Actually, Old Fuff, I must correct you on one point you made:
William Fairbairn, who was in charge of weapons & training in the Shanghai (China) Municipal Police Department between the two World Wars, and later taught British Commandos, armed his officers with Colt .380 Pocket Model pistols that had been modified with a small screw so that the manual safety was blocked in the "off" position. Yes they were carried with the chamber loaded. At the time Shanghai was a world class crime-center, with numerous daily gunfights, and for the most part his officers survived.
Alas, this turns out not to be the case.
Fairbairn did indeed recommend the Colt automatic (he favored the .45 government model for most, and for those officers with very small hands, the 1908), and did indeed have the thumb safeties on his officers' weapons deactivated. He did
not, however, allow them to carry the pistols with a round chambered in these now "safetyless" pistols.
On p. 18 of his book
Shooting to Live (co-authored with E.A. Sykes), in discussing officer's initial training and familiarization with the automatic pistol Fairbairn states:
The insertion of the magazine and the loading and unloading of the pistol should then be demonstrated and explained. Each operation is described in detail and illustrated on the following pages. This is the moment for the instructor to point out and give the reason for the pinning down, out of action, of the safety-catch on the left-hand side of the pistol. He should make it perfectly clear that the pistol, when carried on service, should have a charged magazine inserted, but that it should never be carried with a round in the breech.
Those italics are
not added by me either; they are Fairbairn's own.
He goes on to say that the instructor should demonstrate how to draw and fire a weapon in this condition, which he says "compares more than favourably with the alternative of drawing, pulling down a safety catch, and firing a round already in the breech. It should be shown, too, that the first method (with the breech empty) eliminates the fumbling and uncertainty inherent in the use of the safety catch."
It's possible he had a point there about the tiny, factory thumb safeties, which were the only kind available in the 1920s when he penned those words, and could indeed have been difficult to operate under stress. So he had his officers draw and rack the slide, kind of like the "Israeli draw," except that his men, just like everybody else in the '20s, were taught to shoot one handed.
But he certainly didn't advocate "cocked and unlocked" carry.
