Unless you have a Geiger counter, it's hard to be absolutely sure. At that time Radium was the default power source for luminous paint and so it almost certainly is and it's certainly worth treating it with caution. Radium throws out a ionising radiation. Very little will get beyond the skin, but if you inhale the dust then radium has a horrid tendency to migrate to the bones and hang around for a decade being unhelpful. In addition, one of the decay products is radon gas which is well known.
Now this sounds terrifying, but the fact is that it's just one of many risk factors and can be effectively managed. So don't sniff the dial or fiddle with loose lume and don't leave it all hanging around where people live. Pretty well any lume up until the sixties is worth being cautious about. After that Tritium became the go to substance and that has a half life that means you'll struggle to find any radioactive tritium dials. Radium's half life is in the thousands of years and so it's worth treating with caution.[/QUOTE]
So i kind of freaked out last night about this. Rapped, bagged and gave it a new home somewhere in the house that it is less likely to be disturbed.