Inspired by Shooter2s expedition I visited the Firepower exhibition at Woolwich, England, this week to look out one of my favourite guns, a one-pounder Whitworth.
Attached are six pictures of the gun and its fittings. The muzzle-loading, hexagonal bored barrel is cast-steel, 48 inches long overall and 9 inches across the trunnion ends. The tube has a brass breech ring for attaching the vernier sight and brass trunnion ends. The bore is 1.25 inches across the flats and 1.31 inches across the angles. There is a stub foresight at the muzzle but there are no marks at all on the steel barrel.
The brass trunnion ends have been “well polished” over the years making the marks indistinct, but a close examination shows that they read “Whitworth Ordnance Co.105 Patent 1862 Manchester”
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The split-trail carriage is pale-blue painted wood, probably oak, the strap work and the base of the elevation screw have been nickel plated.
Four small brass plates on the carriage show its history. The first shows that it was donated as gift by a business associate of Joseph Whitworth in Manchester, England, where he had his steel works, to the “City of Edinburgh Artillery Volunteers” in Scotland on May 2, 1862. This makes it one of the first commercial Whitworth guns. The other brass plates show the military units that it passed through before ending up in the museum. Apart from exercises by the artillery volunteers the gun was never used in action but was a mess-room ornament for much of its life.
There is another identical one pounder Whitworth tube, without a carriage, at Fort Nelson in Portsmouth, England. It has a slightly different brass breech ring, is numbered 166 and dated 1863. That one has been weighed at 70 pounds.
Whitworth was advertising the one-pounder in June 1865 at a cost of 40 pounds or 200 dollars a tube, with “appurtenances”, shot remover, rammer, bristle sponge and wad hook, extra. Ammunition offered included solid shot, “rifled spheres”, cartridge bags, lubricating wads, friction tubes and wood sabots in lots of one hundred. No shells were available.
In the 1860s there was some writing in the military journals in England about using one-pounder Whitworth guns in mountainous regions, where the barrel could be carried by a mule or by two bearers. The ammunition, it was said, could be carried by individual gunners and bearers in pouches.
Cannonmns “Tolley” small pentagonal bored piece, featured in another question in the forum, is very similar to these one-pounders, but slightly smaller with different barrel fittings.
I hope you all like this small gun as much as I do.
Starr
