We Fired the Martini-Henry | Rifle of the Zulu War

We met up with Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, to learn about a weapon that was made famous by the Boer and Zulu Wars: the Martini-Henry rifle. During the 1860s, several European armies began to equip their troops with modern breech-loading rifles, leaving behind the now-outdated muzzle-loading musket. By the turn of the decade the British had adopted a breech-loading single-shot lever-action rifle - the Martini-Henry, named after Friedrich von Martini, a Swiss engineer and Alexander Henry, a Scottish gunsmith. Produced at the Royal Small Arms Manufactory at Enfield, the Martini-Henry Rifle became the standard issue weapon for the British army from 1871 until 1889 and was used in campaigns across the British Empire, in Afghanistan, the far east, Sudan and South Africa. The speed of innovation during the mid-19th Century was truly staggering. Within a few decades of the Napoleonic Wars, the British army’s standard issue weapo