[Low-Tech/High-Tech] Looting and Improvising arms and armour in Victorian London

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I do have a feeling that the .320 CF and .380 CF were fairly newish, with rimfire cartridges probably used in cheaper, older models of pocket pistols. There was a .320 European (or .320 Bulldog) that appears to have been introduced in 1870 specifically for the Webley Bulldog, which is either another name for, identical to .320 CF, or at least uses the same GURPS stats.

The nomenclature was not well established. Barnes has 320 Revolver originating in 1870 for a Webley revolver, and used in other British and European pocket revolvers. It "served as the inspiration for" the 32 Short Colt, and is apparently nearly identical in performance. I think this is the same as the 320 European/Bulldog, and I suspect this may be the same as the 320 CF, since there's nothing else in Barnes that looks especially plausible.

In much the same way, the 380 Revolver was also created for a Webley revolver in 1868-70, and was copied as the 38 Short Colt. Performance is apparently about the same as 38 S&W.

The rimfire that seems most plausible is the 32 Long, introduced by S&W in 1861, and used in lots of revolver brands including Webley. There's also the 32 Short, used in lots of revolvers, but with no European brands noted, along with the 38 short and 38 long rimfires, ditto.

Do you have any French or German small bore black powder loadings that date to the 1870s in your books?

not a one, sadly.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The rimfire that seems most plausible is the 32 Long, introduced by S&W in 1861, and used in lots of revolver brands including Webley. There's also the 32 Short, used in lots of revolvers, but with no European brands noted, along with the 38 short and 38 long rimfires, ditto.

I doubt I'll break anything if I assume similar stats.

Originally Posted by johndallman

not a one, sadly.

HT:AG lists a 7x15mmR Lefaucheux, an 8x9mmR Gaulois, a 7.6x29mmR Mauser and a 9x25mmR Mauser. No idea how common any of them were at the time.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by adm

Shield wall tactics, true; but some of these guys are probably rugby players, while not ideal, they ought to have some basic idea of what to do from the scrum.

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

* On shield walls: eeesh. For those of you who haven't had experience in trying to get newbies to hold to any kind of formation in a low-tech battle line, you really can't. It's the product of a lot of training, as well as the ability of an officer to maintain tactical command, the trust of his men even when some of them are falling, and one element very rare to these amateur battles: a reserve. Newbies tend to clump up and to freelance, and those who are otherwise experienced brawlers aren't immune.

* On USING shields: getting newbies to keep them up, instead of dropping them to chest level or lower, is a pain in the ass -- it's very akin to novice boxers letting their guards drop and uncover their heads. I don't suppose I'd discourage people from grabbing improvised shields, but I wouldn't go to any great trouble to provide shields, and I wouldn't expect much from them. Honestly, I'd rather hand a newbie a 6-7' improvised spear than a shield and a weapon.

This fits my thinking. I expect that pole weapons would be most broadly useful for anyone who is not armed with firearms. Improvised bombs and incendiaries are also very good.

I don't know if rugby experience will be common, given that the area of East End in question is populated nearly exclusively with immigrant European Jews, Germans, Poles, (internal migrant) Irish and sailors from a variety of nations. Any born Englishmen there will be poor Cockneys more likely to play real football than rugby.

Remember, football is a gentleman's game played by thugs and rugby is a thug's game played by gentlemen.

Experience in street-fighting as teenagers will be fairly widespread among a certain segment of the survivors. Mr. Frankton's Swell Coves are used to fighting the Nichols gang, the Lascars and Chinese of Limehouse and the nasty John Bull gang, the Faugh-a-Ballers and the Dosset Street Rats. Not to mention drunk sailors, soldiers and slumming gentlemen.

[adm]

Shield walls;

The lack of training was why I did not assign them weapons, in the SCA this made the learning curve much faster, and this was hobbyists, real world be killed or worse will help even more. Note that the opposition is equally untrained, equipment poorly handled is better than none.

Gas and carbide;

If there are depressions or other low points in the local topography you can get a gas pocket that you can light when the opposition is drawn into them, my Dad worked on a minor gas line leak/explosion when he was a fireman in L.A. while unlikely to do significant physical damage to anyone, it may shake the nerves of unprepared troops. The carbide was intended to make the molotovs burn hotter, and to be harder to extinguish.

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Remember, football is a gentleman's game played by thugs and rugby is a thug's game played by gentlemen.

This may be a few years off for your purposes, but football and rugby were often played by the same team. Often in the discussion of setting up a game one of the decisions that had to be made was which rules to use.

[SionEwig]

Just some random stuff.

I'd guess that a certain player is wishing that he'd taken you up on the offer of that Maxim now.

Some of those very inexpensive Bulldog revolvers were very slow to reload. As to availability, even the inexpensive ones were still a lot of money to many people. I seem to remember reading in some reference book that the low end ones were running around one pound sterling or so, but don't hold me to that. It would be no big deal to find one and a box of cartridges in the desk of numerous gentlemen's study.

Still really wish I was playing in this game, it looks to be a lot of fun and right down my alley.

Edit - Oh, and CF originally stood for Central Fire, not Center Fire. I'm not sure when it changed over.

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by adm

The lack of training was why I did not assign them weapons, in the SCA this made the learning curve much faster, and this was hobbyists, real world be killed or worse will help even more. Note that the opposition is equally untrained, equipment poorly handled is better than none.

If I'm one of the leaders of the rabble, I want to win this battle, not work over the learning curve for the next one. I'm not going to saddle my boys down with complex weapons when simple ones will do, and I'm not going to hand them weapon suites which need 3X training when I can hand them ones they can use in basic fashions.

I'm also, especially when it comes to newbies, a big fan of strategic offense, tactical defense. I don't want my newbies with cudgel-and-shield charging the other guy, I want them with 7' spears behind an improvised barricade letting THEM charge US, while some friendly folks lob incendiaries down at them from overhead windows. Finest kind.

Originally Posted by Dalillama

That involves a lot more work (and hence time) than they have available; just organizing something like that could easily occupy 2 hours, let alone actually doing it. Mrs. Eisenstadt and her daughters are already accustomed to working together, and have got all the non metallic materials immediately to hand. Also, the focus is on armor because one of the PCs wants some, and hasn't got any.

Errr ... what did you think I was talking about, if not armor?

First off, I guess you're not all that knowledgeable about low-tech sewing: even if no mechanical sewing machines are available (and in that decade, they probably would be), making just one of those strip-tubes would take a hack seamstress -- or sailor -- about five minutes. (Hell, it doesn't need to be put together with quilting stitches -- I could do it in five minutes.) A full-scale "hauberk" out of them, if you've got a half-dozen working, might take a half-hour, tops. Preparations? Grab some lengths of chain, grab some canvas.

It takes a whole hell of a lot less time than cutting up sections of boiler plate, it'd be much more flexible, and a good deal less likely to crack the ribs of the wearer, which imperfectly fitted bouncing 20-40 lb sections of boiler plate are altogether too likely to do.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by adm

Shield walls;

The lack of training was why I did not assign them weapons, in the SCA this made the learning curve much faster, and this was hobbyists, real world be killed or worse will help even more. Note that the opposition is equally untrained, equipment poorly handled is better than none.

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

If I'm one of the leaders of the rabble, I want to win this battle, not work over the learning curve for the next one. I'm not going to saddle my boys down with complex weapons when simple ones will do, and I'm not going to hand them weapon suites which need 3X training when I can hand them ones they can use in basic fashions.

I'm also, especially when it comes to newbies, a big fan of strategic offense, tactical defense. I don't want my newbies with cudgel-and-shield charging the other guy, I want them with 7' spears behind an improvised barricade letting THEM charge US, while some friendly folks lob incendiaries down at them from overhead windows. Finest kind.

Well, most of the survivors are not going to be fighting any organised opposition in battles. They take refugee on holy ground and teams of foragers who leave this relative safety in order to gather supplies must face threats in skirmishes. Those threats are most often animalistic feral beasts, but may be other survivors twisted into beast-like humanoid forms, who may retain their human intelligence. It is against the feral small beasts and twisted criminals with claws and fangs that improvised armour, shields and polearms would be most useful.

The army of criminals that are trying to take the Tower of London number in the hundreds* and no refugees at any of the churches in the neighbourhood are going to go anywhere near the Tower or the several strongpoints around it now in criminal hands. It appears that it is not merely a disorganised band of criminals, but is being commanded by an inner core of mercenaries, revolutionaries and organised crime figures, and armed with several hundred breech-loaded military rifles, an unknown amount of dynamite and some stranger weapons. Artillery might not be out of the question, certainly there have been some muffled explosions echoing through the fog during the day.

There are also beast-men and strange monstrosities among the criminals and there is reason to believe that clay statues that have recently appeared in the Royal Mint are golem-like creatures that will fight for them.

The survivors near Aldgate have been troubled by a flying column of criminals seeking to kidnap women for unknown, but surely nefarious purposes. Those were armed with a mixture of hand weapons, pistols, shotguns and one or two military rifles. As soon as some veterans among the newly immigrated Russian Jews discharged old muskets (and the odd Berdan) and pistols at them, however, the criminals left to seek easier prey. They might return, however, and the Anglican survivors in St. Botolph's only have two rifles, several pistols and several shotguns.

Forming a shield wall against such foes is ill-advised, however, as if they return they will probably bring a sizable contingent of armed men.


*PCs have only seen just under two hundred around the west side of the Royal Mint and manning barricades on King Street, but judging from noise coming from elsewhere and what they've heard criminals speaking about among themselves, there are hundreds more on Great Tower Hill and Little Tower Hill, reinforcements resting in several buildings around the Royal Mint and the Upper East Smithfield and more reinforcements coming from the Docklands.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I was surprised to see that so many arrested Chinese carried revolvers given the cost of one in the 1870s.

Yeah, I think that the often repeated admonishment to gentlemen to not go unarmed east of the Aldgate, as all the hardened burglars and other criminals were now carrying weapons, might not be as hyperbolic as it first seemed. The newspapers quoted policemen saying that burglars and robbers 'usually had revolvers in their pockets' and many commentators were concerned about the influx of 'cheap German revolvers' into the hands of poor immigrants, Irish and Cockneys. Not that it was illegal to own a firearm without registration or licence at the time, though there was some (fairly recent at the time) legislation that required a gun licence for shooting game.

Yes, I'll grant that at 12s to £6, many of the more useful revolvers in HT:AG are out of the price range of the typical resident of the East End. On the other hand, anyone not actually living on the street had to have an income enough over 20s* to be able to afford food as well. The very, very bottom of the income scale would be the lowest wage recorded for a match girl, which was 6s a week, but a more typical salary for adult women working in a match factory would be closer to 10s per week and would even reach £30 in annual earnings for full time around this time.

In period sources, early social workers and budding social scientists say that prostitutes claimed an income of £4-£10 per week, though that might be a good week. Even a broken-down 'unfortunate' in her forties, like 'Long Liz' Stride (Elizabeth Stride, neé Gustafsdottir), while she was living hand-to-mouth and dodging landlords at doss houses to spend her pennies on gin, could afford to pay a fine of 5s rather than spend 5 days in lock-up. This suggests that the income for even a slow working day was more than a shilling.

Men appear to have valued their time even higher, with a fairly high proportion of East End men given a choice between a fine and a few days of lock-up electing to pay up, with the apparent value being around £2 (40s or GURPS $ 120) per week that they did not have to spend in lock-up. This would be unskilled workers who committed very minor crimes, i.e. public drunkenness, stealing a mug from a tavern, unruly behaviour, etc. Women accused of running a brothel appear to have cheerfully paid £2 or more to get out immediately their case was heard and stop losing money, even if the alternative was to add only a few days to the few days they had already been locked up.

This means that if it was perceived as important enough, many working class people in the East End, and even those among the quasi-criminal poor who were doing well. could save up for a self-defence weapon worth anything from a few day's labours to maybe more than a month's earnings. This would translate into a bludgeon worth 1s-2s, through knives at 5s to 10s to a small pistol worth maybe £2 at the very most (GURPS $240), with the sweet spot for self-defence pistols likely being around 6s to 15s (GURPS $72 to $180).

That would not only buy a cheap boxlock deringer-type double in a small caliber, it might be enough for a wide range of revolvers, both Cheap in GURPS terms and ones that were cheaper than name-brands, but still counted as Good in GURPS terms. According to HT:AG, GURPS $130 buys you a copy of a Bulldog revolver in a full-power .45 chambering and that means that pretty much any smaller chambering using a similar frame, made by similar manufacturers, is going to be even cheaper.

*The price of 30 nights at a doss house.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Victorians did like a parlour full of knick-nacks, and I am not sure that a shirt of Persian mail or a native cavalryman's jacket was worth much in England in 1888. Egerton mentions that after the Sudan War all the bazaars in Cairo were full of swords and muskets and quilted coat priced as junk or tourist kitsch depending on what the seller thought they could get away with. But its not my period ...

I absolutely would not object to it if a player wanted to find something like this. A use of Wildcard points for a skill which covered Scrounging, Merchant, Connoisseur (Weapons), Expert Skill (Military Science), Current Affairs (Whitechapel or People) or Area Knowledge (Whitechapel) would have done it. So would a use of Serendipity. Even a good skill check against some of the above skills, assuming reasonable time to search.

But given that an overwhelming majority of the people who live there were not born there, usually come from other countries and live, on average, with each family sleeping seven to a room, not many of them have ancestors who did military service for the United Kingdom, brought back souveniers and had space to store them. Some Cockneys might have fought, of course, but given that they are subject to the same massive overcrowding, they are not likely to have held on to many mementoes that require a parlour to put up.

There are some middle class houses on the Aldgate and Whitechapel High Streets, usually built before the area was quite so crowded with recent immigrants, but most families who inherited such houses have moved somewhere more congenial to their middle class values and are renting out all their rooms to Irish or foreign immigrant families.

Ironically, the most likely house to find all sorts of strange mementoes is the house that the PCs have spent most of their time in during the campaign, the town house of Dr. Stanley (deceased [twice]). He bought a house on the Whitechapel High Street and instead of making alterations to use it as a rental property for working class families, he had the insides renovated as a fairly grand town house, with servants' quarters, wine cellar, library, dining room, smoking room, study, parlour and all sorts of other Victorian non-sense. It is not clear why he was so keen on making his home amidst the squalor of Whitechapel, but he lived there ever since he got back from the Afghan War.

In Dr. Stanley's house, there were many mementoes of years in Africa, including the Sudan, as well as some sub-Saharan items. He had war clubs, spears, knives, swords and muskets around. There might well be some armour as well. The PCs didn't stay around in the trophy room to check, in light of the gibbering tentacle monkeys, the maid with a rhino's head, the Cockney gargoyle, the minotaur, the giant spiders and so forth.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

* Blacksmiths were endemic in the Western world well into the 1920s. The notion that you'd have some in the area is sound.

Originally Posted by Dalillama

It's actually just possible that Mr. Hirschsohn has got one of the new arc welders (on the market for a couple years at this point), which will make that type of fastening go a lot faster. It won't be fun for the good father, and it will make taking it off and even bigger nightmare, but the leather and padding should keep him from taking actual damage while being welded into his suit. He might have some minor burns on exposed skin from sparks, but unless Hirschsohn screws up significantly it shouldn't be enough to make up even 1 HP of actual damage. Thick leather gauntlets will be part of several flavors of tradesman's gear, and shouldn't be hard to locate at all.

I intend for Mr. Hirschsohn to be a metalworker and tinkerer from an industrial center in Germany, emigrated to London in the early 1880s, and finding a position as an assistant in an established ironmongery in the Minories, Solomon Ironmongers. Otto Hirschsohn ended up marrying Mary Solomon, Joseph Solomon's daughter, and became a junior partner in the ironmongery. After the old Joe passed away last year, the shop belongs to Otto Hirschsohn, but he has not changed much in the outer store.

Otto Hirschsohn is very interested in new technology and inventions, but his store is primarily an ironmongery, not a full foundry. He will have all the tools necessary to make repairs and perform some tinkering in the back, but he won't have anything for industrial scale production or even, I imagine, the equivalent of a blacksmith's foundry where everything must be made by hand, instead of being bought in and at most assembled there.

There is a small blacksmith's workshop at the farrier's some 300 feet away, but the smith there is old and traditional.

What does this imply in terms of available tools?