Ned Kelly – The Original Iron Man.

All of the above, plus would the addition of leg & arm armour (I'm also going to add armour for his feet to this as he was also shot in the foot) have helped or would it have hindered him. Though according to reports (& the photographic evidence) the armour DID help to deflect the bullets.

Basically as it stands the myth is could he have built a home made suit of armour from the materials of the time/available to him that he would have been able to wear without collapsing & allowed him move around effectively at speed. & would it have been bullet proof against the weapons of the time & helped him to not only survived the shootout but escaped to freedom. (I'm guessing he'd have made his escape on horse back.)

On a side note I can SO see Jamie not Adam dressing up as Kelly in the armour suit for this one. Mind you Adam is physical a close build to Kelly than Jamie is.

I could have sworn I'd posted this on TC...but apparently not. I know this was posted on Discovery Boards and the MBFC, and in quite a lot of detail.

Press reports from the time claimed that the armour was proof against a '...Martin Henry Round* at 10 yards...', but like a lot of what was reported is in fact questionable when you look a little closer. This particular claim, for example, doesn't have a named source. Later the press reported that bullets were '...bouncing off the armour...' much to the horror of the police. However this related to the battle that took place at night, and it is clear from other accounts that the police didn't even know that the Kelly gang was wearing armour until the next morning - which kind of begs the question as to how they or the journalist could have seen bullets bouncing off the armour without seeing the armour itself.

It also seems that the police were not all that interested in trying to correcting errors. There are probably two reasons for this, the first being that there were some 50 officers who managed to miss the large armour wearing man lurching towards them. The second was that Kelly only hit one of the officers when he tried to escape the next morning, that individual happened to be the guy in charge who panicked and ran off. And it probably wasn't in the polices interest to promote this little fact.

As for the armour itself**. It was 1/4tr inch thick (at least for Kelly's suit) and didn't cover the legs. It is thought that the most reasonable explanations for the lack of leg protection were either that they were intending to fight from behind cover or that they left the legs free so they could mount and ride horses. It could also be a case of realising that given the weight of the suits adding leg armour would have increased the weight to the point they would have been more or less immobile - or given conditions in Australia they would have found the suits far to hot to wear for any length of time.

We do know that Kelly was captured because he was crippled from being shot in the legs. Of the other three members the effectiveness of the armour is questionable because of differing accounts. One member of the gang was said to have died when he made a toast, raised the groin plate and was hit by a bullet***. The way the remaining two died is open to debate, as was if they were wearing the armour at the time they died.

Construction wise there are at least three different versions. The legend has it that they were created in a 'bush fire', although as someone pointed out in Australia that would mean a full sized forest fire so is probably hyperbole. The other version had it that the Kelly gang 'convinced' a local blacksmith to create the armour. However the makers marks from the ploughshares can still be seen on the armour, which makes it rather improbable that they were made with professional tools and equipment.
The more reasonable explanation, and one that has been tested, is that they were cold forged using a camp fire. It is not that unreasonable to speculate that Kelly may have called this a 'bush fire', or that the journalists reporting the story may have misunderstood him - especially if they were not native to Australia or if the term meant something slightly different back then.

(*'Martin Henry round' probably refers to the Martin Henry Rifle which was in service at the time. This used the 0.577/450 Martin Henry Round.)

(**Apparently the armour that is on display is the original, but that various sections have been mixed up or in one or two cases the plates have been placed in the wrong locations. They may have corrected this by now)

(***Why you'd need to raise the groin plate to make a toast is beyond me, unless you have a very strange anatomy. You'd think that otherwise your genitals should be hard enough to deflect a bullet if you were willing to expose them to men who were shooting at you...)

We do know that the armour was capable of stopping or deflecting bullets, since the armour clearly shows evidence of being hit several times. However since it is unlikely that all of the police who were shooting at Kelly were using rifles we can't be sure if the impacts came from revolvers or rifles.

So what parts of this could be tested?

Well cold forging certainly could be, and in fact more than one group has tested and confirmed this is possible. There were also a number of tests carried out on the armour that seem to confirm that the armour was indeed cold forged in a camp fire. These tests are probably not all that well known - as indeed 'Ned Kelly' is almost unknown outside Australia. So duplicating these tests would be reasonable for MB even if the results should be known.

The effectiveness of the armour could also be tested. As noted the official, or at least reported, claim is the ability to stop the rifle rounds of the period at ten yards. I suspect that the thickness of the armour would be effective against pistol rounds of that period, but have always been a little wary of the claim about the 'Martin-Henry' rounds at least at the distance given. I would expect enough energy to get though to cause problems for the wearer even if the bullet itself was stopped.

Last of all the mobility of the suits could be tested if they have fairly accurate reproduction of around the same weight. The major question would be to see if you really could have ridden a horse in the armour, and maybe they could expand this to seeing if adding additional leg protection would have caused serious problems. They don't, of course, have to use a real horse for this - and may not want to as they could hurt the horse either by the weight of the armour or by catching parts of the suit on the poor animal when they try to mount.

I'll try to hit some of the points in order:

the reporter could have guessed about the armor if he was far enough from the police and the noise of the guns to hear the bullet impacts on the metal.

for the question of the "toast" keep in mind this is Australia and he was a criminal - where giving a toast and raising his groin plate could have been a field expedient for not being able to drop his trousers.

to me, the presence of makers marks does not automatically eliminate the possibility of having a professional involved. a professional could still have reworked ploughshares. the evidence that it was not done at forge temperatures may or may not indicate the lack of a professional - but is more significant data.

I didn't confirm the dates to make the correlation, but if this was in the black powder cartridge era, it was common for rifles and pistols to be chambered for the same ammunition; to make carrying extra simpler. for example, the original Winchester repeating rifle and the Colt Peacemaker were both chambered in .44-40. this would both make it harder to tell the difference between rifle hits, and pistol hits - but also reduce the muzzle energy of the rifle below that which modern shooters think of as "rifle shots"

last of all, you missed the last possibility for why they had no leg armor: the simple lack of resources (time and/or material)

the reporters claims about the armor must be judged in the context of WHEN the report was made. if he filed his story a day later, then certainly he was adding embellishments after the fact. if he filed the story as soon as the police stopped shooting at night, we might be interested to figure out how he determined there was armor when the police didn't.

ah, yes - makers marks would show the armor was reshaped out of other things. rather than fresh cast.

as for resources: we had a slogan in the theatre: "done is art"

without being able to talk to the gang, we will never know their line of reasoning, which leaves "well, I think we can get by with that" on the table.

I think you probably mean the Martini-Henry Rifle.

As I said, even the police were unaware that the gang was wearing armour until the next morning when Kelly came out to face them and the gang was fighting from within a building at night which hid them from sight. So even if someone had heard the sound of bullets hitting metal they would have assumed they were striking something other than armour.

After all metal armour wasn't something that had been in use for over 230 odd years*, so was hardly something anyone would expect.

(*The last appearance I know of was a cavalry/mounted infantry unit that fought on the Parliamentary side during the English Civil war circa 1650. This unit was nicknamed 'Lobsters' due to the colour of the troops when they took the armour off. One can only imagine what colour you'd be after wearing a similar suit of armour in the Australian outback - which might be yet another reason for dispensing with leg armour.)

French Cuirassier cavalry regiments wore Breast plates during the Napoleonic era, indeed the charge they made against British squares at Waterloo is quite famous.

British cavalry also wore breastplates during the Napoleonic wars.

However by Kelly's time such armour was used for dress purposes, and would in any case not have been something seen in Australia.

The breast plates worn by the British Horse Guards circa 1815 were required to be proof against pistol shot at ten yards, and most of them seem to have been more than capable of stopping rounds at point blank range.

The swords carried by the horse guards were of poor quality, or at least the issued swords were known to be of somewhat questionable quality*. But the armour doesn't seem to have been complained about. That said Napoleonic pistols would have been considerably less powerful and had less penetrating power than a pistol 70 years later.


(*One trooper hit a French man and had his sword snap at the hand guard. He was a semi-professional boxer and rather than disengage - which would have been more than acceptable under the circumstances - he stayed in the cavalry fight and used what was left of his sword as a knuckle-duster. Had he done this a generation or two later he would most likely have won a Victoria Cross for his actions.)

BTW, I'm not 100% sure that the French Cavalry ever made it as far as the British lines before being engaged by the Allied cavalry. I do know that the French Cavalry charged, but the result was a mass brawl between the cavalry units of both sides that effectively took them out of the battle for the rest of the day. It was only towards the end of the day that the Horse Guards were considered in any condition to mount a counter-charge, and then more because it looked like the battle might have been lost than because they were considered to be in top form.
This was down to the condition of the horses rather than losses sustained in the brawl. While I've not seen anything in regards the condition of the French Cavalry at this point, it seems unlikely that they were in any better condition given that the horses used by the British Horse guards were almost certainly in much better condition than anything used by the French both because of breeding and in the way they were looked after.