Thread: School me on the 7x57 mauser

Originally Posted by Bol Tackshin

Around the turn of last century, the Boers and Brits were having at it in South Africa. The 7x57 was popular among the Boers and Rigby would not have had much success selling the 7x57 in the rest of the British Empire. That's what I read many years ago to explain the Rigby chambering, but I can't seem to verify it. Does anyone else have insight into this?

American gun writers always try and explain it and get it wrong, simply because they never called it a .275" in their country. The truth is that the 7x57 was just commonly known as the .275 in the British empire, right from the start - they didn't use metric names. The same way we call the .303 the .303. That's what it was called. People knew it was also called the 7x57 of course, but that was something that Europeans called it. Germans and foreigners and suchlike. As another example, in Europe they had the 9.5x57mm, a fairly popular cartridge. In the British commonwealth, this cartridge was known as the .375. (Rimless)
It's just imperial versus metric.

What Rigby did do was repackage and sell the 140 grain load as their brand of a "High Velocity" load, which was very popular for deer stalkers in the UK, but it was never marketed as a proprietary cartridge, or referred to posessively. Rigby have never referred to a ".275 Rigby" as a cartridge name until very recently with the new company. Historically, never.

The earliest mention I can find of the ".275 Rigby" referring to the 7mm cartridge is in an article by American gun writer Jack O"connor from the 1970's, and I am sure he just misconstrued or misremembered what WDM Bell had written in his books. It sounds good, but it's just a simple mistake.