Weapons designed, developed and produced at RSAF have become legendary and include those shown here...

• The P53 or 1853 pattern rifled musket.
• The Martini-Henry rifle of the 1870s.
• The Lee-Enfield rifle, which served as the standard British rifle for 54 years from 1903 to 1957 and remains a favoured weapon for target shooting to this day.
• The Lewis machine gun for WW1 aircraft.
• Enfield pistols.
• The BREN light machine gun which has the distinction of having been in service with British Services for 66 years longer than any other weapon!
• The STEN sub-machine gun - (orignal drawing and video story) conceived by Harold Turpin, RSAF's chief designer one weekend as a cheap, effective and easily produced weapon to replace rapidly the vast quantities of rifles lost at Dunkirk and without which the course of WW2 might have been very different.
• The Hispano 20mm cannon for Spitfires and Hurricanes and other WW2 aircraft.
• The ADEN aircraft cannon.
• The FN or SLR (Self Loading Rifle), the British service rifle from 1957 to 1983.
• The GPMG - General Purpose Machine Gun.
• The RARDEN 30mm cannon, still in service on many light armoured vehicles.
• The ARWEN anti-riot weapon.
• The SA80 rifle and LSW (Light Support Weapon) machine gun variant, the current British service weapons.

This is the type of weapon being manufactured, some under licence, at RSAF in the 1980s... Hughes Chain Gun GPMG LSW SA80 ARWEN Click here to view enlarged picture

Though best known for its world famous products, and especially the Lee-Enfield rifle, the BREN light machine gun and the STEN machine carbine, RSAF is probably historically more important as the birthplace of modern engineering production methods in the UK.

Read more »

Prior to 1856 all components were made individually, predominantly by hand. Every weapon was a one-off and the various parts were not interchangeable. But, in America the use of precision machinery to produce identical and interchangeable engineering components had been evolved from a concept originally developed at Portsmouth Dockyard in the early 1800s for making ships wooden pulley blocks.

A Parliamentary Commission was sent to evaluate the new system after it was exhibited at the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition in 1851 and new machinery was purchased from America to re-equip RSAF. A new machine shop to house it was built in 1856 and is believed to have been the largest in Europe at the time. That machine shop with its distinctive Italianate frontage and clock-tower housing a historic Thwaites turret clock is now listed and one of the few original buildings still surviving on the site. The clock, dating from 1783, has been fully restored by its original makers and a mini museum, the RSA Interpretation Centre, has been created below the clock-tower.

Two of the original machines imported from America and a set of the earlier Portsmouth Dockyard woodworking machines, from which the concept of interchangeable production was developed for metalworking, are on display in the "Making of Britain" gallery at the Science Museum in London.

Prior to the advent of modern drawings and interchangeable production methods, guns were made by copying patterns and a "Pattern Room" was set up at the Tower of London to house the master reference patterns approved and sealed by the Board of Ordnance. In 1841 the Pattern Room was moved to RSAF after a fire at the Tower and remained there until closure of RSAF in 1988. It is now part of the Royal Armouries at Leeds.

The new production methods brought with them the need for a very high precision reference standard of length. This lead to the creation of the "Enfield Inch" which became a de-facto national standard until it was superseded by the later official national standard inch.

It was not only for the quality of its weapons that RSAF Enfield was renowned worldwide. Apprentices were trained at the factory throughout its 172 years and RSAF had a well deserved reputation for one of the finest apprentice training schemes in the UK. An RSAF apprenticeship was virtually a passport to a job anywhere in British industry and indeed worldwide. You can read more information about the scheme and the personal story of RSAF apprentice training is told in The Lads of Enfield Lock - 172 years of apprentice training at the Royal Small Arms factory, Enfield, Middlesex, England. 1816 - 1988", compiled by Graham Birchmore and Roy Burges on behalf of the RSAF Apprentices Association and published in April 2005, price £10 (+P&P)

Despite closure of the factory the RSAF Apprentices Association continues to thrive as a means for former RSAF apprentices and their trainers to stay in touch with each other and with the RSAF heritage. The Association has some 280 members on its mailing list and has introduced a class of "Friends" membership open, by invitation, to those who do not qualify for full membership but who have been associated with RSAF and/or the Apprentices Association or are involved with RSAF's heritage.

RSAF straddled the boundaries of Middlesex, Essex and Hertfordshire and occupied an island site between the river Lea to the west and south, and what is now the large flood relief channel to the east (formerly one of the many small watercourses meandering through the Lea valley.) It adjoined its sister ROF, the Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills, to the north and originally shared barge traffic between WARGM and the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. Later when RSAF was connected to the national railway system at Brimsdown in 1916, the WARGM narrow gauge railway ran into RSAF to an exchange siding with the standard gauge tracks. The sites are now separated by the M25 motorway and lie between junctions 25 and 26. The RSAF clock-tower and water-tower are visible from the motorway, if you are quick and know where to look!

RSAF owed its existence and location at Enfield Lock to:

• Concern at the prices and quality of the arms being supplied by the trade and the Government's desire to set up its own competing manufactory to drive prices down and quality up.
• Availability at Enfield Lock of a sufficient head (height) and flow of water to power the water wheels for driving machinery in the barrel mill.

The site was originally very isolated and access was poor other than via the canal. Thus the factory and its community necessarily had to be largely independent and self supporting. Over the years RSAF had its own:

• Workers' housing
• Market - and the RSAF workers founded the Enfield Highway Co-operative Society
• Church
• Schools
• Mechanics Institute, library and reading room - 'further education'
• Four government owned public houses!
• Water supply
• Gas works
• Power station - by 1885, nearly 20 years before the first public electricity supply in north London
• Telephone exchanges
• Canal and wharf
• Railways
• Police station
• Fire brigade and ambulance station
• Doctors surgery and wartime hospitals
• Dining halls
• Theatre and dramatic society
• Outdoor bathing pool - and the workers sponsored the construction of the Enfield Lock indoor swimming pool and baths
• Sports and Social Club with sports field, social hall and sections for football, dancing, orchestra, singing, angling, shooting, model railways etc.
• Volunteer Rifle Corps, the 41st Middlesex (Enfield Lock)

It was the nucleus of skills and expertise drawn in by RSAF which spawned the industrialisation of the Lea valley and the local communities and housing that grew up around it.

For most of its 172 years the factory operated under the name by which it is best known "The Royal Small Arms factory, Enfield" or "RSAF", but in its earliest years it was originally known as "The Royal Armoury Mills", and in its final few years after privatisation its was renamed "Royal Ordnance Small Arms" or "ROSA" (but continued to be commonly referred to as "RSAF", contrary to official dictat).

Today, sadly, most of the former factory has gone and the site has been redeveloped for housing. Just a few of the original buildings and structures remain, including the listed 1856 machine shop with its clock-tower frontage, known as "Machine Shop 1" or "the big room". Part of the filled-in canal and original millpool in front of the machine shop have been opened up again as site features.

More of the history of RSAF may be found in signed copies of the book "The Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield & its Workers" by David Pam, the former Enfield Borough Historian.

There are also chapters relating to RSAF in Jim Lewis two fascinating books about the remarkable but little known developments of technology and industry in the Lea valley:

• London's LEA VALLEY - Britain's Best Kept Secret. Jim Lewis.
  Published by Phillimore & Co Ltd. £14-99 ISBN 1-86077-100-9

• London's LEA VALLEY - More Secrets Revealed. Jim Lewis.
  Published by Phillimore & Co Ltd. £14-99 ISBN 1-86077-190-4

« Back to Start