So if Gillette were prepared to establish a factory in France to create the illusion that they were working the French Patent while the actual shave items were made elsewhere, did they do the same thing in Germany .....or even in Leicester?
At this link: http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/293610-What-Gillette/page2
mblakele speculates that the E to H prefixes may have been a labelling decision made by Montreal for their excess razors sent to England.
I take the "factory" claims with a large helping of salt. For example we have seen 1908 letterhead reading "Offices and factories: New York, Boston, Montreal, London, Berlin, Paris." Note the language: any of those could be an office, or a factory, or both. Whoever made these claims could have lied outright without much fear of consequences, but they seem to have preferred ambiguity and imagination.
For the Paris factory, McKibben states that Gillette was making at least some blades in Paris. The wiki page Gillette_Timeline cites Adams in his book Gillette, The Man and His Wonderful Shaving Device. I do not have that book myself, but apparently Adams says that a French court ruled that the Paris factory did not represent a substantial investment. Presumably that invalidated the patent in France, discouraging any further investment. On the other hand Achim has http://mr-razor.com/Rasierklingen/1913 Box of 10x12 Gillette Blades France.jpg showing what appear to be 1913 blades made in France.
The operation in Germany may have been even less substantial. For example Achim has an ad in German dated ca. 1911. It mentions the Gillette company of Boston and London, but not Germany. Instead the ad mentions a local organization: Grell, a Hamburg importer. That seems unusual if Gillette had a large factory in Germany.
But we know Montreal was real, and I think Leicester was real for as long as it lasted. Contemporary sources report that the company bought a seven-year lease on a substantial building, and planned to employ 250 workers at the outset with possible growth up to 500. But this lasted only a short time, from early 1909 until WWI made it impossible to operate. The plant was closed officially in 1916, about when that first lease would have expired and also when conscription in the UK would have made labor for non-essential goods almost impossible to find. It may have been relatively idle since 1914 when the war began and large numbers of men volunteered for service. The next UK plant did not open until ca. 1920, in Slough.