Welcome to our website!

Welcome to our first blog, the first we hope of many over the weeks, months and years to come.  We’ll try and keep these as regular as possible;  they’ll be completely free form and we’ll simply follow our nose and write about what interests us and, hopefully you from time to time.  They may cover topics as diverse as historical events, the practicalities of running a website to support our hobby, our motivations or perhaps a write up of a Militaria fair or car boot sale we’ve attended.  We’d also like to be a bit different and occasionally invite guest bloggers to provide us with some pearls of wisdom.

Its taken us an awfully long time to decide what was going to be best to support this hobby.  Do we fund it by selling through Ebay?  Militariazone? Is it going to be too expensive? How do we take payments? Advertise? Social media? Have you ever kept a set of simple accounts? Do we need to?..... the list of questions could go on forever.  At the end of the day though you need to take a view and we thought the costs and administrative burden would be worth taking the plunge: we think we have much to share and this is how its done these days, just don’t ask me to do a VLOG! (I had to look up what that meant…).

We love our military history and want to share this passion with you.  We also want to keep it alive and relevant.  So many lessons can be learned from the past, and many have, the problem as we see it though is that these lessons aren’t being applied to positive effect much of the time.  So we need to play our part by providing a platform which makes the study of military history an enjoyable and interesting thing, keeping it vibrant and accessible to everyone so that learning from the past is fun – we’re not in the business of simply redrafting dry historical narratives.  We like to touch and feel history, to imagine what it would have been like to use a piece of equipment, wonder how warm or dry an old jacket would have kept you in winter (without Goretex!), marvel at the martial traditions of centuries of Regiments or the Samurai, try the recipes we find in wartime diaries, listen to Glen Miller through old Gramophones and enjoy the humour and sense of duty which so often comes through in what we find.

 We are also supremely aware that military history comes with much that is abhorrent and we hope that we don’t have to emphasise that we in no way, shape or form align with any of the obvious horrors of the past.  But remember always that history should be told as it is not as you may want it to be so an accurate portrayal, rather than one looking through fingers covering your face, is incredibly important.  Be assured of our moral position on this.

We do need to run this as a business though.  It has to be self-funding and can’t perpetually be funded by the bank of mum and dad (BOMAD).  So while we try and contextualise what we sell to bring it to life we also know the value of our things and make no apology for trying to make a profit to offset acquisition and running costs.  Some items may appear on the pricey side but always remember the hours we have put into researching and finding them, acquiring them, logistics to get them to us, insurance, advertising and social media, competing with big collectors and their [very] deep pockets, doing this as a hobby and not at a commercial scale and margins etc.  It ‘aint cheap as they say.  We are fair though.

We’ll leave it at that for now.  We’re very excited at our first attempt at running a website to support our passion.  It may in due course become a full-on enterprise but for now we’ll keep it as light as possible.  Once its no longer any fun we’ll have to have a word with ourselves.

You’ll find us on this website of course, on our Facebook page, not yet too sure about all the ‘grams’ and ‘snaps’, its all a bit overwhelming while having to do a grown-up job at the same time.  But more than anything we love to interact with people like you at all of the fairs we attend – mostly in the South-East of England.  Keep an eye out for ‘Mostly Militaria’ and you’ll always get a friendly welcome, exchange of ideas or sharing of advice; if we can’t help you we probably know someone who can. 

Please also do get in touch at enquiries@mostlymilitaria.com if you are looking to sell any of your items which you have found in the attic, we're always happy to have a look.

Never stop learning.

The Mostly Militaria Team