One for the collectors

[woods&wurz]

A mate of mine who collects WW2 weapons & munitions has come across these, They came out of HOLTS auction house a while back without any details.

Would any the collectors out there be able to shed any light on them, dates etc ?

Thanks in advance

Matt

[enfieldspares]

The boxed FN cartridges were a large "job lot" that was sold at one time i the 1970s and 1980s through John L Longstaff of Pudsey that later would birth Tim Hannam's (now Hannam's Reloading) and Henry Krank. It is thought that these were ex-British Army made for use in the then used FN Browing A-5 that can be seen in some pictures of the Malayan Emergency as point weapon for jungle patrols. The cartridges were commercially produced by FN and then purchased for use by the British Army. Why metal cased? This is because at the time plastic cased shotgun cartridges did not exist and in the damp of a jungle (or as the US Army discovered in the trenches of the Western Front in 1917) paper cartridges swell and don't cycle. Nowadays the problem doesn't exists as plastic cartridges answer it. Shot size 4SG or SSSSG is bigger than the better known AAA. Here's a link to these old English shot sizes:

https://www.vintageguns.co.uk/magazine/english-shot-sizes

Edited August 9, 2023 by enfieldspares

[woods&wurz]

Thanks for the information, I'll pass it on.