My enfield no4 1941 Maltby. what's is story?

[Alan de Enfield]

Yes, who can forget that P-H shambles, and the Tom Senior milling machines rusting away, along with a heritage and name recognition built over generations.

It isn't the PH factory, it is the AJ Parker factory - totally differemt operation and very strong competitors.

The AJP factory was in the middle of an industrial area. The PH facility was out on the edge of Parkland, when they closed, it became a shop selling mattresses.

[Surpmil]

Touché, but was their fate any better than AJP?

It's not the location I refer to so much as the business entity itself and all that went with it.

[Roger Payne]

I was invited in there with Edna's niece & great nephew when they closed the place down. It probably would have been around 2007. It looked little different to in the photo's shown. They'd been duped into letting most of the more interesting stuff go for a song, although I did manage to buy some spares from them & paid them an honest price. There were boxes & boxes of screws, springs, No4 butts strewn all over the place. Fortunately the chap who got in before us missed a few 4T transits chests. I was offered all of the SKN actions, but didn't want them. I gather the police got involved eventually as some of the local kids were found running about with them...! By coincidence they ended up stored with a friend who was a dealer in the gun quarter in Brum. I cleaned up a few for him so that they were fit to sell on, but I've no idea what happened to the vast majority. There was a lot.

[Alan de Enfield]

I was offered all of the SKN actions, but didn't want them. I gather the police got involved eventually as some of the local kids were found running about with them...! By coincidence they ended up stored with a friend who was a dealer in the gun quarter in Brum. I cleaned up a few for him so that they were fit to sell on,

Those appear to have ended up at 'Scott Arms' auctions at Newark, being sold in dribs and drabs over the years. I bought one of the first ones to appear at the princely sum of £23 (+ fees) as the months / years went by they were making around £123 (+ fees).
All seemed to have parts missing - mine was just missing a trigger guard, some have had had bolts missing.

Mine even had the 'same blob of paint' on the butt.
Some of them had 'blue' and some of them had 'yellow' - No idea is there was any significance.

[Strangely Brown]

When the land was sold off and flattened to build a luxury retirement complex a few years ago the demolition team had a nasty surprise. One day while driving across the cleared site a JCB disappeared from sight, it went straight through a cellar roof no one knew was there!

Luckily the driver was unhurt, though not happy being submerged in stinking mud and stagnant water!

They 'sensibly' carried out a Ground penetrating radar survey of the site afterwards and found three more....

Not recorded anywhere by all accounts....

A similar thing happened on land that was once occupied by the Barr & Stroud factory; they had fairly large stocks of rangefinders but no customers at a time when there was large quantities of military surplus floating around the world.
Even offering the staff a chance to buy one for the princely sum of 10/6d didn't attract any punters.

Some years after the factory had gone and the name had been licenced for a proprietary brand of far eastern binoculars the developer of the old site uncovered cellars still with rangefinders stored inside. I don't believe at this stage any of them were salvageable.

[Gil Boyd]

China for one.................who bought a lot of the CNC stuff and lathes from British manufacturing as they closed. I was out there in 2015, and EVERY British made lathe I saw in Shenzhen had a UK lot number on it!!