A Few small finds today at WW2 camp site

[SatansCabanaBoy]

great display, nice work.

[Steve T]

Great display

[harry211]

a meager offering tonight I'm afraid - a couple of GS buttons, a round "thing", threaded both round the internal hole and the external, marked G.T.L and nicely dated 1917, but not a clue what it is. I have looked up GTL and all that comes up is Gas to Liquid so maybe part of a heating system

A single cartridge this time but am actually pleased with this one as it is not one of the normal inspection rounds and is dated 1907so a nice early one - can anyone help id this one. I am assuming it's a drill round given the rounded bullet....

[Whitehunter]

That looks like the type of .303 they used in the Zulu war

- - Updated - -

That looks like the type of .303 they used in the Zulu war

[Steve T]

It isn't a drill round. The snub nosed bullets were replaced by the spitzer type in 1910. You can also just make out a c on the stamp denoting a cordite fill. The round looks like a misfire to me.

[TonyE]

It is a Cordite Ball Mark VI which was introduced in January 1904. Your example was made in Canada by the Dominion Cartridge Factory in 1907.

Although the spitzer Ball Mark VII was introduced in 1910 as already posted, this was only used by units equiped with the re-sighted SMLE Mark III and the Mark VI was still needed for troops equipped with ealier Marks of rifle. This included Canadian, Australian, Indian and British Territorial Forces. The Mark VI round continued to be made in the Dominions until almost the end of WWI.

Your round is a missfire caused by a light strike of the firing pin, which in turn was probably caused by dirt or gunge inside the bolt. It is still live so subject to the Firearms Act I am afraid.

The Mark VI round was virtually identical to the Mark II that was used in the Boer War, not the Zulu Wars. The Zulu Wars took place in the 1870s, long before the .303 entered service in 1889.

Regards
TonyE

[harry211]

not that I want to appear ungrateful or complacent , but really......more of these *!*!!* inspection rounds - about 250 or so this time around. They are all coming from the same small area which I assume must have been near the armoury as they seem to have just tipped boxes and boxes of them out of the door before they went home..

hopefully there might actually be something more interesting the same area as I seem to have cornered the market in WW1 inspection rounds - need to set up a shop I think

[LUCKYSTRIKE]

Hey Harry,
Great result again , is the building that could have been the ammo store still standing or are its footings showing? It might be worth getting a large scale map of the site or even drawing one so you could record where you made the different finds. This may give an idea what different parts of the site were used for and in the future could become an important reference on the history of your productive site.
Keep up the good work.
LS

[harry211]

Thanks LS. It is quite a difficult site to interpret - it is now quite heavily wooded and overgrown. No standing buildings as I believe they were wooden, but there are remains of foundations but with the overgrowth/trees and some demolition rubble it's quite hard to make sense of it all. I do record everything using GPS and when I have some time I'll attempt to map out some of the building remains and where stuff is found. All the finds so far though have been in/on the camp boundary bank & ditch, so don't know if they will actually relate to locations of specific buildings or whether things were just dumped in a random manner. There are a couple of distinct dump areas with the usual piles of broken crockery, but the .303s (about 1500 have come out so far) are all in a small spot and there is a foundation of a building quite closeby, but there appears to be no other general dumping in that area as all I pull out are the .303s so a bit of a mystery at the moment.

cheers
m

[jayh]

Matt if you ever need a hand digging up all those pesky rounds then give me a call would love to have a search there!