Lee-Enfield No. 1, Mk III

The British Army went to war in 1914 with a rifle it believed to be obsolete and a cartridge that was ballistically inferior to those of its enemies.

- Terry Wieland

The British ended the war four years later with the same rifle, knowing it had proven its worth under the worst of conditions and earned a reputation as the finest overall battle rifle in the war. The Lee-Enfield No. 1, Mk III, or “Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield” (SMLE), was one in a long line of rifles dating back to 1888, with the first of its kind, the Lee-Metford, firing the then-new .303 British cartridge. It was developed at the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield Lock, north of London, and many famous names were involved in its design.

The superintendent at Enfield Lock was John Rigby, partner in London’s famous John Rigby & Co., and grandson of the founder. William Ellis Metford was a prominent firearms designer and inventor of Metford rifling. Both men were noted long-range riflemen. James Paris Lee was the Scottish-born inventor of the detachable box magazine and an early proponent of turn-bolt rifles.

After exhaustive testing and evaluation of dozens of entries in a competition to choose a new military rifle to replace the Martini-Henry, the committee settled on Lee’s basic design combined with Metford’s rifling. Then began the usual British practice wherein the rifle was repeatedly tested, modified, tested again, employed in various conflicts and continually altered to meet changing combat demands. Different models, and variations of models, were denoted by numbers, marks and asterisks.