British & Foreign Lee Arms Company, Limited - London, England 1900

Beautiful certificate from the British & Foreign Lee Arms Company issued in 1900. This historic document was printed by Love and Wyman, Limited of Winchester and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of the company's name. This item has the signatures of the Company's Director's and Secretary and is over 107 years old.


Certificate Vignette

James Paris Lee was best known for inventing the bolt action that led to the Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield series of rifles.

In 1861, Lee successfully developed a breechloading cartridge conversion for the Springfield Model 1861 Rifled Musket, managing to acquire a contract for 1,000 rifles from the US Army during the American Civil War.

The Lee Model 1879 rifle was his first successful magazine-fed rifle, which was adopted by China and the US Navy, and a later design - the Winchester-Lee M1895 - was also adopted militarily and sold commercially.

It is a portion of the Model 1879 that earned Lee his place in the pantheon of arms designers. Lee designed the first practical detachable box magazine - an item that would become an absolute requirement for military arms of the future.

The British & Foreign Lee Arms Company, Limited was affiliated with the Lee Arms Company which developed a unique bolt and magazine design which was investigated by the British. In 1889, after extensive trials and tests, the British Army decided to adopt the Rifle, Magazine, Lee-Metford as a standard issue arm. This in turn developed into the Rifle, Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield (or SMLE), the British service arm for many decades.

The Lee-Metford rifle (a.k.a. Magazine Lee-Metford, abbreviated MLM) was a breech-loading British army service rifle, combining James Paris Lee's rear-locking bolt system and ten-round magazine with a seven groove rifled barrel designed by William Ellis Metford. It replaced the Martini-Henry rifle in 1888, following nine years of development and trials, but remained in service for only a short time until replaced by the similar Lee-Enfield.

Lee's bolt action mechanism was a great improvement over other designs of the day. The rear-mounted lugs placed the operating handle much closer to the rifleman, over the trigger. This made it much quicker to operate than other, forward-mounted lug designs which forced the rifleman to move his hand forward to operate the bolt; also, the bolt's distance of travel was identical with the length of the cartridge, and its rotation was only 60 degrees compared to the 90 degree rotation of some French and Mauser-style actions. In addition Lee introduced a superior detachable box magazine to replace the common tube and integral box magazines in use with most repeaters, and this magazine offered greater capacity than the competing Mannlicher design.

History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com (old stock certificate research service).