The illustration is taken from the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research vol XXXIII no.136 (Winter 1955) which accompanied an article by R Scurfield: British Military Smoothbore Firearms. In the section titled the Percussion Arms Known as Pattern 1842 he writes about a short-barrelled Lovell musket as held by Sergeant Simpson in the Cunliffe painting of 1853. The musket is probably no.32 in the photo, although not the accompanying long bayonet. Mr Scurfield writes: ‘These are the last smoothbore weapons to be issued to the British Army, and were called into being by the fire at the Tower in 1841, which destroyed many thousand stand of flintlock arms (mostly of the pattern called in Queen’s Regulations 1844, the “Land Regular and Light Infantry Musket”) awaiting conversion to percussion. The fire is to be regarded rather as a blessing in disguise than as a catastrophe, from the point of view of the supply of small arms, since at any rate, it delivered the British Army from such a succession of “transformations” of flintlocks as for many years afflicted the French.
‘All regiments of Foot received the 39-inch barrel musket, except the Foot Guards, who continued to carry Lovell’s Pattern musket; the 33-inch seems to have been issued only to sergeants, and the 30-inch was special to the Royal Sappers and Miners and the Royal Artillery: it was called a carbine, and the one illustrated (fig. 32) is marked on the butt-plate “R.S.M.” with the date “Tower 1847” on the lock.’
