit
I say go for it. There are so many good places to go shoot guns that you can rent for a fun session of "I don't know what I'd do with it but I want one!" shooting.
As a matter of fact many people at gun ranges are willing to let you fire their guns if you show interest and are friendly enough with them.
I thankfully live in one of those areas. Gun people around here are, for the most part, pretty good people.
With the Browning high power in the army, we found you could release the magazine safety with your finger, or trip the hammer sear, so you didn't have to put the magazine back in to fire the action after unloading.
Good work Jonathan! I really appreciate your effort and consideration, and consistency in making these videos! 🙂 keep it up, from the manufacturer of the high power 🇨🇦
Unfortunately this looks to be a classic example of the better being the enemy of the good. The P38 was solid enough, the "improvements" made only made things more complicated for both good and bad results. Also over 20 extra parts is a demonstration of an engineer who never learnt the KISS principle. Or did and just ignored it.
Fascinating to see, as always.
Please do a video on the early 1980s Stirling .38/.357 revolver. I got a chance to shoot one (briefly) in an abandoned train tunnel in Wiltshire back then.
Interesting... Was that in Mr Brunel's Birthday Tunnel* at Box by any chance? 🤔
*As something of a Vanity Project to show everybody how clever he was, Mr Ismbard Kingdom Brunel built a railway tunnel through a hill in Wiltshire (the Box Tunnel) so that on the mornings of his birthdays (until leap years eventually changed the date of that perfect alignment, but not in his lifetime...) the rising sun would shine straight through the full length of the tunnel, and therefore straight through the hill, creating a small patch of warmth and light in an area that would otherwise have remained in darkness for another hour or so 🌞👍
A truly wonderful channel.
Thanks James!
Excellent, thank you
Those grips look phenomenal.
Finally. I've learned what that gun is called.
😂 me too
Jonathan: "What is this weapons?"
Some guy from the back of the audience: "A gun!"
in Canada we only replaced the Hi Power in 2022 i used it in service i liked it i'm certainly a Hi Power fan, but i really like the P38 its a very visually appealing weapon only shot one once but it shot pretty damn well, just relocate the spring to the grip and you have a pretty nice pistol on your hands
I have a Webley pellet pistol, Don't know much about it except it's old, a old man gave it to my brother in the 50s so it probably older than that 🤔✌
I used to work in a shooting range in cape town where they had reloading equipment that I was allowed to use almost infinitely.
During the quiet time I used to reload hundreds of rounds for the old p38 that was the ranges self defence pistol.
It never malfunctioned and I simply don't know why they discontinued production
They never stopped loading RG 9mm ball to Mk II Z specs. It will fracture the slide on a Browning L9 at the extractor cut out in the end. Fortunately this causes a failure to feed rather than anything drastic. It's probably worth having the slide on any broad arrow stamped HPs in your collection x-rayed if you intend to live fire them.
Ha, noted, thank you :) Everything gets inspected and classified by a REME-trained armourer and we play it safe with ammunition specs, so hopefully we have avoided that assiduously and not by luck.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries It's luck! Every APWT with a HP it was at least one of the older Mk 2s that broke at the extractor cut out. Having said that a lot of the pistols were hand me downs from slightly more dashing types who had put a lot of rounds through them.
@@zoiders Types who might know what colour the boathouse is?
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries Noooo. More like the CP wing and 14 Int Coy. They moved over to Sig 229s in the mid 90s (strangely two tone matte stainless ones) and the rest of us normals inherited the cast offs. Quite a few HPs with ambi safeties and 3 dot sights showed up in late service along side older Mk IIs with tiny controls and sights.
@@zoiders Ah, interesting, thanks.
I love seeing this stuff. It's why I'm here, really.
There are people that want the latest and greatest iteration of a firearm. Others value the earliest prototypes of the model. I understand those that occupy either end of that spectrum.
But I think that both sides can agree that their interests can converge at serial #2. Thank you for showing this to me.
It's a shame there are only two ever made , I'd love to take a Jurek out to my range and give it a side by side shooting comparison with my P-38 .
I am also curious to see if the fit and finish is as good as my Webley Mk4.
Wonder that they didn't put the mainspring on an arm under the side plate like the 1913 Webley Self Loader?
I was just wondering, early in the video, how it would do with a steady load of MK2z ammunition, then you addressed that. Cool. I know some of my own 9mms don't much like 'Zed' cartridges in that they get hot quickly and the recoil is somewhat stouter than some commercial loads. Then again, some of my pistols don't seem to care and don't get too hot after a dozen quick rounds.
So on this pistol, if I am understanding your demonstration, if the gun is loaded with a round in the chamber and the magazine is removed, then there is no way of unloading the gun until a magazine is reinserted. On my pistols to unload I remove the magazine, then clear the chamber. This can't be done on this gun if the hammer is locked in the down position. I don't like that. Clearing the chamber, then removing the magazine sets the stage for an accidental re-chambering before the magazine is removed. I have seen UDs happen from that when people do that in companies and units where the gun is turned in at the end of a shift.
Polish P64s can have similar trigger pulls (for a different reason) although the highest I have seen so far was 27 pounds. Thinner steel in the Jurek;s mainspring might lighten that trigger pull. Of course lightening the mainspring will probably also increase felt recoil when firing Mk2z ammunition as the slide will recoil a little faster then. The requirement to be able to handle a steady diet of Mk2z ammunition probably had a lot to do with why the mainspring is so stiff.
I am curious why Mr. Jurek did not double stack the magazine at least somewhat. Even 10 or 11 rounds would have been a more marketable improvement. All in all, it is an interesting pistol.
Jurek had a workshop ij G'ham later on and made some lovely sliding block single shot target pistols - mainly in 22lr - but there may have been some 38spl. I fired one as a young fellow - and have always wanted one since.
Cool video. Now that you've done a video on a German pistol copied by a Polish designer, maybe you could do a video about a Polish pistol that was manufactured by the Germans - the Radom VIS 35. JAT
I remember watching one of Forgotten Weapons videos on the 1907 US Trials pistols and one of the entrants had a similar slide locking lug design but, if I recall correctly, it was manually cammed into engagement by the shooter instead of the more sensible arrangement here, probably for patent reasons given the time period.
I have a peculiar, late-war mashup of a P-38, with a finished, proofed, but completely blank/unmarked, Walther HP (commercial) slide on an AC-45 frame. It's the oddities that tend to have the most interesting histories.
Good video and information.
I do enjoy collecting the early Webley automatics!
I'm guessing that you don't live in the UK
I wonder whether it would be possible to attach a lanyard to the hammer loop hole and use the action of raising the arm to cock the hammer with each shot if necessary.
17:55 Ah, the Universal Disassembly Tool! 😀
26:20 I wonder why they didn't try to improve the design using the imput from this trial. Double action mechanism seems to be a significant enough advantage over Browning HP (although FN apparently thought otherwise), with luck Webley could've won the contract, if FN would have played by the rules, of course.
The one thing I didn't have time to check was Richard Milner of the Webley archive, but I doubt there's anything in there. Gordon Bruce speculates that Webley just gave up knowing that the BHP was already in service and popular.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries Isn't it basically the story of pretty much any small arms project started by Polish and Czechoslovak engineers in the UK?
A whole lot of luck would have been needed. The HP had a many year head start on development behind it. Also active combat service to reveal any remaining bugs, and hopefully get them remedied. The Webley-Jurek pistol was a clean sheet design with exactly two produced. Not to mention that the British armed forces already had a fair number of HPs on hand, and they appeared to do a satisfactory job of punching holes in enemy troops. The cost effective way to phase out the revolver would have been simply to make the HP pistol general issue, keep what you'd already bought, and then acquire enough new ones to replace the existing stock of obsolete handguns.
@@reubenpickering7777 HP was far from the only service pistol in the UK. Setting aside the old Webley semi-automatics, there were M1911s in RAF & SOE, Llamas & Ballester-Molinas in SOE etc. And even the eventual adoption of HP as L9A1 didn't make it the only one either, as there was still room for L47A1 (Walther PP) in RAF and MI6 service. So, the adoption of one and only service pristol wasn't the path that was followed. And since NATO standartisation of firearms wasn't happening anyway by the late '50s, there was no particular need to adopt anything more made by FN without proper examination of other alternatives. Double action, when sufficiently improved, could be an ace up the Webley's sleeve, especially given that the preceding revolvers were either DA or DAO. And let's be frank here, UK was no US or Germany (either of them, really), no service pistol was adopted widely enough to seriously consider its familiarity to the troops.
@@F1ghteR41 If double action had been seen as of overarching importance, the P38 was already a mature design fielded by a no longer hostile power, which could have been produced under license. So the Webley pistol still most likely goes goes nowhere. It clearly had a lot of flaws. It would have taken years to iron them all out, much as it had taken FN with the HP, or Colt with the 1911. In any case, apparently that feature didn't offset the HPs higher magazine capacity.
Good overview of the Webley. Doc Jurek admired the P38 but was adamant it was flawed. (btw he insisted he was a doctor of chemistry).
Testing after the war showed P38 slide cracking with UK 2Z ammo plus there was no way the British would adopt a German gun at that time, the over engineered slide lock up was included to strengthen that area.
Shooters of a certain age will remember his different models of single shot target pistols, I had a .22 Jurek rifle, with an ambidextrous bolt of another 0unique design.
Interesting firearm and possibly not one I'll be able to find one to add to my P38 collection! Question, the magazine looks very similar to the P38 one, are they interchangeable?
I liked the browning i carried one on duty as armskote storeman in the Army, i also carried one for a year or two as a ppw but as a ppw was a bit awkward to carry in the summer months , then we carried wathers 22 ppk and 9mm p5 wich i though was and excellent weapon
28 minutes? Yes please.
That a heavier trigger than the Philippines Colt. 😳🤯 Awesomely interesting pistol today! All that juicy history is why C&Rsenal episodes are an hour long. 🤣
Walther P-38 and Beretta 92 series pistols have a tendency for the slide to crack at the locking wedge engagement area where the slide is thin. That may be a reason for going to the Browning locking system in this pistol.
Hi Mr. Ferguson! 3 minutes in and I already love the story behind it. That trigger is a very interesting thing, slightly funny. I don't know why but the first thing that came to my mind was draw weights of longbows from Mary Rose, lol. I must have seen some documentary lately.
I see a pistol called Jurek I know "yeah, the Polish engineer involved 100%"
I had a pair of CZ50 pistols and they were the heaviest DA trigger I've ever experienced. I wasn't able to get a good trigger weight reading on those. The SA trigger (hammer cocked) on the CZ50 was still heavy but with a much shorter travel and about half the weight of trigger cocking. I wasn't able to find your review of the CZ50. Odd--the CZ75 has a very good trigger in either mode of fire.
Were the magazines interchangeable between the two designs? The grip looks great for small hands, but not the trigger pull weight.
Damn, did that not make it into the edit? I definitely recorded a bit to say exactly that - yes, it uses P38 mags :)
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries Thanks Jonathan, I've been wondering for a while now, what firearm designs were let down by materials techonology of the time not being up to the job, that may now be possible with newer materials/processing?
@@mickymondo7463 Interesting question - I'm not sure anyone's seriously looked into that. Probably the self-loading rifle pre the 1920s when metallurgy was just all around worse? Springs wore out, parts peened, wore, and broke. I think there's a reason all the early ones have a way to disable the recoil system and revert to straight-pull.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries Thanks Jonathan, I have often wondered whether some of the older designs that didn't work back in the day, would be viable now with more modern materials and manufacturing capabilities, it is something I see in other areas, like Motorcycles, which were revolutionised with modern plating techniques like Nikasil plated aluminium cylinder bores for example.
Thank you very much, this is a fantastic presentation of a subject I previously knew nothing about. I love learning new things about firearms history and design. Keep up the good work! 👍
It's a pretty recent change, but this is (arguably) not the last Webley Pistol
Since 2020 Webley & Scott have been producing, in India, pistols for the Indian market
True. Clones of the Colt 1903 ,32scp, a modern Webley Mk IV revolver, an actual 1911, a new plastic framed 1903 ,32 and some shotguns.
1st rule of thumb is If your going to copy something you make it better not worse
One very small correction. It's Marian and not Marion :)
At the mention of Webley one imediatly thinks of the revolver.
I mean, the P38 itself has a stupidly heavy DA trigger. I can't imagine a 32lbs one, that's mental.
I hate my p38. I love it and hate it lol. The DA trigger is god awful so it has become a forever display piece and does not get used. One of the best looking handguns IMO though. 32 pounds is insane, I would've canned it as soon as I felt that.
I don't find the DA pull on my post-war commercial P 38 to be overly bad. Heavy yes, but it just requires a strong grip and concentration - although at more than maybe 10yds it would probably be tough to keep on a torso-sized target without taking way too long to aim, squeeze, and fire.
Try the Enfield revolver. I had a insanely strong index finger because of that gun. At least it was a smooth pull.
Jonathan, I'm a Brit that lives in the US. I just picked up a Webley MK1 with Navy markings but it's really odd. It has a threaded barrel which looks like it's original to the gun and the barrel is completely smooth, no rifling what-so-ever. I can't find another example like this anywhere else online or in books.
I posted in all my usual military surplus group and a few people said they had actually owned that exact pistol before but couldn't find anything on it either.
Any help? Looks like it was possibly used for flares?
Line throwing pistol.
@@zoiders I thought that too but I don’t think there would be enough power in a standard cartridge
@@DeimosPC It depends on the line. It could have even been used for botanical purposes.
@@zoiders Botanical purposes? For subduing REALLY angry plants?
@@Loweko1170 When not stealing countries from people the British colonial types were busy cataloguing the flora and fauna of the world's tropical rain forests. This meant getting up into the canopy so you need a line thrower.
It's a lovely looking weapon, shame about the flaws.
The world's most deadly grip exerciser
You can still own a pistol in .22 calibre in Ireland but you have to be a member of a pistol shooting club and jump through a number of other hoops, it's expensive too get one but it's possible and I don't see anything wrong with someone owning a pistol for competition shooting.
Dr Jurek was one of those annoying competitors who, if four minutes was allowed for the string, he would be firing his last shot at three minutes fifty, regardless of how many other people were rolling their eyes and tapping their watches.
Possibly just my eyes misreading the images, but is there a little greater angle to the grip on the Jurek, the P38 is such a natural pointer but this appears even more so
you have the best job in the Realm
P-38's like their fodder a little hot too😎
9:35 Considering that on-screen text corrections can often get missed by people who are primarily listening while doing other things; I think such a relatively major correction would have justified rerecording that segment lol
I agree but unfortunately production schedule didn't allow for it. We film with a crew of two and I can't just get them back in every time I miss something. And without wishing to play for sympathy, I have a day job to do as well!
I have seen lots of videos on craft produced copies, but this is the first time I see a legit Walther BrowningsBrowningsBrownings one.
A combination of well known features... P38 overall shape and recoil spring system, TT33 hammer and grips, Browning locking system. Still, the modified Browning/Petter/Glock locking action is much simpler.
Please make a video about the Brunswick rifle? It is a underrated rifle.
12:30 I have small hands. I would love a grip like that on a pistol.
When it comes to life and death scenarios, humans go with what works the bestest cheapest.
A question. Ignoring the commercial effects of there being no safeguarding of intellectual property, if current designs of pistols (or rifles for that matter) were unaffected by patents and could just use whatever design worked best what difference would that make to current designs? Would we just have "the" pistol, "the" carbine and "the" rifle for any particular use (because the best designs were obvious to everyone) or would there still be a wide diversity of designs for particular uses?
So, not only does the safety not decock it, so one has to pull the trigger to decock it, but you *have* to have the magazine inserted to do this. So you cannot clear the pistol amd ease springs without taking two actions that increase the chances the user will screw up and cause an Unintended Loud Noise.
Yeah, I gave away a pistol *specifically because* of this issue. It's bad enough in a Browning High Power, but you don't expect a single action pistol to have a decocker (sorry, Radom), and at least you know you have the pistol in the "fire" setting before doing this (which discourages dumb privates from thinking, "Oh, it's on safe, so I can snap the trigger with it pointed at my buddy!")
As for the trigger pull, that's worse than my surplus Polish P-64, which I measured (using a *fish* scale, as it was far beyond the limits of my trigger scale) at 26 lbs in double action and 3.5 lbs on single (which resulted in an unintended double fire the first time I shot it, as my finger slapped the lightweight SA trigger during recoil after healing on that Magilla Gorilla DA trigger pull.
Huh... I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that the British Army didn't jump all over this. 😆
That Webley is like a Bentley motor car. A bit of polished wood makes all the difference
LOL. The Webley revolver's triggers are so bad that we refer to all others as a percentage of a Webley. Glad to see that there foray into semiautos carried on that tradition.
9mm 2z haven't heard that since Dunblain handgun ban, must travel up and have a Gander around the collection.
"Webley Hi Power" is an appropriate name considering it looks like the result of a love affair between the Walther P38 and the Browning Hi-Power.
How many of the Webley Jurek pistols were made?
Hopefully I said in the video! Two examples.
It is interesting how both the US and the UK wanted to adopt a version of the P38 post war,(the Americans developed the Smith and Wesson Model 39). I assume this was due to the DA/SA design, yet both models were rejected by models already in service.
The Model 39 shares very little with the P38, it has double action but the locking system is entirely Browning based.
Although the capacity isn't huge, this looks like, especially for the time, a nice concealed carry or officer's pistol.
The grips look awesome and extremely comfy. The 32lb 2x action pull could, possibly, be trained around as the printed note stated the pistol will NOT fire with the manual safety on, mag in, and hammer in single action mode.
I don't know how the British military would handle training but the pistol could be treated like a cz75, untended to be used cocked and locked but with 2x action as a backup for light primers, etc. Though the hammer dropping to, um, something (1/2 cock notch?), when the trigger is pulled w/ manual safety engaged, wouldn't win any awards for design.
Can the hammer be recocked if it's dropped in 1x action with the manual safety engaged?
@JonathanFerguson if you could conceal carry today, which handgun would you choose?
Is there a half cock function to this design that could make it "safe" with a round chambered somewhat like a Tokarev 33 ?
If you remove the front section of the barrel it kinda looks like the scout’s pistol from team fortress 2
It's a Marian, not Marion.
Yes, my colleague made a mistake there, apologies. Although we can claim Anglicisation since as zoiders notes above, in English the male spelling is 'Marion'.
@@JonathanFergusonRoyalArmouries Well, Marion is spread in the literature regarding Mr. Jurek. For Polish like me, Marion sounds like a female name.
@@ifyoudontfailyouarenoteven6210 It does to most English speakers too - it's a very uncommon male name regardless of spelling.
32lb double action trigger pull?! That's almost comical.
Given that (thankfully!) no-one had to put their life on the line to try it, I think we can outright say that it is comical :)
I find that to be very elegant in appearance.
Grip panel
Release similar to TT33
If the barrel on the jurek was flush to the slide it would look a bit like a walther ppk or a P5
1st also love watching these vids keep it up
Honest question, are there any other British-made/British designed pistols besides this?
If the brit p38 DIDNT have that 32lb pull, then there'd be NO safety mechanism 🤣
The Webley may be a copy, but it so much more elegant.
Interestingly There is a Polish Wikipedia page for Marian Jurek but not an English one.
Error in description section - not "Marion" (that is a british female name if i am not mistaken) but "MariAn" ;) Thanks for vid.
Marian is the female spelling in coqiual English. Marion tends to be the male spelling. John Wayne's real name was "Marion".
@@zoiders That's really funny since in Polish it's the other way round: Robin Hood's beloved is known in Poland as lady Marion.
@@PobortzaPl en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_and_Marian
@@zoiders pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Marion
And in English it's "Maid Marian"
@@zoiders I always figured it was kind of intentional like the ballad of "A Boy Named Sue."
32 pound trigger?! The NYPD's mandatory heavy trigger, which causes them to hit everything but criminals, is "only" 15 pounds.
Is that in single action?
the infamous webley
Yes, but will it _blend?_
So you'd carry this loaded chamber, cocked with the safety on then, due to that horrendous double action trigger pull.
When you can see the tension in your hand through a glove, you know it's a heavy trigger. Yikes. Beautiful gun, but yikes.
Brit inventory: Pistol, 9MM, Walther Stolen.
Mk I of course.
honestly there must have been that many p38s captured at the end of the war they could have probably just straight up adopted that and recovered captured tooling