A Curious Gift

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I mentioned yesterday that we had picked up some of the last remaining bits from Lou's house before the house clearance can start next week. One of the collection of small objects I found - in the old coal shed, of all places - was the above. It's a spent .303 cartridge and a hollow 'bullet' that, as you can see, had been in the 'case for a very long time, given the tarnish on the exposed portion of it.

As you can just see, the cartridge case is engraved with a monogram of a crown over a fancy 'M', and the 'bullet' is marked Sterling Silver. I was intrigued by this little curiosity, so I did a bit of Googling around and discovered that this has quite a bit of history behind it. The monogram belongs to Princess Mary, and the cartridge case and silver 'bullet' originally contained a pencil, and the whole formed part of one of the gift boxes sent to British troops in the Great War as part of the Princess Mary Gift Fund, along with tobacco, cigarettes or other such stuff to bolster the morale of the poor buggers out there being shot at in the King's service.

The markings - apart from the Royal moniker - on the cartridge case base, suggest that the round was manufactured in King's Norton, Birmingham, and was a Mark VII. There was an international agreement in force at the time that soft or hollow-pointed ammunition was outlawed as effectively immoral because of the catastrophic wounds that these munitions cause, due to the instant expansion of the round on entering the target's body.

The point here is that the Mark VII .303 round was, whilst being a full-metal-jacketed round, its internals were a tad devious in design, to avoid breaking 'the rules' of an exposed bullet-core. These things were 'tail-heavy', having a lightweight nose filling ahead of the lead core. While they flew true and straight, ballistically, due to the spin imparted by the barrel's rifling; as soon as the bullet struck its target, it would tumble end-over-end, maximizing the wound thus caused.

The ridiculous irony of it all was that these rounds were autoclaved after manufacture to minimize wound infection on deployment, and that these gifts to the troops were made from spent munitions very close in design to the very stuff being fired at them daily by the enemy. The moral contradictions of warfare are encapsulated in this small and now unassuming little trinket.

Addendum - I've just checked, and the manufacturer of the cartridge case was probably Kynoch & Co., not the King's Norton Metal Company - if anyone out there knows what the stamp K14 exactly means, I'd be grateful for the feedback...
 

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