Interview Harold J. Turpin june 1943

Good thing they chose his second surname and not first to name the beacon after, then innit.

Otherwise, it might have had a red light instead of the amber.

A country singer here in NZ had to take his grandmothers name when he went to work in the States, the Kiwis on here will know who it is, John Grennel aka John Hore. So names can be a problem.

Ian S C

I checked a couple of references at the library:

"The New Encyclopedia of Firearms" by Ian V. Hogg. Page 45 Shepard and Turpin + Enfield.

"Modern Rifles and Sub-Machine Guns" by Major Fredrick Myatt (MC) and Gerard Ridefort page 113, Shepard and Turpin + Enfield.

Also to add to Bren, and Sten, there is Aden (as in aircraft Cannon*) stands for "Armament Department Enfield".

Ian S C                              *25 mm & 30 mm, used in the Hawker Hunter, English Electric Lightening

Edited By Ian S C on 02/03/2015 05:19:57

Good morning all,

A good friend of mine was one of the Hoares of Portsmouth, his house was full of Hoares and they all lived next to the Bishops!

Turpin was a prolific writer and contributor to the Model Engineer; locally one of our members has his locomotive Hybrid, still going strong after many years and displays some beautiful craftsmanship and many novel ideas.

Regards,

Bob Youldon

Interesting post I lived in enfield and every sunday we would travel to ridgeway park in chingford to run his hybrid loco he was a very good engineer having designed the sten gun He also helped me with my Juliet Peter lejeune

First of all thanks for such nice words Rod. I have looked into all the references I could find and also communicated with people at the apprentice organisation i Enfield. Even in Enfield they agree. Enfield is for England!

No reference older than 1949 describes that EN is for Enfield. It's the older references that states EN for England. Even the inventer him self, who was also an exelent model engineer and member of this verry fraternity his entire life who says En is for England.

I myself has also looked to the internett for answers. A lot of sites states EN for Enfield, but they don't have any references to where they have this from. They are all repeating this missinterpretation.

I have written an article on the subject (in Norwegian) wich are to be published in late march. I am about to translate this to english and I promise I wil post i here too.

Lastly I find it most interesting that in this forum of all there are stil people not suoopring one of your own inventor and his wn description that EN is for Enland. It realy is

(The argument on this forum is, by the ay, exactly the same as we had in a norwegian forum. People stating this and that from the internet without any check og the sources to verify, or falsify, the information the nett sugests is the truth. I guess this is a possibility to learn for us all. The internett doesn't have all the answers and isn't always right.)

Hi Askilkd,

Congratulations on your tenacity.

I suspect Mr Turpin wanted to emphasise that he came up with the design before returning to Enfield.

It also shows how books can repeat something and just because it appears logical, it gets repeated, just as much as on the net.

I was tempted to mention the 'EN'; in EN1a, which stands for neither England nor Enfield.

Neil

.

Neil,

For info.

The word 'Factoid' was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe.
"facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper"

Mailer created the word by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean "similar but not the same".

The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as "an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact".

MichaelG.

Michael,

I didn't know that, I thought a factoid was just a little fact! You are an unrelenting source of invaluable information.

Thanks,

Rod

You're welcome, Rod

The book is excellent, by the way.

MichaelG.

At the time(1943) Britain was at war, saying the EN was "for" England was typical propaganda/jingoism of the time.

Both the Oxford Concise, and Collins Dictionary of the English Language support the use of EN = Enfield.

Ian S C

Ian,

I admire your tenacity!

Such is the power of the factoid (my new favourite word)

Cheers,

Rod

Well Wikipedia can choose whichever answer it wants, and cite this thread as a source

Some people don't have the guts tio tackle the issue

www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/565239/Sten-gun

Neil

I imagine that the originators wanted to differentiate their home grown STEN design from the BREN, a copy of a Czech gun. I don't suppose the authorities cared one jot what the derivation was, it fitted within their naming convention - BREN, STEN, ADEN. But that's all surmise (it might even become a factoid). Askild's research has given us the best documented derivation (sources and footnotes etc.). I don't suppose it really matters what the derivation of the name was except to a few of we nerds!

Rod

Perhaps we will never know because the origin of the acronym seems to have been thoroughly muddled by the mists of time.

**LINK** quotes evidence given to the Board of the Royal Commission Awards to Inventors. Lord Cohen: "Why was it called the Sten?" Colonel Shepard: "It was called the Sten by the then Director General of Artillery. The S was from my name, the T from Mr. Turpin who was my draughtsman and who did a very large amount of the design and the EN was for England. That is the origin of the name, for which I accept no responsibility."

But In the official history of the Royal Ordnance Factories, ST is for Shepard and Turpin and EN is for Enfield.

Note that the acronym was coined by the Director General of Artillery, not by Shepard or Turpin. The DG might well have said "England" by mistake. It won't have been the last time a senior bod was later corrected by his officials! My money is on EN=Enfield because this is consistent with British naming policy at the time. May I have a Nerd badge please?

In this case it stands for Emergency Number.

At the start of WWII there were many steel makers and each had their own specifications and it was soon realise there were going to be problems.

So the Ministry of Supply got a delegation of all the large manufactures together, supposedly at a hotel In Scarborough ? and locked them in a room and told them they could only come out when they all agreed to a system.

From this the EN numbers were born.

They were supposed to last for the war but they were so successful they carried on right up unit we got these new fangled number no one knows.

If you ring my steel company up and ask for 99M99 or whatever they go

"Oh you mean EN plonk

I have a huge interest in the sten gun, as it was great example of design engineering in difficult times. No or little skilled labour available, specialist machine tools scarce, materials in very short supply and needed elsewhere for more pressing items, during the wartime panic after dunkirk.

The sten was a design masterpiece imho. It ticked all the boxes, simple to manufacture with unskilled labour, mainly housewives drafted in, in any videos or photos i have seen of production. It didn't need any fancy machine tools to make, a lathe, horizontal mill and some gas welding equipment seems to be about it. The materials needed were nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing difficult to make, plain old mild steel mainly.

It was churned out in the millions by a company any of us of a certain age will remember and be familiar with, namely Triang toys made by lines brothers in merton, london. This was the largest toy factory in europe at one time i believe.

Have you seen the video below ? Peter Laider is an expert in most british military firearms , and i think can be contacted on some of the military firearm forums.

http://youtu.be/NMqSsvqjJ2E

P.s, isn't discussion of naughty things like firearms banned on here like it is everywhere else by the politically correct nazi's ? 

Edited By ronan walsh on 05/03/2015 00:26:04

In a certain Australian military establishment in which I onced worked there resides an original 1935 model Czech vz. 27 from Brno, (designed by Vaclav Holek and ancestor of the .303 and 7.62mm BREN, ), an original English 9mm STEN and the Aussie equivalent, designed when the requirement was urgent and imports were difficult to ship.

The OWEN Gun.

Invented along the same lines - cheap, reliable and simple to produce from pressings. The prototype was was left in a bag at a pub in Kembla Grange, the inventor was an engineer with a lathe and mill at home and the one person who could do anything about it got his hands on it from the landlord. So it went into production at Lysaght. Used with great effectiveness in the jungles of Papau-NewGuinea.

The name came from the inventor, Mr. Owen.

* Danny M *