Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors 1899a with English proof marks

Thought some might enjoy a picture of my 1899A born in 1908, in 303 savage. It has English proof marks which I'm guessing are not all that common. It's going on a caribou hunt in a few weeks.

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Sweet! Good Luck on the Boo! take pics Too!

You are getting old John, you're repeating yourself. Yep, that's a real purdy one, and welcome to the site, Joe.

One year between registration and your first post. Good start though. Welcome!

And yeah, that rifle rocks. Good luck with it.

I wonder if a JTC letter would explain the proof marks?

I posted an 1899 or 99 about 1+ year ago that had British marks on it. It was my friends gun. Others have seen similar on other guns. Not common, but not super rare.

Nitro

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By the way, outstanding rifle. And better yet, the hunt you are taking it on. My kind of hunter.

Any chance the British proofed Savage went to the U.K. just before WW II and made its way back ? Most of those rifle went into the ocean ( what a waste ) but some did make it back.

OK, it was imported to Europe and proofed with Belgian proof marks then imported into Pomgolia after abt 1924 when the English proofs were applied.

Pls note the English style front swivel mount of the barrel

It would be typical of a retailed rifle as Savages were quite popular, esp in 22HP and 25/3000 but this predates both.

There is a work by a German author that covers proof houses and period stamps (incl Russia).

Ok. For the second (or third, or fourth) time- commercial sporting arms were never shipped to the UK as Lend-Lease war materiel. If it went over at all during the emergency it was as a privately donated piece. As most never made it back home after the war (contrary to to the initial agreement), if this gun is one of those it would be a sweet find. Without any provenance that would be pure conjecture. Most likely it is what it is: an American rifle sold in England (hence the British proofmarks, necessary for legal marketing therein), and since then made it back across the pond. One likely scenario is a British subject emigrated to Canada with the rifle he bought in England, and since that time it passed through a few hands and made it back across the border before our gov't sealed it. Or it sold at a British auction 30-40 years ago to a Yank who re-imported it. I could cook up a dozen similar scenarios. One thing is certain- it did not travel overseas under the auspices of the official Lend-Lease Act.

Some years ago there was one over here in Darwin for sale, 25-35 from memory it had british prrofs also and I think some marks from india. A long while back so can't recall clearly.

Johno

Arrived in Alaska. Flying out tomorrow on the caribou hunt. Will post a picture when I get back if the old girl brings one down. I really love hunting with older guns like this. Carrying it around makes for a successful hunt even if game is not taken.

I saw a picture taken in 1929/1940 of a women in the home guard
holding a Savage 99. Whether the rifle was lend lease or not no one knows. Thousands of U.S citizens donated guns were shipped to England under the lend lease program.

Doc

Doc, you betcha it happened, but not under Lend Lease. Two entirely separate things. Lend Lease was gov't, what you are referring to was private, under the aegis of the governments.

Sorry Doc, that was not the "Lend Lease". There was a program called "American Committee for Defense of British Homes." The Lend Lease was the government trying to help Britain and the latter was the "American People" trying to help, Joe.

In the dark days following the British Expeditionary Force's evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940, Great Britain was a nation virtually disarmed. And not just by the need to abandon equipment on France's beaches to save British "Tommies" to fight another day, but by the policies of its own government. The days of devotion to civilian markmanship, "volunteer rifle clubs" and the idea that there should be "a rifle in every cottage," as proposed by the Prime Minister Marquis of Salisbury in 1900, had given way to restrictive gun control laws that required subjects to demonstrate "good reason" to merely obtain a handgun or rifle. So with Hitler's legions poised to cross the English Channel, the British people were defended by an ill-equipped and defeated army and a "Home Guard" armed with little more than sporting shotguns and pikes.
Help for the beleaguered nation came from both the American government and from the American people, the latter through the "American Committee for Defense of British Homes." In late 1940, the committee sent an urgent appeal -- which, of course, appeared in American Rifleman -- for Americans to send "Pistols - Rifles - Revolvers - Shotguns - Binoculars" because "British civilians, faced with the threat of invasion, desperately need arms for the defense of their homes." Thousands of arms were collected and sent to England, one of which was a .30-'06 Model 1903 target rifle owned by Major John W. Hession. Hession was one of the pre-eminent highpower rifle target shooters of his day, and he used that rifle to win Olympic gold at Bisley Camp in England in 1908. The rifle, unlike the majority sent, was returned and can now be viewed int he national Firearms Museum.

The U.S. Government responded to Britain's peril as well with passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. Almost immediately, quantities of "U.S. Rifle, Cal. .30, M1" were on their way across the Atlantic, and those guns are the subject of an article by noted M1 Garand historian Scott Duff starting on p. 42. The "British Garands" have an interesting history but the importance of arming the British at that time is made clear by the fact that the rapidly growing U.S. Army itself did not have sufficient numbers of the then-new M1 Garands. Winston Churchill wrote in Their Finest Hour: "When the ships from America approached our shores with their priceless arms, special trains were waiting in all ports to receive their cargoes. The Home Guard in every county, in every village, sat up through the night to receive them. ... By the end of July we were an armed nation ... ."

I have a Springfield M1 garand, s.n. 2.6M/1941, with Italian proof mark on the barrel. I've always thought this was a "lend lease" rifle. Do you think so? How to verify?

Re reading that article, the American People were actually sending guns before the Government got into helping. The American People were collecting guns in 1940. The Lend Lease didn't come along till '41, Joe.

After Italy capitulated, some number of Italians were formed into units to fight the Germans and armed with Allied weaponry. Mostly 1903A3 Springfields, Stens, and Lee-Enfields as I understand it, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn of a few M-1's. (But I doubt the Italian provisional gov't would've taken the time to proof said weapons, rather just slapped them directly into the hands of those boys.) I guess too there would have been a decent chance that some of the Enfield No.4's built by Savage were in that mix of weapons also. Most likely though, yours was a rifle loaned/sold/given to Italy after the war when she was re-organizing and we were desperate for allies against the dreaded Commies. Italy fairly quickly developed their own rifle, based on the M-1 and chambered in 7.62 NATO. I'll speculate they held the M-1's we gave them in reserve for a while and then moved a bunch of them onto the American market, like everybody else was doing in the 50's and 60's.

The old savage did the job at 75 yards. He didn't take a step. Just as effective now as 100 years ago.
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That. Is. Marvelous!!