Jack Flash
Member
I bought a boat load of that stuff about the same time. The dealer told me it was Egyptian.... Picked up a bunch of Iraqi 303 in the 80's. I thought the ammo was Greek...

One box showed some obvious water damage. There were a high percentage of hang-fires and non-fires from that box. However, all but one of the non-fires went off on the second try. (Neat feature of the LE that you don't have to open the bolt to try again!) None of the other boxes had any problems, and these were really pretty accurate out of my No. 1 Mk III*. I still have some. I think I got them for less than 3 cents a round.
Only later did I discover that they were Iraqi made, in 1956, IIRC. (But back when I bought them, Iraq was, if not our "friend", at least they were the enemy of our enemy). By the way, the head stamp looks like "1907" but that corresponds to our "1956". (See pictures below: what looks like "1909" is "1959"). Here is a link that shows our Western numbers compared to Arabic: Arabic Numbers