42nd Highlander Revolutionary War period question

[brownbess]

I have found a maker that the 42nd Royal Highlander Reenacting Regiment uses, thanks for all the help!! Burns Battle Bonnets on FB.

Burns Battle Bonnets are in my opinion the best. I use one for my impression of a private in the 42nd highland grenadier company.

[OC Richard]

Osprey Publishing Ltd produces an extensive and well-illustrated Men-at-Arms Series of military reference books, which are a great resource for re-enactors as they detail all elements of period uniforms and weapons with coloured illustrations.

Extreme caution must be used with those Men-at-Arms illustrations.

Some of the illustrations are excellent, some are wildly inaccurate and could only have been done by artists completely unfamiliar with the things they were illustrating.

A while back I posted this on XMarks, praising some, and pointing out specific errors in several others:

http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/f...-errors-79267/

Of course when you get back prior to photography, illustrators who haven't seen the original surviving uniforms, or examined period paintings, have little but their imaginations to go on. I would in every case set aside any and all non-period evidence.

When we get to the period of photography we need to stick to the original period B&W photos and take the colours from original surviving uniforms or period paintings.

What we oughtn't do is look at period photos which have been coloured, either back then, or later.

For example here are three 19th century B&W photos of Black Watch pipers which have been hand-coloured.

The one on the left is close, but the hose are wrong of course. The others have been put into red doublets, with bad hose, bad bonnet dicing, wrongly coloured tartan, etc.

Note that the centre man's kilt changes from a red tartan to solid green partway up.



For reasons unknown the Men-at-Arms illustrator ignored all evidence and based his illustration of a BW piper on the centre horridly coloured photo above. He didn't stop there, putting only two tassels on the sporran, and making the shells blue (on scarlet doublets the shells were matching scarlet, one thing the photo-tinter got right).

Note also that the BW Pipe Major in the photo is wearing his sash on the other side.



Here's the original B&W photo; note the cover is BW tartan, and the two drone ribbons are BW, and RS, just as is worn today.