This Webley Mark IV is chambered in .38 S&W, serial 1575xx, and all of its numbers are matching. The bore is mirror bright and the revolver is in excellent condition overall, mechanically excellent. It comes with a leather holster stamped MP4. The Webley is offered as it is shown, holster included.
The story of the Mark IV .38 is a story about being turned down. Webley and Scott designed the pistol in the years after the Great War to answer the Army’s wish for something lighter and softer recoiling than the big .455, and offered it to the government. The government liked the design well enough to adopt it, and then handed the drawings to the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, which built it as the Revolver No. 2 Mk I, declining to pay Webley for the work. That was where matters stood until 1939. When war came and Enfield could not produce revolvers fast enough, the government went back to Webley and ordered the very pistol it had passed over, and Webley built something like a hundred thousand of them through the war.
They went to the people who could not carry a rifle and still do their jobs: officers and NCOs, tank crews, signallers and military police. The cartridge was the .38/200, a 200-grain loading of the .38 S&W, later revised to a 178-grain jacketed bullet when somebody raised the question of whether a soft lead bullet sat comfortably with the Hague Convention. The big .455 Mark VI was declared obsolete in 1945, but the .38 Mark IV carried on as substitute standard into the early 1960s, and it was taken up by police forces across Britain and the Commonwealth, some of which were still carrying it at the end of the century.
Specifications
Manufacturer: Webley and Scott, Birmingham, England
Model: Mark IV
Caliber: .38 S&W, not .38 Special
Serial: 1575xx
Capacity: 6 rounds
Action: Top break, double action
Matching: All numbers matching
Bore: Mirror
Condition: Excellent overall
Mechanical condition: Excellent
Included: Leather holster, stamped MP4
