RAF No2 Dress Trouser Belt

When the RAF introduced its No2 Dress uniform to replace the old serge design braces had fallen from favour as a way of holding up the trousers. They had certain disadvantages, the biggest being that in order to drop the trousers to answer a call of nature, the jacket had first to be removed. The new No2 Dress uniform therefore had belt loops and a belt on the trousers instead. This belt would not usually be visible, being under the jacket, so a simple and robust design would be quite adequate. The belt adopted is similar to that used by the US Army as a trouser belt in World War Two and consists of a blue grey webbing strap, with a friction buckle:

The buckle is made of brass (rather tarnished on this example now), and has a roller within to secure the other end of the belt:

The buckle is removable for cleaning, with a toothed tab on the rear holding it firm to the belt. Lifting this tab up allows the buckle to be detached:

The opposite end of the belt has a rivetted brass tab fittted to prevent the webbing from fraying:

This is a very simple, but effective, design of trouser belt. I have two examples of these belts and in both cases the faintest traces of a manufacturer’s name can be seen in black ink, but they are far too faint to read unfortunately.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.