Senior Instructor Graham Melloy is about to depart to Africa as part of a UN peace keeping mission. Below he covers some of the survival tins he’s collected over the years.

In the mid 1980’s when I first ventured out in to this line of interest the big thing was making your own survival kit or more commonly a survival tin.  Now these kits were put together with whatever we could muster up from our hard earned pocket money from Survival Aids which now no longer exists as well as what we found in our old man’s sheds!

I have always had a survival kit and I now have a much tailored and tried and tested one that I never leave home without but I also have a wee collection that I have as an interest.  I thought I would share some of these with you and you will see that some of the items are fairly universal through the decades:

Old BCB COM-PAC kit circa early 1990’s

Survival Aids Combat Survival Tin again 1990’s

Coghlans Pilots Kit I picked up about 19 years ago

Now the above kits all have everything pretty much required for PLAN-M in some sort of form.  As they are survival kits a lot of the items are one trick ponies that will keep you going for that all important first 72 hours.  Some items can be used over and over again with care.  I also have a few variants of BCB military supplied kits that are available which most people will be aux fait with.

Pilots Mk 4 Go Pack which comes in 3 packs each containing what you require for a “survival” situation.

Some more up to date versions Above – Military, Combat and basic pack all of which are very similar with some containing more luxury items.

I have loads of parts of kits and some really extensive self-made ones for different environments but these are clearly a personal choice thing.  There is no hard and fast rule as long as you cover the essentials required in conjunction with PLAN-M.  I am just on the lookout now for a vintage WW2 survival kit to add to my collection.