"Royal Marine battalions. " Topic

Did they have backpacks?

I have the head conversion kit. The sergeant figure has no knapsack but the plastic perry/ Victrix figures do…

If I leave off the packs I'll have to scrape off alot of straps. So is leaving them on a sin. I'm not recreating a ships company but a battalion for land service.

My research indicates that Royal marines did not wear back packs during operations close to shore (War of 1812). I didn't find anything that indicated they did wear backpacks for more extended operations

That said, I've modeled a battalion of British Marines using Perry plastics with the Victrix medal heads and I left the backpacks on for the same reasons you cite above. I think they look fine and I'm sure that at least one British marine may have tried on a back pack.

Remember that British Marines do not carry colors when deployed on land since they use the ships colors and those stay with the boat.

I believe that the Marines probably had backpacks in their kit in order to carry their spare gear when they moved about from ship to ship. Just seldom had to actually wear them.

Boat?????!!!!!!!
Man must be a colonial or some strange beast!!! Hottentot or something!!!

They would have had to carry their kit in something. Line infantry didn't carry them because they looked nice.

Chokidar:
I was going to call it "that floaty thing" but settled on boat

:)

Cheers. I elected to go without packs.
I made a few with packs and decided I like the look of the pack less marines.

I'm quite impressed with the conversion heads. Very nice figures work well with perry and victrix. Out of 30 heads there were 3 miscasts.. No facial features but the other 27 looked perfect.

Bosco5 wrote:

Remember that British Marines do not carry colors when deployed on land since they use the ships colors and those stay with the boat.

I am in Spain at present, without reference books to hand, but it is my recollection (from Brian Lavery's "Nelson's Navy") that there were four Royal Marine Divisions, based on Portsmouth, Plymouth, Chatham and (from 1805) Woolwich. These each had a number of companies and there was one set of colours per Division. Marines were drawn from these to serve on ships (not boats, which term would cause apoplexy to any member of the "Senior Service"). However there were complete battalions deployed both to Spain and North America, and at least one of these took colours (I seem to recall from the Portsmouth Division) with them.

Rod

There was a thread on Royal Marine colours here very recently, so have a search of the forum, as there was lots of good information there.

As Rod says: The Marines/Royal Marines were issued colours in home depot or on the rare occasion that they were deployed as full battalions. However, it was also known for shore-parties to carry warships' jacks ashore as 'colours'. The military museum at the Almeida Fort in Santa Cruz de Tenerife has two such jacks, captured from Royal Navy/Marine shore parties that surrendered to the Tenerife militia during Nelson's raid of 1797 (the occasion on which Nelson lost his arm). One of the jacks has the ship's name ('EMERALD') embroidered in white across the horizontal red bar of the St George's Cross.