Between 1905 and 1906 a committee was formed to discuss the design and production requirements for the proposed War Office Pattern Miniature Rifle.

There ia practically no aspect of the rifle that were not here discussed. The documents cover everything from the specification, and its being argued over by the various committee members, proposed usage, materials, markings to be used, the selection of manufacturers and means of distribution. It will be seen that not a little difference of opinions on all these subjects arose between those holding varied opinions of what the rifle should represent and how it should be generally utilised. The invloved parties included many highly experienced officers holding varied ideas of what was required of the new rifle. The communications were not without rancour, with the more elderly members being at odds with younger and more progressive incumbents. The superintendent of the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield evidently had his work cut out to prevent out-of-date or impracticable theories being driven into the rifle's production, and in ensuring a contemporarily practical and affordable end product.

The papers include much correspondence between the involved parties, including the Birmingham Small Arms Company, the London Small Arms Company,Webley and Scott Ltd., a number of other commercially interested firms, the senior committee members, the War Office, the R.S.A.F. Staff, the National Rifle Association, plus Government Ministers and their Secretaries, not to mention the Society of Miniature Rifle Clubs.

For those seriously researching these rifles, the manifold recorded minutes and correspondence of the proceedings of this committee were collected together by David Penn, retired Keeper of Weapons at the Imperial War Museum. The large number of facsimiles have been collated into six tranches, each of which has been processed into a flip-page document.

These documents are replicated below, and are, up to a point, searchable. This applies to those documents that were typed and in which the text is not overly faint; however, many of the records are of handwritten communications to which digital searching can also not be applied, but that hold a plethora of valuable information .

For clarities sake, we have added typed copies of some pages in the first tranche of early documents, but to do this for all handwritten documentation would take longer than the time probably available to our own ageing researchers! We can only wish you happy and enlightening reading.