I sorely needed some form of accurate method of measuring depth of some tailstock operations.
A friend owns a precision engineering shop. He had the same lack of feature on a 1935 Holbrook toolroom lathe.

A small CNC program later and here is the result.
Divisions of .025mm, secondary divisions at .5mm and primary divisons of 1mm.
One turn of the handwheel on the tailstock equals 2.5mm.
A pointer was mounted in the top of the body.
The tailstock wheel inner face was machined flat for the index marks.

No it wasn't a freebie, unfortunately.

cheers
Richard