WW2 British gas mask bag???

[stefano34]

Bought three of these recently off a car boot in Spain for 10 Eurothinking they were Spanish or some other Eurpean nation and post war due to grey plastic type suspension fastenings on rear but on getting home and checking further I noticed some British markings on their carrying straps.
The markings appear to be LIM.CO.LTD 1941 (war dept arrow) then a much larger L.





So any ideas, I guess they have been dyed at some point and they are roughly 10" square by 3" deep...I bought them to use as panier bags on an 1940's French touring bicycle( one of my other saddo hobbies!)

[António Fragoeiro]

Hi mate, i maybe wrong, but that is not the british war dep arrow, and not even the strap is from a carrier bag.

[António Fragoeiro]

This is 1942 dated example from my collection.
The style of the arrow is completely diferent.

[stefano34]

Pretty sure it is a WD arrow, I have one on an unissued 6x30 binocular case that is virtually identical but ther company name is different.

[Nige H]

Hi stefano,
again as mentioned by previous reply's I can confirm this is not British except for the strap, which yes looks like a 37 pattern cross straps all but cut down and modified, the rest looks more of a northern European manufacture and the buckle hardware and other fittings are more akin to German, Austrian, Swedish or Finnish style equipment. I suspect it start out life as something else completely and has then been made up into a satchel, as a home project using a variety of odds and ends that were to hand. What draws me to this conclusion is the number of different styles and types of materials used in the bags construction, and the choice of thread thickness and colour.

Nige.

[stefano34]

Well at least I know now I won't be wrecking a couple of rare items when I alter two of them some more to fit my old French touring bike then...I guess they would hasve been made up/coverted from old stock possibly using British ex WD straps etc, the small closure straps with open bottom buckles have different webbing weave to all the other webbing strap' additions' and the carrier straps are different again also the straps are all a much brighter orange than the rest of the bags so could be a fairly 'recent' addition...many of the sanitation dept staff in Spain use orange equipments so I guess could be for their use?

[Edward Lionheart]

Hello. Since no one has recognized the rather obvious origin of the bag itself since 2011 I'll take the liberty to dig up this old post I came across while searching for something else and give it a definitive answer : this is an early west german kampftasche ( klein ) with already recut straps. It could have been called scarce, if not rare, before being altered to look orange, but in this state its value as a collector's item is almost non-existent.
The british strap has obviously nothing to do with it, and was put here to make more attractive for the civilian market, many many other similar bags, big and small, have been fitted with all kinds of straps, adjustable or not and / or removable or not, over the years.

[karkee]

Not sure about the bag, but the strap is definitely a British-made Long Left-handed Brace with Loop.

What's interesting about this brace is that it is made with reduction weaving which few of the smaller British firms could do. This was clearly not made by MECo or MW&S Ltd, but I can't see the beginning of the maker mark to tell you exactly who made it.