POUDRE BUSKRUIT

[CINDERS]

Brought these in N.Z few years ago when my wife and I were visiting her relatives over there I happened to fall into a few gunshops and found these.
What intrigued me was they are for the Bren only (I surmised) the case has a domed primer AFAIKT and has no other markings on the case but F N 50 No MkVII or MkIII designation.
The bottom line has me wondering what the word Best has to do with anything

If anyone fluent in french can translate that would be very much appreciated by me.
The only real downer is customs they just ripped it open and damaged the flap I did list it as collectible ammunition and hold the appropriate license, but yeah rip it open who cares.
TIA

[Wthenley]

looks like Dutch to me. You can upload the image to this website and it will translate it for you. Yandex.Translate – dictionary and online translation between English and over 90 other languages.

[Daan Kemp]

Belgium - French and Flemish
Poudre = powder, meaning black powder
Buskruit = black powder
COOPPAL must be part of the lot number as it has the year at the end, probably july 1950
Patr Kal = cartridges calibre
Pour [shiny bit] M[itraillette] = for ? machinge gun
Voor MG = For machinge gun
Cde = cannot find it but could be commande = order like in order number
Best = bestuur of bestelling = management or order. Possibly the order number.

[Bruce_in_Oz]

That's the stuff that was available by the pallet here in Oz in the early / mid 1970's. Superb ammo with top-grade cases. Berdan primed (.217" eg. RWS 5608 / 5627 / Vihtavoury Kemira .217") NON mercuric. I still have a few rounds and a small plastic bucket of fired cases here.

Also available in packets with a pink label and red-tipped projectiles, for entertainment after dark.

We used to pull those painted bullets and replace them with a locally-made soft-point for hunting. The tracers mostly didn't trace, which would be one more reason for their being "surplussed".

FN, Belgian, hence the bilingual label, intended for machine-guns, specifically as labeled, the BREN.

I recall that it sold retail for less than ten Oz cents per round at the time.

[Woodsy]

That ammo was a batch of .303 imported by the NZ Forest Service for deer culling operations in the early 50's because CAC had ceased production after WW2 due to large Army stocks on hand. They resumed production in 1950 but the Army had the first priority and .303 was in short supply for hunting. The NZFS ditched the FN ammo as soon as CAC became available. CAC hollow-pointed the Mk VII ball for NZFS use and commercial sale, as well as introducing an aluminium pointed bullet (very similar to Winchester Silvertip) for commercial sale. The NZFS hollow-pointed .303 accounted for many thousands of deer in the '50's and '60's until the commercial helicopter meat hunting got underway in the '70's when literally 100's of thousands of deer were shot and the meat exported to Europe. I was involved in it from about '67 onwards as a shooter then a gunsmith and got into the design and manufacture of net guns which were used from choppers to live capture animals for stocking deer farms. Commercial shooting is now very much reduced and only to fill specific orders for meat.