Guns Illustrated 2011. Dan Shideler

Guns Illustrated 2011

Wesson name. At any rate, Wesson didn’t hang around long and by 1877 Harrington had partnered with William A. Richardson to perfect a top-breaking, shell-ejecting revolver, a gun that H&R/Marlin now says was the first American gun of its type. (This is a tough claim to support, since H&R’s First Model Hand Ejector appeared in 1886 and S&W’s first break-open revolver hit the market as early as 1878.) Prior to the introduction of the First Model Hand Ejector, H&R’s bread and butter had been a tremendous variety of solid-frame, removable-cylinder .32 and .38 revolvers. The double-action-only Vest Pocket .32 is one of these.

It pays to load only four .32 S&Ws in the H&R Vest Pocket .32. Hardly a man-stopper, but who wouldn’t love a 125-year-old gun in this condition?

In the beginning, H&R revolvers weren’t marked with the Harrington & Richardson name. Some were marked “Aetna”; others, including the Vest Pocket .32, were unmarked. In fact, the only markings on the Vest Pocket are “VEST POCKET”on the topstrap and “.32” on the barrel. The grips are of no help; they’re just plain fi lagreed hard rubber. We can be pretty sure it’s an H&R, however, because of the close resemblance it bears to a revolver illustrated in the 1888 - 1889 Great Western Gun Works Catalog.

The gun shown in the Great Western catalog is listed as the American Bulldog, which was a trade name used by H&R, Johnson & Bye, and a few other makers as well. You’ll also find similar guns by H&R branded as Young America, Bicycle, Victor, and various other trade names. The general outline of the American Bulldog, however, is a dead ringer for that of the H&R Vest Pocket except for barrel length. If you squint a little and use your imagination, you can see that the American Bulldog is the same basic gun as the Vest Pocket.

Except, of course, for the Vest Pocket’s stubby, absurd-looking 1” barrel. That tiny barrel throws the symmetry of the gun entirely out of whack, but the silly little thing does fit in a vest pocket. (I know. I tried it.) The H&R Vest Pocket has to have been one of the smallest centerfire revolvers ever produced. I for one have never seen a smaller one, not even a Belgian velodog.

The Great Western catalog lists the American Bulldog for sale “with either the ordinary old-style hammer, or with the patent safety hammer.” And that’s something noteworthy about my Vest Pocket. Even by nineteenth-century standards, it is primitive -- so primitive, in fact, that it’s hard to believe it was ever offered to the public. It does not have a rebounding hammer. In other words, the gun’s firing pin always rests at full-down position. This is hard to believe in today’s safety-oriented, litigious world.

Here’s how it works. To remove the cylinder, you depress the cylinder latch underneath the barrel and withdraw the cylinder pin. You then wiggle the cylinder out of the right side of the frame. Note that the firing pin still protrudes from the recoil shield! There is no way to retract the hammer as it doesn’t have a spur.

Now you load the cylinder. If you load all fi ve chambers, you will find, when you replace the cylinder, that a loaded cartridge now rests directly underneath the firing pin. Not good! As I say, it’s a little tough to imagine such a thing. The closest modern equivalent is to be found in the various .22 mini-revolvers, which are loaded in pretty much the same way as the H&R Vest Pocket. However, the mini-revolvers have safety notches between the chambers in the cylinder that provide a place for the firing pin to rest in and stay out of trouble. There are no such notches in the Vest Pocket’s cylinder.

Sounds incredible, doesn’t it? I had such a hard time believing it myself that I had the gun examined by three professional gunsmiths, all of whom disassembled it and agreed that the little thing had absolutely no provision for a safe hammer rest, or in fact for a safety of any sort.

I can only speculate that if you were the owner of an H&R Vest Pocket revolver, you loaded only four chambers and inserted the cylinder so the firing pin would rest over an empty one. With any luck, you’d discover this technique before you accidentally shot yourself in the gut.

H&R must have recognized the inherent weakness in this design, for the H&R Vest Pocket was soon upgraded to the “Vest Pocket, Safety Hammer,” as alluded to in the great Western catalog copy. You can easily tell a Vest Pocket Safety Hammer revolver from the earlier Vest Pocket by looking at the gap between the face of the cylinder and the recoil shield, preferably while the gun is unloaded. If the firing pin protrudes into this gap, you have a Vest Pocket. If it doesn’t, you have a Vest Pocket, Safety Hammer. Of course, you could save yourself all this trouble by reading the markings on the topstrap.

The H&R .32 Vest Pocket looks positively dinky compared to its contemporary, the Forehand &Wadsworth .32 Double Action at top, and the 1926-vintage Colt Police Positive at bottom.

I actually carried my H&R Vest Pocket as a self-defense gun for a week or two, but then I stopped for two reasons: 1) it’s so small I was afraid I might lose it in my pocket, and 2) it looks like a Hong Kong cap gun -- not likely to inspire fear in the criminal heart. And, truth to tell, I have some concerns about the long-term reliability of the gun.

The H&R Vest Pocket, like so many other economical (i.e., cheap) revolvers of the period, lacks a positive cylinder lock. At the moment of firing, there’s nothing holding the cylinder in position except the pressure of the pawl. Once the trigger is released, the pawl returns to rest and the cylinder is free to rotate every whichaway. This system isn’t entirely impractical -- the Colt Model 1878 used a similar design -- but it does promote wear on the hand under the pressure of repeated firing. A gun of this type will shoot loose, eventually, and there’s not much you can do about it.

And then there’s the whole aesthetics thing. I ask you, dear reader, is this not the ugliest revolver you’ve ever seen? The Japanese Type 26 revolver was ugly as a road-killed turtle, but the H&R Vest Pocket has it beat by a mile. Am I right?

I can’t say for sure when my H&R Vest Pocket was made, but as a member of the Aetna/Young America/American Bulldog family -- and judging from from the style of the lettering on the topstrap – it probably left the factory around 1880, give or take a few years. It’s hard to believe, but these tiny little guns are currently priced in the $150 to $200 range in Excellent or better condition – when you can find them, that is.

That’s not exactly a steal by my standards, but if you like unusual revolvers, it’s not too bad. At least I didn’t think so.

With all due respect to my able Contributing Editors, I’d like to note a handful of new products that tripped my personal trigger during the last 12 months. You can read more about a few of them in other areas of this book, but this is my take.