Hi Ken,
Although I have been AWOL from the list for the past couple of weeks, I am back on duty as the Navy moderator and hope I can be of assistance.
While it is certainly true that the preponderance of Imperial Navy grip strap markings have the period stamped in, to believe that this was universal or the lack of this punctuation indicates a primae facie fake is somewhat naive and indicates a failure to understand how a yound soldier or sailor's mind really works.
Lest I get too windy on this matter, I shall merely quote an old German military proverb: "Dienst ist dienst und schnaps ist schnaps!", which figuratively translates to , "Do whats necessary to make the superiors go away"
Simply stated, unit armorers marked guns with the tools they had and did so as an additional duty (In the Army, the unit farrier, not the armorer did the marking and since it was "out of scope" for his military occupation, he was paid a supplement for this work. I have not found a similar provision in Imperial Navy regulations.)
Consequently, any assumption that there was 100% uniformnity is at best a very long shot...
Tom
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