hi my name is Dave Hewitt and I'm the armourer for the Royal Armouries
I also run a company called White Rose armory
I've been making armour professionally now for 32 years
I started in 1984, well actually I started making longbows in
1984, then got fed up and started making armour. Yeah 32 years I reckon now
I remember I got myself a workshop and then started making armour of a sort
obviously I didn't really know what was doing or what the end product
should look like because obviously there was nowhere like the Royal Armouries for me to
go in and look at real stock so all I'd got was the odd book or so and the first efforts were
truly awful but I really enjoyed it and just kept going kept going and at the time I
was re-enacter and then he couldn't find
to use we have to make our own so I started making them for the group
Helmets and gaultlets bits of leg armour that looked like the tin man from wizard of
Oz but it got us by and we got some got some gigs and it got some money together
which meant I could afford to spend a bit more time on it so yeah and it's
built up from there and now we supply film companies, collectors, professional
jousters, reenactors of course museums
I still don't know what was to know about arms and armour you see the problem is with
commercial armourers like myself, your being asked to create stuff from
the civil war, the 15 century, from Greek period, from THE Roman period so you've got to
really stretch yourself and your knowledge to these different periods.
I'd try and use different techniques that they probably would have used and it's
extremely difficult. Well I'm a big fan of the 15th century
so late 15th century armour is my forte and I also love the Roman Gallic period
so I just find all the Roman helmets fascinating. I like making those and
muscle carasses and things like that um I like making this an artistic thing
it's not just hitting a piece of mail with a hammer it's using the using art it's
almost like sculpting the human body you're making an exoskeleton of somebodies
form and shape. What I'm going to do: I'm going to I'm going to talk about
how arms and armour developed alongside weaponry obviously because we've got
this arms race going on between armourers and weaponsmiths, each one trying to outdo each
other so I'm going to talk about that and how armor changes over the centuries I'm
going to bring some stakes and some different types of armours and show
people what we use nowadays to form the metal plates and that
really hasn't changed in all the centuries and I'm gonna bring some armour
that's been taken to pieces then put it together with bolts and nuts so you can see on the
plates all the work together and why they're there so hopefully it'll be
something to keep keep people interested