CAMOUFLAGE CHIEF

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 August 1942, Page 4

CAMOUFLAGE CHIEF

PROTECTION OF VITAL DEFENCES -IN BRITAIN. Britain’s airfields, gun-sites, lorry parks and. other vital war centres are being camouflaged by a man who in peace time supervised the cutting and making-up of thousands of dainty frocks and blouses. He no longer sits in the office of a Lancashire factory which during the past thirty years has sent frocks out to stores in most parts of the world. Today the dress expert climbs to vantage points in the countryside of England and Wales to make notes of the minutest colour details of the landscape around the site to be camouflaged. Returning to his factory, where yards of coloured hessian cover cutting tables once gay with silks and cottons, he matches up the hessian with the colour card he has brought back with him. The hessian is then cut into special patterns and threaded through rope netting, made by a manufacturer with a name known to fishermen the world over.

The threading is done by hand, and here the skill of the women dressmakers which comes from years of experience, is as valuable as their director’s knowledge of colour schemes. And the result of their work together is that vital points in Britain’s defences appear to Nazi airmen as part of the landscape beneath them.