Double Dovetail Bren gun

[Martin Bull]

... talking about price increases, I purchased my 6th Vickers MMG off the late Doug Preece for £600 in December 2000.

Cheers,
Steve

Dougie Preece - a name from the 'good old days' indeed ! Witham's offered me a Vickers for £500 cash in 1998 - but I didn't (and still don't ) have room for one ( the divorce would have been much more expensive.... ) But yes, prices are now seriously unaffordable for me ; luckily I was buying when it was all very different.

[PRE]

Hi Jake, depending on the source you read, between 26,000 and 28,000 Bren Mk1 were left behind - or destroyed during the retreat from Dunkirk.

Cheers,
Steve

Hi Steve,
Not doubting you at all, but what is the source for those numbers? My main interest is German-captured foreign weapons, so this caught my eye.
Thanks,
Pat

[HARRY THE MOLE]

Hi Steve,
Not doubting you at all, but what is the source for those numbers? My main interest is German-captured foreign weapons, so this caught my eye.
Thanks,
Pat

Hi Pat

'The Bren Gun Saga' quotes 27,000 guns being lost or deliberately abandoned (for gas fowling and unreliability problems) during the retreat, another on line source says 26,000... and yet another on line source puts the figure in the low thousands. I cannot remember where I saw the figure of 28,000. But any author worth his salt will tell you that you should NOT put anything in your book, unless of course you have documented evidence. The only way around it without supporting evidence is to say something on the lines of: 'It is claimed by some sources that'. You can absolutely guarantee that some smart-arse will come along and prove you wrong. The hardest part of writing any book is the research that goes in to it.

Cheers,
Steve

[HARRY THE MOLE]

Dougie Preece - a name from the 'good old days' indeed ! Witham's offered me a Vickers for £500 cash in 1998 - but I didn't (and still don't ) have room for one ( the divorce would have been much more expensive.... ) But yes, prices are now seriously unaffordable for me ; luckily I was buying when it was all very different.

Hi Martin,

You might remember Interarms (of Manchester). When Sam Cummings was winding down his business, he was selling off boxed deactivated Bren guns at £120 for two. I once purchased a Lewis gun off him that had been recovered from a destroyed tank when the battlefields were being cleared in the 1920's. The cooling jacket had taken a shrapnel hit and was split open along much of its length, and shrapnel balls were embedded in the alloy cooling fins. As with much of my (then) large collection of WW1 Mg's, I eventually let it go.

Cheers,
Steve

[Reibert]

Hi, mates,
what´s about the law´s in England ?
Is it permitted to own a "functioning" machine gun mag, or submachine gun mag, or, SLR mag in the UK ?

AFAIK in Germany it´s forbidden to own "live" mags for any automatic weapons actually.
To own "deactivated" mags isn´t any problem there ...

br.,
R.

[HARRY THE MOLE]

Hi, mates,
what´s about the law´s in England ?
Is it permitted to own a "functioning" machine gun mag, or submachine gun mag, or, SLR mag in the UK ?

AFAIK in Germany it´s forbidden to own "live" mags for any automatic weapons actually.
To own "deactivated" mags isn´t any problem there ...

br.,
R.

Hi Reibert,

For the moment... it isn't a problem to legally own large capacity magazines. I suppose the authorities take the view that as semi automatic and automatic arms are banned over here, no-one is able to acquire a gun to use the magazine!

Cheers,
Steve

[PRE]

Thanks, Steve!
I'll add that to my ongoing list of info about captures.

[m3bobby]

D8619 was for sale by the gunner back in 2015 but I didn’t make a note of the price. It is a first stage intermediate (D4713 to E1792 is the closest I’ve pinned this stage down to).