'War Department' (arrow) Marking

Here's some of mine, one even survived the war!

As you can see, good kit.

graham.

Bill

The other side of that was when something was listed on the inventory that couldn't be found. Then it was cobble something together that could be acceptable and write it off as 'Beyond Economical Repair' and hope . If questioned say "Well thats what I signed for when I took the inventory over!!" and never had cause to use it.

Cheers

Martin

Reminds me of the time the QM's Marquee caught fire on exercise, lads were running up and extracting kit on one side and the QM was on the other throwing it back in to the fire, its easier to add things to the list than save it. All caused by a Kerosene stove being knocked over. Foam mattresses burn with lovely black smoke.

Clive

I feel obliged to revive this old thread, having just found this detail in "Sundials, Incised Dials or Mass-Clocks" by Arthur Robert Green in 1926 ...

[quote]

It is an interesting fact that the "broad arrow" as a Government mark was first used in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. She appointed Sir Henry Sidney to be Master of the Ordnance, and he, finding that the Government effects were constantly being stolen, caused everything under his charge to be marked with his own heraldic badge, the pheon. Since that time the "broad arrow" has been retained as the official Government mark.

[/quote]

... so now we know !!

MichaelG.

Interesting thread. I too have a lot of tools so marked and was lead to believe the 'broad arrow' was used due to the fact that it was easily reproduced with three strokes of a hammer and chisel.

Guy

Some of the marks I have seen look as though they have been produced by exactly that method, I wondered whether that was the case as a chisel can usually be found but a broad arrow punch is a bit harder to find.

Mike

A bonus reference, just found at para 10.3 of this: **LINK**

ftp://ftp.iks-jena.de/mitarb/lutz/standards/dstan/81/091/00000100.pdf

MichaelG.

Another enjoyable breakfast read from Michael. I see requirements for High Pressure Cylinders include:

'Albeit with some damage' reminded me V-Bomber aircrew were issued with eye-patches. These were worn in expectation that nuclear weapons would be exploding over Europe whilst they were en-route to their target in the Soviet Union. If the flash blinded the pilot, he would be able to carry on using his other eye...

The Def Stan also gives the correct name for the Government Broad Arrow - it's a Pheon.

Dave

There are recognisable stylistic tendencies of Broad Arrow varying by period.

Victorian may sometimes have recurved barbs, as often visible on C19 firearms.

That style tended to become replaced by 3 converging tapered wedges - you see this on Ordnance Survey benchmarking on summits later topped by trig points, and late Victorian to WW1 military items , tools and instruments.

The 3 chisel-scrape version of the Broad Arrow tends to be more modern - WW2 and later.

Plus there were variants for the Empire - for example, a Broad Arrow surrounded by a 'C' or a 'U', or with an 'I' in subscript indicated Canada, Union of South Africa and India respectively.

I believe it's an offence to fake it, but that doesn't stop (for example) recently-made 'repro' telescopes and binoculars with arrow-like symbols on them appearing regularly on the Bay. I think most of these originate from the prolific brassworks of the northern Indian subcontinent.

Lots of history here, it is VERY old! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_arrow

I'm always amused by MOD issue 13-amp plugs, which have an arrow on them to show which way up they go

In the workshop I have a set of metric spanners, feeler, screw and radius gauges issued to my father in the 70s. All marked with the crow's foot (the story passed down in legend within the Dockyard was that Samuel Pepys based the mark on a bird's footprint in the snow whilst trying to reduce theft) but accompanied by a letter saying they were issued as his personal property. This was done as part of metrication as fitters had been expected to buy their own tools, and all their BS/UN tools were becoming obsolete.

Brian

Anyone know what the ME stands for?

Whilst there is much to be said for the index-friendly noun-adjective-adjective system, item names did not like to change too rapidly, either in the MoD or the Post Office Telephones in which I was an apprentice (didn't complete it).

For the example that first alerted me to this nomenclatural caution, a Valve, Electronic 0C71 was what everyone else, including its own manufacturer, called a Transistor, OC71.

'''

In the 1980s I worked for a small electronics company whose customers included the Senior Service. It obtained a contract to service examples of a sizeable lump of ship-borne maintenance kit in a gloss-turquoise, ammunition-box style case. The control-panel bore a label, "Some threads may be Unified" - the rest were all BA - so they were not very old.

The instrument itself was designated Test Set ASDIC Patt. xxx NSN-xxx-99-yyy-zzz etc.

I learnt later that the MoD and Royal Navy had replaced their own acronym ASDIC with the Americanism Sonar many years previously.

'''

I remarked to one of the Inspectors on the obvious ruggedness of the Test Set, ASDIC. An ex-Navy man himself, he explained equipment like that has to withstand shot, shell, storm.... and Jolly Jack Tar.

All my school pencils and rubbers and rulers had "property of HM Government" stamped on them

courtesy of the GPO

I have a combination set marked Ministry of Supply. This CWC army watch with arrow.

all my GPO stuff was marked S O

On the naming topic, when I worked at Post Office Research we wanted small coil formers to make some RF filters. No way could we find anything suitable in the "Rate Book" or the Research stores catalogue. Eventually we discovered that when cataloguing they first care across some funny little screws, like grub screws but sintered out of magnetic dust, and intended for use as inductor cores - so they called them "cores, dust". When they later came to the actual coil formers, plastic mouldings into which the cores screwed, they decided to call them "mounting, cores, dust". I doubt they had many people booking them out of stores until we found this out!

Then there was the thing with screw terminals, usually two to a small metal block, with several moulded into a bit of plastic. Of course everyone called them "terminal blocks" so they were catalogued as "block, terminal" and came to be universally known as "block terminals" to the puzzlement of every new recruit. Of course they should them have been reclassified as "terminal, block"....

An expert in military supply could date that watch fairly accurately.

Pre-ww2 items have pattern numbers, where a physical pattern was kept for manufacturers to copy. Later actual patterns became rare, so the numbers became stock numbers, used to identify types of item, not necessarily made to a pattern.

MoS numbers run from WW2 into the 1960s and are broadly tri-service. When the MoS was shutdown, most items were transferred to the MoD and reclassified with NATO numbers by one of the 3 services.

0555 is a Naval Class Group, indicating the watch was ordered by Naval Logistics rather than the Army or RAF. Later, the leading zero of 0555 was changed to an alphabetic 'O' to be consistent with the alpha classes used by the RAF and Army. But the watch also has a full NATO stock number, indicating it comes from the time when military logistics were going tri-service, but the three services were still semi-independent. It's an Army watch bought by the Navy, and probably used by the RAF as well. 99 means it's British.

I suspect a watch bought by the Defence Procurement Agency today would only have a NATO stock number on it, or maybe nothing at all. The US DoD discovered it cost them $140 to have a $10 toilet seat marked up with its NATO stock number!

The need to mark items was a painful wartime lesson, and saving money by removing them may be an unwise peacetime economy. Unmarked items cause chaos when work needs to be done in a hurry, as in the middle of military operation. Serious problem when assets can't be repaired quickly because fittings can't be identified.

Dave

The "Rate Book". Now that brings back memories. I wonder if they still use it, although it's probably been computerised by now.

And what about "81's". What were they?

Peter G. Shaw

81s...they were snipe or long nosed pliers used for wiiring...A GPO...part number...I still have mine..👍