Kerr's Patent Revolver - History

History

James Kerr had been the foreman for the Deane, Adams and Deane gun factory. Robert Adams, one of the partners and inventor of the Adams revolver, was Kerr's cousin. Kerr developed an improvement to the Adams revolver, British Patent No. 1722 of July 28, 1855, and when Adams left the Deane brothers to found the London Armoury Company on February 9, 1856, Kerr went with him. The London Armoury Company manufactured military rifles and revolvers. Kerr designed rifles for the company based on the 1853 pattern Enfield rifled musket. When the company directors decided to focus on rifle production in 1859 Adams left, taking his revolver patents with him.

Kerr designed a new revolver in .36 caliber and .44 caliber (54 bore in British measurement). Production began in April 1859. The British government did not initially purchase the weapon and civilian sales were modest.

However, the U.S. Civil War began in 1860 and the governments of both the United States and the Confederacy began purchasing arms in Britain. In November 1861, 1,600 revolvers were purchased for the Union army, at $18.00 apiece. However Confederate arms buyers Maj. Caleb Huse and Cpt. James D. Bulloch contracted for all the rifles and revolvers the Armoury could produce (and the Confederate government could pay for). As a result, the London Armoury Company become a major arms supplier to the Confederacy, selling the most of the 11,000 Kerr revolvers produced to Huse. The Kerr revolvers sold to the Confederacy were said by William Edwards in his book Civil War Guns to be those between serial numbers 3,000 and 10,000, but earlier serial numbers are thought by collectors to have also been shipped to the South, and there are no good records to show the exact number sold to the Confederate buyers.

As with all Confederate imports from England (and Europe), these weapons had to pass through the Union blockade and the number that actually reached the Confederate army is unknown. Modern writers often state that the Confederates acclaimed the London Armoury Company's guns (which would include the first-class model 1853 rifle-muskets on the Enfield pattern) as the best weapons delivered to the Confederacy. The London Armoury Company supplied more revolvers to the Confederacy than the total produced by all the efforts of Southern manufacturers to make revolvers.

As the Civil War progressed, the London Armoury Company was almost completely dependent on sales to the Confederacy and survived for only a year after the end of the war, dissolving in the Spring of 1866.