Deceptive Textiles: Lister’s Velvet Loom, Resilitex, Decoys for WW II, Britain

My research on the technology of handweaving silk velvet led me to this story, and I pursued it like a miner follows a vein of ore. I am deeply indebted to Eugene Nicholson for bringing this fascinating tale to my attention and providing insightful information. An excerpt from the War Diary of the Camouflage Service of Headquarters 21 Army Group, written on New Year’s Day 1944, says that ‘camouflage ’ has a double meaning. It is both “the art of concealing from the enemy the disposition of men and materials, and also of indicating false positions by means such as the use of dummy equipment.”2 The first part of the definition immediately conjured up images of splotchy, olive green uniforms and khaki-colored tanks from a slew of ‘B ’ movies about fictitious heroics in WW II. But it is much older. Recall Macbeth’s fateful lines ‘Fear not, till Birnam wood Do come to Dunsinane. ’ The crux of the game is the same: to conceal, hide, to fool the eye, to throw an invisibility cloak over huge objects and colossal spaces such as airplane hangars, factories and airfields by emulating irregular natural patterns done in convincing seasonal palettes and giving the desired objects a second skin. However, my research focused on the less familiar second part, on dummy equipment and decoys. Her