Avre Friday Briefing #72
Batch No. 4 — 1940 Pattern Battledress Blouse
Batch No. 4 is our Officer's Cut Battledress, made bespoke to the individual with each one of the 100 pieces containing a piece of original World War 2 parachute silk lining the collar.
This week we've made progress with the production arrangements. We've been waiting for a few weeks while Hainsworth's, the inventors and originators of Khaki Serge, produced the merino cloth we need for this piece. And we're glad to say that we took delivery of the first batch yesterday. We have one further delivery expected next week then we'll be getting on with cutting and the rest of production.
When the British Army adopted battledress just before the war, it was the most modern military uniform in the world — the design borrowed from contemporary ski wear, cut short and close for movement rather than the parade ground. The 1940 "Austerity" Pattern that followed stripped it back further to save material and speed up production: the fly front went, the buttons were left exposed and the pocket pleats disappeared. Plainer and quicker to make, this was the version British troops wore through North Africa, Italy and Northwest Europe.
The cut sits high on the natural waist, which stopped the fabric bunching when a man was sat in a vehicle or crawling flat on the ground.
The Officer's Cut
In the 1940s, officers who wanted to stand out did it through tailoring. Rather than take the standard issue, they'd choose their own cloth and lining and have their tailor make up something bespoke. These became known as the Officer's Cut, and it's the approach we've taken for Batch No. 4.
Limited to 100 pieces.
Latest from WW2 HQ — Stalin's Lifeline
James and Al are back on board HMS Belfast this week, working through the Imperial War Museum's film archive, and this one covers the Arctic convoys — the route that ran supplies from Britain, round the top of Norway and into Murmansk and Archangel, to keep the Soviet Union in the war after Germany invaded in June 1941.
The archive contains footage of carriers pitching in heavy seas, crews hacking ice off the decks before it made the ships top-heavy, Swordfish biplanes landing on carriers in an open cockpit - all in sub zero temperatures. If you found yourself in that water, you didn't have long.
On this day — 31st July 1944
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1933
On the morning of 31st July 1944, a P-38 Lightning took off from Corsica on a reconnaissance flight over southern France, scouting German positions ahead of the Allied landings in the south. It never came back. The pilot was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — the writer behind *The Little Prince* and *Wind, Sand and Stars* — flying, at 44, for a photo-reconnaissance unit that had had the guns stripped from its aircraft and cameras fitted in their place.
What happened to him stayed a mystery for decades. In 1998 a fisherman off Marseille found his identity bracelet, and divers later located the wreckage of his aircraft nearby. There were no bullet holes in it, so exactly how he came down is still unknown.