Can someone tell me just what the heck is going on here?!!

[Surpmil]

I think it very unlikely that such a thing would happen in the British Army (maybe the Colonials, who didn't always obey the rules, might have done it).

From 1925 the body (action) is the 'master component' and IS the firearm, everything else attached to the body is just an accessory & were numbered to the body.

If your conjecture is correct then you'd find that the magazine, forend etc would all have the original numbers bared out and the new (bolt) number applied to each of them

Maybe your 'Armourer' was resting under the Shade-tree and had just had a new set of stamps bought for him to play with, so he gave them a try.

Thanks for the grin! Don't we see enough rubbish and rubbishy work on UK made Enfields, to say nothing of every other kind of former industrial product of the former "workshop of the world"? I had a No.4 trigger guard in my hands the other day that was truly a sight to behold.

Do we need to review industrial history here? "The Trouble-shooter" with Sir John Harvey Jones for example?

Of course the case could be made that it was largely the craftsmen and women who were betrayed by a useless managerial and political class, more intent on the airs and graces of social presumption than pursuing mere "trade".

On the other hand, people who can't be bothered file a rough edge off a receiver or stamp on a serial number properly even in wartime, are the kind of careless slobs who will always end up working for someone else.

Who owns the surviving "names" of former glories now?

Who allows firms like Wikinson Sword or the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to go under? Or Parker-Hale or a thousand others?

The kind of people who might as well let their toffee-nosed mentality of former days go with them, that's who.

[Alan de Enfield]

Thanks for the grin! Don't we see enough rubbish and rubbishy work on UK made Enfields, to say nothing of every other kind of former industrial product of the former "workshop of the world"? I had a No.4 trigger guard in my hands the other day that was truly a sight to behold.

The Fazkerley quality was bad enough when they employed Monkeys, but it went considerably futher downhill when the Monkeys were replaced by the local 'scouse' humans. One of the problems was that the locals had little comprehension of the Alphabet, but were happy to start at the beginning - hence, virtually every Faz rifle being stamped with the Letter A.
Had production continued long enough they may have moved onto the letter "B"

The Monkeys were sent over to Maltby where they just couldn't understand the local Yorkshire accent which resulted in some interesting features including 20,000 No4s being marked as Mk1*, however the Monkeys eventually learned to understand the locals and by the end, the markings and quality of Maltby production was quite good.

[Surpmil]

"There are no bad regiments, only bad officers".

The most stupid can be trained to do a simple job and do it well, but they must be made to feel they are part of a team, that they are treated with a proper degree of respect, and that their work however "humble" is valued by their so-called leaders, who should also demonstrate an awareness that they share the same proportion of their DNA with the large primates.

And if that is not sufficient to produce best efforts, then there is always discipline.