SHARING THE LOVE: Lee Enfield Civilian Target Rifles. Part 2

Next rifle is the C.L.L.E. (Charger Loading Lee Enfield) which was a improvement on the M.L.E. (Magazine Lee Enfield). The Brits and Commonwealth troops were initially outmatched by the Boers in their respective volume of fire during the Boer War due to the Boers using Mauser rifles which could be reloaded with stripper clips. The Brit's Magazine Lee Enfield and Magazine Lee Metford rifles were issued with two 8 round magazines and their volume of fire quickly diminished as their troops soon had to resort to single round loading once the magazines were depleted. There was no way to reload their Lee Enfields from chargers or stripper clips. Lesson learned and suitably chastened the Brits soon added a charger guide and the Charger Loading Lee Enfield was born. There were very few changes to the new rifle, the CLLE MkI from the M.L.E. with only a small change later from the MkI to the MkI* by deleting provision to carry a clearing rod. As with the M.L.E. civilians were interested in buying the C.L.L.E also as the desire to buy the 'latest and greatest' still persists to this day. The rifle I'm about to show is a C.L.L.E MkI* built by BSA. Again, there is no royal cypher nor date of manufacture as with most, if not all civilian purchased Lee Enfields. The rifle is in excellent condition and sports the very rare Vickers Son and Maxim front sight and rear sight base. The VSM sighting system used what we would call a 'ghost ring' as a front sight and the issued leaf and slide is on an interesting quadrant style base so you rotated the rear sight left or right instead of sliding it over. The following is pure conjecture of course but I get the sense that Vickers wanted to get in on small arms sales also, perhaps both military and civilian as evidenced by the VSM sight for civilian rifles being offered via commercial sales.