Quote Originally Posted by ccdjg View Post
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.
The outsourcing scenario sounds very plausible to me, although if I had a contract with a steelworks to supply branded pistols, I wouldn't have been thrilled about them making 'no brand' pistols to be sold in competition!

Certainly the presses brought over after the war were huge, expensive machines, that could be turned to a variety of uses and presumably wouldn't have been affordable to a small airgun manufacturer. The man I spoke to (now deceased) was first the buyer for a large British manufacturer, before he left the company and used his good relationships with the West Germans to build his own multi-million pound steel and engineering works - which exists today.

Hearing how thoroughly Frank Clarke emphasised the Britishness of his own guns, it looks like he was trying to differentiate his products from rival ones - which he may have known were really 'grey' imports!