John Knibbs in his excellent history of B.S.A. “The Golden Century” explains the surprising diffidence on the part of B.S.A. in introducing an ejector version of their new in 1920 proprietary machine made gun.

He reproduces this advert they put out at the time,

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

Within a year or so they brought in an ejector model, pricing it at £25 as opposed to the 11 guineas for the BLNE.

They soon reduced the standard ejector to 14 guineas, keeping the £25 price tag for a game engraved ejector with extra finish.

Going by current auction entries (making some allowance for the fact that a BLNE is more likely to be dumped at auction than the Ejector model) I would guesstimate that at least 75% of the 48,190 were made as Non-ejector guns.

Last edited by Parabola; 01/22/23 08:16 PM.