A Curious Gift

-

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...
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Sister Ray

-
Image
Ray Keats - aka Ann Key - local artist & family friend, died this morning. She'd been ill for some years, but never let it get in the way of her work or of tending to the massive network of friends, colleagues and fans she had accumulated over the decades. Her house on the High Street of Rachub, just below where we live - a former cockle factory(!) - bought many years ago when she and her late husband Ronald moved here from Manchester to set up home in Yr Achub, is currently still home to her paintings and drawings, and the front window displays her work, including the last drawing she made in hospital, just days before she died. Her good friend Colin has been a diamond in her latter years, looking out for her and just being there when she needed him. She will be much missed by this tiny community of ageing bohemians up here in the hills, but suffice it to say, George, her cat, will be well looked after now she's gone.
Read more