Avre Friday Briefing #63
The mill that made Khaki
We've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about fabric. Specifically, the wool we've chosen for Batch No. 4 — the 1940 Pattern Battledress Blouse.
The cloth comes from Hainsworth's, a mill in West Yorkshire that has been producing military textile since before the Crimean War (1850s). Their cloth went to Waterloo (1815). It went to South Africa during the Boer War (1899-1902). It went to both World Wars. And when the British Army needed a less conspicuous fabric for troops returning from India in 1899 — something that wouldn't give away their position quite so obviously as bright scarlet — it they invented Khaki Serge.
They also invented RAF Blue. When the Air Force separated from the Army in 1918 and needed its own identity, it was Hainsworth's who proposed the distinctive blue cloth they've worn ever since. (The first batch, as it happens, was surplus stock from a cancelled order for the Tsar of Russia).
The fabric we've specified for Batch No. 4 is the genuine article and stays true to their historical origins. Which is exactly why it takes time to manufacture. You don't rush a 200-year-old mill.
Batch No. 3 Shipping
The U.S. Navy Shawl Collar Denim Shirt starts shipping at the end of next week. We'll be in touch directly with tracking details as they go out.
From WW2 HQ — Al aboard HMS Belfast
Next week marks the 82nd anniversary of D-Day — 6th June 1944 — and Al has marked it with a tour of HMS Belfast alongside IWM naval curator Rob Rumble, covering the five places you really have to see on the ship.
Belfast fired her first shells of the Normandy bombardment at exactly 05:27 that morning, targeting German artillery positions a mile inland from the beaches before the landing craft came in. A fact that becomes slightly more resonant when you're standing inside the gun turret where it happened.
The tour covers the captain's bridge, the engine room (four steam turbines, 80,000 horsepower, 32 knots), the galley feeding 950 men in the middle of the ocean, the sick bay — including a mid-Atlantic appendix removal — and the guns themselves, with rare access inside a restored turret.