Avre Friday Briefing #75
We Have Ways Fest - Come and find us
We Have Ways Fest is back at Blackpit Brewery from 11–13 September, and we'll be there again this year with a range of jackets.
It's James and Al's festival — the UK's No.1 Second World War weekend, now in its sixth year. Three days of talks, historic vehicles, living history and music.
Try on our jackets
Being a primarily online business, we don't have a shop where we can meet our customers, so the fest is one of the few times a year you can see our jackets in person, feel the fabric, try things on and chat to us before you commit.
We'll have Batch No. 3, the U.S. Navy Shawl Collar Shirt, and Batch No. 4, the 1940 Pattern Battledress, on the stand, along with VAT 01, our Operation Chariot blended malt whisky. We'll also have the final remaining pieces of Batch No. 2, the 1941 British Denim Smock, assuming they don't sell out between now and then.
Showing Batch No. 2, the 1941 British Denim Smock at WHWF 2025
Batch No. 5
We're also bringing Batch No. 5 along which is something we haven't shown publicly yet. If you're there, you'll be among the first outside a small circle to see it in the flesh.
Come and say hello, Pete will be on the stand all weekend.
Tickets here.
On this day — 21 August 1944
In 1944, this was the day the Falaise Pocket finally closed.
The formation of the Falaise pocket in Normandy
After six weeks grinding inland from the Normandy beaches, the Allies had trapped the bulk of two German armies — the 7th and the Fifth Panzer — in a pocket around the town of Falaise. The last way out ran below a piece of high ground called Hill 262.
Holding it was the 1st Polish Armoured Division under General Stanisław Maczek. Cut off for three days and low on ammunition, they held on while German columns tried to force their way out past them, at a cost of around 1,400 men. The Canadians reached them on the afternoon of the 21st. By that evening the pocket was shut, with somewhere near 50,000 German troops taken prisoner inside it.
Germans troops surrender in St. Lambert on 19 August 1944
Some of you might remember us writing about a different group of Poles who inspired us to make our Batch No. 2 British Denim Smock. Those were Polish II Corps, the men behind the Monte Cassino story, fighting in Italy. Maczek's 1st Armoured were a separate formation, in Normandy. But it's the same thread: men who'd lost their country in 1939 and spent the next five years fighting their way back toward it.
What we're watching
James and Al have recently teamed up with the Imperial War Museum, working through the IWM's film archive. This week's episode is on the Battle of Britain.
