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Picture Page October 2014 An uncommon box of Eley pistol cartridges........... . . . . . . . . . The box shown above was sold in the August 2014 Wards Collectibles
auction, and is one a handful of known matching boxes of made by Eley
Brothers. Jacob Brandt includes the cartridge in his Manual of Pistol and
Revolver Cartridges, and identifies it using the two
A .45 M. P. cartridge in the Imperial War Museum's collection (catalog # SAA1479) is described on their web site (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30027478), and they point out the identification of the cartridge by Dr Geoff Sturgess in the Journal of the Historical Breechloading Smallarms Association (Vol. 2, No. 6, page 5) as being made for use in an automatic pistol patented on November 17, 1885 (British patent # 14047) by Sir Hiram Maxim. This is the identification of the cartridge that is accepted by collectors today. According to the web site, the pistol is 'a delayed-blowback adaptation of Maxim's short recoil locked breech machine gun design covered in his 8th July 1885 Patent Number 8281, and employs a tubular magazine beneath the barrel. The cartridges in the Patent drawing bear a strong resemblance to this cartridge (their catalog # SAA1479). Its considerable taper would have allowed the case to set back immediately and facilitate the delivery of energy to the breech face without gripping the chamber walls too tenaciously, as would have been likely with a conventional straight-cased revolver cartridge. It appears to have been cut down and formed from an Eley .450 rifle cartridge case. The cartridge is almost certainly black powder loaded, and would have soon been eclipsed by the development of smaller-bore smokeless self loading pistol cartridges in the early 1890s.' The patent drawing of the pistol with it's tubular magazine is shown below.
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An example of Maxim's pistol has never surfaced. Note the
similarity of the cartridges in the drawing, with their short tapered and
rimmed cases and flat nosed bullets, to the cartridges in the box, one of
which is shown here. As noted above, the cartridges are
Discussion of these boxes on the International Ammunition Association's cartridge forum revealed that, in addition to the box in Ward's auction, photos of at least four more of these boxes are known. The hand-labeling of the five boxes differs enough to make it obvious that they are different boxes; it is also obvious that they were labeled by the same hand. The most significant difference in labeling among the boxes is the inclusion of 'Cartgs' (.45 M. P. Cartgs) or a similar abbreviation in the cartridge identification line on two of them. Three of the other boxes are shown below:
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meanings
of 'M. P.' that were commonly accepted at the time my copy of his book was
published (1998), these being 'Mauser Pistol' and 'Metropolitan Police'.
Unfortunately, no pistol had been located that used this cartridge so the
true identification of the cartridge was open to speculation. 
believed
to have been made by Eley from shortened .450 rifle cases. The boxes were
apparently originally made to hold rifle cartridges, with the labels hand
modified to show they held 50 of the .45 M. P. cartridges rather than 10
rifle cartridges. In addition, the cartridge identification and load
information were also added by hand. 
