Loading individual rounds into a magazine can be a long and laborious process as each round has to be taken out of a box and pressed into the box magazine one at a time. To speed this process up many militaries adopted a principle dating back to the days of the bolt action rifle, the charger. These metal strips came pre-prepared with rounds ready to be fed as a block into a magazine, rapidly speeding up the loading process. Some early automatic rifles came with charger guides built into the receivers over the magazine well, but in reality it was most likely that magazines would be loaded off of the weapon so separate charger guides needed to be developed that could be fitted to a magazine to serve the same purpose of allowing swift reloading from chargers.

The British Self Loading Rifle was no exception and a simple pressed steel guide was issued that could be slotted over the mouth of the magazine:This is an unissued example and has a stores label attached, sadly any writing on this has decayed to the point of being illegible. The charger is open at the top to allow the rounds to pass through and into the body of the magazine:The only markings on the charger are a stores code, manufacturer’s initials and a date:As mentioned above this is an unissued example, so comes in its original waxed cardboard stores box:It is cushioned inside the box from rattling around by a simple piece of corrugated card:My thanks go to Major Ian Ward who very kindly let me have this one for my collection and at some point I will get out some inert rounds and a magazine and see how effective it actually is…