1896 Model Rifles Still Fine Sporting Weapons

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27404, 17 July 1954, Page 6

1896 Model Rifles Still Fine Sporting Weapons

The fighting at Spion Kop and Rorke’s Drift in a war which ended more than 50 years ago may seem to have a very distant association with shooting deer in the Canterbury foothills, but in Christchurch rifles thought to have been used by the Boers are being sold to sportsmen, and are proving as good weapons in their modified form as they were when they were first produced. A Christchurch gunsmith recently bought 25 German-made Mauser rifles from the ordnance depot at Trentham, where they were sold as junk, but he has found that a good many of them, after being packed in grease for years, have barrels still in firstclass condition. From them, he has produced sporting rifles of a very high grade. The gunsmith explained that the Mausers were the first 7 mm. bore rifles, and they were first produced in 1896. The Mauser had the strongest action of any rifle, and, firing a 175-grain bullet from a 30-inch barrel at 2300 feet a second, was really the first of the high-powered rifles, he said. The rifle was known as the Spanish Mauser because it had been used against the Americans in the fighting in Cuba, and caused them considerable concern. At the start of the Boer War, the gunsmith said, the British had the single-shot Martini Enfield .303 calibre

rifle. There was much friction between Britain and Germany through the supply of the excellent Mauser rifles to the Boers. The ballistic coefficient of the 7 mm. cartridge was regarded as near-perfect. Support for the gunsmith’s belief that the rifles, or at least some of them, were captured from the Boers is offered by the names on one or two of them. One rifle has the name “P. C. D. W. de Plessis” carved on the butt. The Army Department in Wellington said yesterday that there were no more of the Mausers available. Some of those sold had been impressed during the Second World War from private owners. The department had no evidence that the rifles were used in the Boer war. They were accumulated over a good many years.