Gloves are one of the cheapest ways into genuine surplus and one of the most confusingly labelled. The names on the listings are not marketing — each one describes a glove designed around a specific problem.
Combat gloves
The general-purpose issue glove. Reinforced palm, close fit, designed to be worn while doing things rather than while standing still. Warmth is secondary to grip and dexterity, which is why people who buy them expecting winter gloves find them thin.
Contact gloves
Thinner again, and deliberately so. These are for handling equipment where you need to feel what you are doing — the emphasis is entirely on dexterity and protection from abrasion, not on insulation.
Leather gloves
Usually black, usually with a knitted or wool lining, and traditionally worn with dress uniform as well as in the field. They are the most civilian-looking of the lot and the ones most likely to get worn every day.
Check the lining before you buy second-hand. The leather almost always outlasts the lining, and a perished lining is uncomfortable and difficult to replace.
Wool gloves and liners
Plain, cheap, extremely warm for the weight, and designed to be worn inside another glove. Sold on their own constantly, and perfectly usable on their own, but they are not weatherproof and they wear through at the fingertips quickly.
Cold weather and Arctic patterns
Bulky, heavily insulated, often with a separate liner and sometimes a trigger finger. Genuinely warm, genuinely clumsy. Excellent for standing about in the cold; poor for anything requiring fingers.
Buying them
- Sizes run small on issue gloves compared with civilian sizing, and they are meant to be close-fitting. If you are between sizes and plan to wear a liner underneath, go up.
- Check the palm, not the back. The back always looks better than the glove is. Wear shows on the palm and between the fingers.
- Pairs get separated. With ex-issue stock it is worth confirming you are buying a matched pair of the same size, especially on older items.
Dress gloves are a different thing again
Alongside the working gloves there is a whole category worn purely with dress uniform: white cotton or leather gloves for ceremonial occasions, and black leather for parade and officers' dress. They are not designed for warmth or grip and they will not last five minutes of real work.
They are, however, one of the cheapest ways to finish a dress uniform for display or costume, and they are the detail that most people leave off. A tunic on a mannequin with bare hands looks unfinished in a way that is hard to place until you add the gloves.
Why glove sizing is its own problem
Issue gloves are sized to the hand rather than S/M/L, and different patterns from different eras use different scales. That is why the same stated size can fit differently between two pairs that both say they fit you.
The practical approach: measure around your palm at the knuckles, excluding the thumb, and buy to that. If you intend to wear a wool liner underneath, allow for it — a glove that fits perfectly bare will be too tight with a liner, and a cold hand in a tight glove is colder than a bare one, because you have cut off the circulation that was keeping it warm.
What to buy if you only buy one pair
For general outdoor use, a leather glove with a wool lining is the most versatile thing in the range. Warm enough for most British weather, tough enough to work in, and it does not look like you have raided a stores.
Looking after leather gloves
A good pair of lined leather gloves will last decades if they are treated sensibly, and be ruined in a single evening if they are not:
- Never dry them on a radiator. Heat is what cracks leather, and a glove dried fast goes stiff and stays stiff.
- Dry them flat, away from heat, and reshape them with your hands while they are still slightly damp.
- Feed them occasionally with a leather conditioner, sparingly. Over-feeding softens the leather too far and it loses its shape.
- Never machine wash. Leather does not recover.
Wool liners, and why they are worth having
Liners are the most under-rated item in the whole glove range. They cost very little, they add a genuine amount of warmth, and above all they take the wear — a liner absorbs the sweat and the abrasion that would otherwise go into the inside of an expensive glove.
They also give you options. A liner alone is enough for mild weather and allows far more dexterity than a full glove, so a liner plus one outer glove covers a wider range of conditions than two different pairs of gloves would.
Shop the kit
Genuine issue gloves in stock now.
