N°23 MKIII Manufacturer and Loading?

[doppz92]

Hello, I've had this one for a while and cannot find the manufacturer, 3 dots below the filling screw nor can I find the significance of the red top and the white band (or may be yellow?). Any info will be greatly appreciated. Cheers

 

[Millsman]

The base plug maker is H Hope & Sons 55 Lionel Street, Birmingham. Note that the plug is for a No 23 Mk III. The Grenade body is a No 5 or No 23 Mk I or II. So the plug is wrong for the body.

The white / cream band was originally pink. The pink paint was made from a mix of Vermillion, Oxide of zinc, Terebene and Turpentine spirits. Vermillion is well known for fading and oxide of zinc apparently facilitates it and chlorine compounds make it fade even faster. These paints were organic and were only meant to last a few months at best. So 100 years later it's a miracle that any of these WW1 paints survive.

The red paint shows that it was filled and the pink band shows it was filled with Ammonal or Alumatol.

There was no specification for white bands. Training grenades were generally white all over.

 

[doppz92]

Thanks a lot Millsman, so it has a matching plug and I assume the lever and ring are too. Pink band means Ammonal or Alumatol, but why are the lugs painted red?

 

[Millsman]

I think you post came in as I was editing my post.

So no, it has the wrong plug for the body. The lever is the first type from April 1915 though to the late summer of 1916. So it's most likely a No 5 with the wrong base plug. Saying that the filling would have been Ammonal for a pink banded No 5.

 

[Snufkin]

The grenade did not leave the UK initially with a 23III base plug, but it is not necessarily wrong. A very real possibility is that it is a No.5 grenade that was salved from the front lines, lines of communication, or even taken from wounded and dead soldiers at aid/clearing stations. Having made its way to an Ammunition Repair Facility, it was inspected, cleaned and rectified, being converted to a No.23. Contracts for large quantities (100,000s) of No.23II and No.23III base plugs as well as No.23II slotted strikers were placed for this very purpose.

As an example for one Ammunition Repair Factory, April-June 1918: just over 321,000 No.5 were dealt with, of which 312,544 were converted to No.23.

So it probably best not to change out the base plug.

 

[doppz92]

Thank you, very interesting indeed. I said the plug was original because it seems to be from the same manufacturer as the body. I didn't know grenades were repaired or upgraded. But thinking of it, it does make sense, the already "old" N°5 were lacking the rifle rod feature and it would have been a lot cheaper to replace a couple of parts rather than dump them and purchase newly made grenades. Were these Ammunition Repair Factories located in France or were they in the UK?

 

[Snufkin]

Thank you, very interesting indeed. I said the plug was original because it seems to be from the same manufacturer as the body. I didn't know grenades were repaired or upgraded. But thinking of it, it does make sense, the already "old" N°5 were lacking the rifle rod feature and it would have been a lot cheaper to replace a couple of parts rather than dump them and purchase newly made grenades. Were these Ammunition Repair Factories located in France or were they in the UK?

If it looks like body and base plug have been together a long time then it doesn't harm to keep them that way, and it can preserve the real history for a little while longer.

Saving money was a big incentive, as the attached snippet of repaired No.23 for one month in 1918 shows. Nearly £11,000 saved, which was better than putting them through a stone crusher and simply recycling the raw materials. Ammunition Repair facilities were in France, and at Home, but it made sense to minimise transportation effort and costs.



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