Webley Mk III

About the Webley Mk III

The Webley Mk III is a British top-break, double-action/single-action service revolver chambered in .455 Webley, introduced in 1897 as the third iteration of the Webley military service-revolver lineage (Mk I 1887, Mk II 1894, Mk III 1897, Mk IV 1899, Mk V 1913, Mk VI 1915). Like its siblings it operates via a stirrup-type barrel latch on the upper rear of the frame: thumbing the lever releases the barrel assembly to pivot downward around a front hinge, driving a star-shaped extractor upward to eject all six spent cases simultaneously. The Mk III's defining improvement over the Mk II was a redesigned cylinder-to-frame lock - a hook engaging a lip on the front of the cylinder when the action was opened - which both improved lockup and, for the first time in the service line, allowed the cylinder to be removed from the frame for cleaning. This feature was carried directly into the Mk IV. The exposed-spur hammer can be fired double-action by a long trigger pull or single-action by manual cocking. The Mk III was issued chiefly to the Royal Navy rather than adopted as the standard British Army sidearm, and many examples reached officers through private purchase. It fired the .455 Webley Mk II cartridge, a heavy 265-grain lead bullet at roughly 620 feet per second, prized for close-range stopping power despite modest velocity.

The Mk III's name is one of the great traps for collectors - it denotes both this 1897 .455 break-top service revolver and an entirely separate small-frame .38 pocket revolver, while the contemporaneous .455 Mk III cartridge was the notorious 'Manstopper' hollow-point that Britain withdrew from military service for violating the 1899 Hague Convention on expanding bullets. Issued largely to the Royal Navy, the Mk III was the first Webley service revolver whose cylinder could be lifted out of the frame for cleaning.

Webley Mk III specifications

The 'Webley Mk III' designation is a well-known source of confusion: it refers both to this 1897 .455 service revolver and to a later small-frame .38 Webley pocket revolver - and should not be confused with the .455 Webley Mk III cartridge of 1898 (the 'Manstopper' hollow-point, withdrawn from military use after the 1899 Hague Convention). No reliable standalone production figure for the Mk III service revolver was found in accessible sources; total Webley service-revolver output across all marks ran to the hundreds of thousands before the Mk VI's roughly 125,000 units of 1915-1923. Overall-length and weight figures here are drawn from commercial-listing and dealer sources and should be treated as approximate; a 4-inch barrel was standard, with longer commercial lengths also offered.