Maltby Lee Enfield Serial Numbers
British munitions factory: ROF Maltby was a rifle manufacturing plant near which manufactured weapons such as the rifle and submachine gun. During, ROF Maltby manufactured over 737,000 weapons. Rifles manufactured at Maltby were marked either with and M, RM or ROF(M) to distinguish them from rifles made at other ROF plants.ROF Maltby and were established early in World War II to increase arms production facilities in areas less vulnerable to aerial attack and were known as Shadow Factories. The main British factory for rifle manufacture in WWII was the BSA factory in Shirley. Enfield, which until 1941 was Britain's main military rifle production facility, focussed on producing Bren Guns etc.ROF Maltby's closure was announced in Parliament in July 1957 with dismantling work beginning almost immediately afterwards and complete withdrawal and demolition had been achieved by 1958. References.
While I sit and patiently wait for my SA SG to make its way to my driveway, I've decided to kill time by starting to research my next purchase: a Lee-Enfield No. 4 Mk. I.
(The short explanation of my choice is that I was recently given a nice Mosin-Nagant M91/30, which got me interested in collecting representative samples of WWII infantry rifles. Now that I've got the Garand coming, I'd like to round out the Allied collection as soon as funds become available.)
As I've begun looking at Enfields online, I've discovered that quality resources are much harder to track down (certainly, there's less available than for Garands), so I thought I'd throw a few questions out there and see if any you Garand-types fool around with Enfields in your spare time. Here's what I'm wondering:
1) Do any of you know of any good, comprehensive Enfield websites that I've somehow missed? Most of the ones I've found are pretty poorly designed and hard to make sense of.
2) If possible, I'd like to get a WWII British-made Enfield, but am having trouble sorting out I.D. info. I found some resources on serial numbers, but they're a bit scattershot, and seem to focus more on where the rifles were made than when. Does anyone know of a clear resource for dating the rifles and their components?
3) If any of you are Enfield collectors, do you have any words of wisdom for a newbie collector? Things you wish you'd known about before making your first purchase? Things to be aware of or watch out for?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts. I'm hoping for some feedback that will not only get me started on the Enfield hunt, but also keep my mind off that SA SG until it gets here! :D
To work out which factory that your No4 was made is to look at wrist markings where the serial numbers are. Now this only equates to British No4MkI here. The British made No4MkI’s use a prefix and number – (Alpha numerical) system to identify manufacturer. Mary camera. Numbered serials starting with 1 indicated ROF Maltby. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.