Highland Regiments footwear during the Great War

[OC Richard]

About the hose, you see plenty of photos showing Highland troops wearing their diced (or tartan in the case of some pipers) hose-tops with puttees.

About the selfcoloured hose, I'm not sure about the colour. There might have been a wide range of colours considered "khaki" by the army, and due to variances among contractors. About WWI hose I don't know, but plenty of WWII hose survive and they vary from olive green to brown to tan and everything in between.

In WWII officers wore different hose, in a pale beige, the same colour often seen in civilian kilt hose back then, not sure if this was also the case in WWI.

One thing to do for sure: ignore the colours in the colourised photos of WWI soldiers, they get several things wrong.

Here's a photo that was colourised around time it was taken, nice to see



Before colour photography you have coloured B&W photos, and paintings. Here's one, showing hose that appear to be exactly the same colour as the tunics. (BTW it's rare to see the bagpipes painted so accurately. You can see they're fingering F, and some have their B finger lifted too, oddly enough.)



Another painting, showing diced hosetops with khaki spats. I do wonder about the Royal Stewart bag-covers, perhaps one of the wartime battalions?



Now back to the B&W world, note the pattern knit into the cuffs of his khaki hose



Here's a combination I've rarely seen, khaki hose with spats



An officer with pale beige (not cream, more like fawn) hose and (probably) brown shoes. Note the officers' brown sporran with tassels and no badge, seen in some regiments.