Good morning gents,
I mentioned this lid in a previous thread and it is one that causes me great anguish evry time I see it
When the MkVI was introduced and issued to my unit I was serving in Germany. Once the new helmets were issued it was normal British Army procedure for the obsolete items to be backloaded for disposal. As these were "unit stores" rather than personal issue like the MkVI it was done under the auspices of the QM by whichever troops were available at the time as it involved stripping off the hessian / scrim and removing the liners.
On this occasion it fell to my section to do this as we had "nothing better to do" on that day
Most of the lids were nothing unusual being either the original factory crappy brownish colour or thickly hand applied NATO green. However some were a bit of a surprise. Being a bit of a magpie and being the "gaffer" I squirrelled away ten (yes 10!) marked from LCPL to Maj. I carted these around for some years until the nagging of "her indoors" about keeping this "rubbish" caused me to junk all but this one just to stop the earache. Oh how I wish I had been deaf. A salutory lesson I feel
These helmets to my knowledge from the records held and my own experience of the system would have been factory fresh when they arrived in Germany probably in the '50s or '60s and never left theatre until they were backloaded so had "lived" through the entire Cold War albeit covered in hessian scrim for almost all of it!
Anyway at least I still have this one and I hope you like it.
Regards
Mark
PS There was meant to be a pic of the left side too but it did not upload properly and for some reason it appears as an unopened attachment at the bottom of the post which might not be noticed. However the left side is the same as the right and in the same condition.
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