Hi Rob
I've just checked my Clarkson "C" type chuck and it looks the same as your's, apart from mine being a bit more battered on the outside. Mine is stamped quite clearly Clarkson Autolock on the face of the closing nut.
The collets that I have for it are all in the region of 20.64 – 20.65 mm od so well over either 3/4 in or 20 mm. They need to be a good sliding fit in the sleeve as this helps with the concentricity, and the sleeve is a VERY nice sliding fit in the body. I also have 3 collets that I've picked up separately that won't actually go into the sleeve, being slightly oversize on diameter. One of them is just 0.01mm too big so should be possible to get it to size fairly easily, the other 2 are more like 0.1mm oversize so more of a problem as they are HARD. It may be that those are for another make of chuck that uses the same principle, so be careful when you buy collets. If you can take the sleeve with you to try the collets for fit. Also good luck with finding metric ones, they seem to be VERY thin on the ground.
None of my collets are marked in any way with a trade mark but a number came with the chuck so I don't have any real reason to assume that they are NOT of Clarkson origin.
The sleeve for my chuck also has that groove, it's there as an undercut for where the nose taper meets the parallel outer diameter of the collet, so it avoids any "hang-ups" in that corner and also helps to minimise the effects of swarf or debris that gets in there so it doesn't affect the closing and centrering action.
"S" type metric collest have a groove in the od of the tail end flange to identify them, on the 2 metric "C" type collets that I have there is no such identification, I've sized them by trying the shanks of the milling cutters in when it was fairly easily able to tell the difference between 1/4in and 6mm and also the 1/2 in and 12mm collets. Without some definite marking though it would be pretty easy to pick up the wrong one and wonder why the cutter was running off centre.
Keith