Tonight I am starting a new series, very much inspired by the excellent mannequin of the month feature on Rifleman Moore’s YouTube site. Towards the end of each month I am going to bring you a reconstruction of a soldier, sailor or airman in full kit and then pair this with a kit layout showing all the pieces that come together to make up that impression. Unlike the other posts on the site, these impressions will include a mixture of original and reproduction kit; the idea being to inspire you to create your own living history impressions. My aim is to cover a wide variety of time periods over the last hundred years, and include some Empire and Commonwealth impressions as well. One or two of these impressions will have appeared before, such as tonight’s which has already been featured on the British Empire Uniform’s Facebook page, but the accompanying kit layouts will be entirely new and I aim wherever possible to use new photography of the impression as well. If you like this sort of content, please let me know and I will continue trying new things on here.
Alexandria, 1940
This flying officer has just disembarked from a Sunderland Flying Boat at Aboukir Bay and is waiting to transfer to a hotel in the city before moving on to his final posting. He wears an RAF khaki drill officer’s tunic, with a pair of matching shorts, long socks and a pair of black leather shoes. On his head he wears an officer’s service cap with a mohair cap band and an embroidered cap badge.
He wears the 1925 pattern RAF pistol set, made of blue-grey cotton webbing. The holster contains a Webley .380 revolver, secured by a blue lanyard around the officer’s neck. A small pouch for spare ammunition sits opposite, whilst a water bottle in its carrier rests over his right hip. As he is travelling, he has both the wedge shaped haversack on his left hip and the two part rucksack on his back. This pack splits in two, with a smaller upper compartment and a larger, removable, lower part. A pair of straps on the rear allow a helmet to be carried securely when not needed. He waits patiently whilst his kit bags are unloaded and then he has a bumpy seven mile drive to the city ahead of him.
The items of kit used to make up this impression are laid out below:
- MK II Helmet
- RAF Officer’s Service Dress Cap
- Khaki Drill Shorts
- RAF Officer’s Khaki Drill Service Dress Tunic
- Knee length Shorts
- Leather Shoes
- Webley .380 Revolver with RAF blue lanyard
- 1925 Pattern Webbing Pistol Set
- 1925 Pattern Upper Rucksack
- 1925 Pattern Lower Rucksack
Tales from the Supply Depot 
Fantastic display. I especially like the use of the Pattern 25 webbing which is one area of my collecting. Finding that the braces and extenders are quite difficult to acquire.
This is great! Well done!