Never seen one of these before

[ccdjg]

That was very interesting what you say about steel pressing machines being brought into the UK from Germany after the war, and I could well imagine this happening in the 1930’s. It certainly gives food for thought. Could Dianawerk have been one of the machinery suppliers I wonder?

However, the suggestion that the Briton (and by inference its associated clones) were imported from Germany and then falsely passed off as “British Made” does not really stand up in my opinion. If you look at some of Frank Clarke’s adverts for the Briton from the 1930’s, he could not have been more emphatic that it was entirely made in Britain, with phrases like “MADE FROM ENGLISH STEEL PRESSINGS” and “manufactured from the finest BRITISH material and workmanship” abounding. http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q...psa71f3310.jpg

Clarke was a very respected businessman at the time, a governor of the Birmingham General Hospital no less, and I could not imagine him risking his reputation by making these claims if they were untrue.

I much prefer the scenario that imported German presses may have been involved. Do you have any idea how much capital investment the appropriate machine presses might have entailed? If it is a lot then I can’t imagine a small company like Frank Clarke's being able to justify the investment required. It is most likely that he would have outsourced the pressings for his Briton and Super Briton to one of the many large steel manufacturing companies that existed in Birmingham at the time. In fact the following advert from one of his 1930’s catalogues states “all goods herein are of 100% British manufacture and every effort has been made to secure the very best material and workmanship possible”, which appears to be a rare admission of his use of outsourcing. http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q...psdf7dba12.jpg


As if there aren’t enough already, this now raises some more very puzzling questions. If Clarke did outsource the pressings for his Briton to a Birmingham company and did not import them from Dianawerk for UK assembly, then why is the design so closely similar to that of the Diana Model 2? Did Clarke instruct his UK supplier that dies should be made to copy the Diana 2, or did Clarke get Dianawerk to make dies and then import them for his supplier to use? How did this all happen so quickly, with the Diana 2 and the Briton both coming onto the market in 1931? Where does the slightly earlier Super Briton fit into all this?

This outsourcing scenario does offer a possible explanation for the Milbro, Limit and Garanta pistols. The steel pressings company that Clarke used could have sought new outlets to keep their machinery busy, and they could have provided analogues of the Briton, suitably modified for rebranding, to other gun houses to retail. The absence of a makers name on these guns and their boxes is then not so surprising, as the retailer would not want the name of the actual manufacturer on its own branded product, and the manufacturer would not want to see some other company’s name on the guns claiming to be the maker.

This is very reminiscent of what happened with the Milbro SP50 die cast air pistol. Manufacture of these was outsourced to a specialist Dundee company and many thousands were sold worldwide not only under the Milbro/Diana name, but under other brand names such as UMA, Perfecta, Hy-Score, and even Webley. The name of the real manufacturing company was never mentioned on any of these.