Survival knives polarise opinion – hated in some quarters, an invaluable tool to others. Wilkinson Sword Survival Knife (top) and Dartmoor Knife CSK185 (bottom). In the picture caption on page 15 of his ‘Survival Handbook’, published in 1990, Mears writes “The Wilkinson Sword survival knife, designed by the author to combine the ideals of a woodsman’s knife with the requirements of the expeditioner”. The Dartmoor was a revised version of the original Wilkinson Sword Survival Knife, designed in the 1980s by Ray Mears. Photo: Paul Kirtley.Įven in 2005 the Dartmoor was something of a throwback. I recently had the opportunity to try one of these out. It is these knives that are available from Knives are available in various states of finish, right up to mint condition and boxed. After the company went under, the remaining stocks of Dartmoor knives were sold off. The final production version of the Wilkinson Sword Survival Knife was something of a redesign of the original, officially renamed the Dartmoor Knife CSK185, the latter being an acronym for Combination Survival Knife with a blade length of 185mm. I was surprised because Wilkinson Sword (the sword and knife maker as opposed to the razor blade manufacturer) ceased trading in 2005. Recently I was surprised to learn that the Wilkinson Sword Survival Knife is still available. I had relatively little skill with a knife. To be honest, though, back then I didn’t really know what I was doing. Later on I did manage to get hold of one of the knives and I enjoyed using it compared to the cheap survival knives I’d had in the past. For a young lad with little pocket money, however, they were expensive and therefore unobtainable. There were two products in the catalogue that I wanted more than anything else – a DPM Ventile smock and a Wilkinson Sword Survival Knife.
It was full of hard-to-find survival equipment. When I was a teenager in the 1980s I used to read every word and scrutinise every picture of the catalogue produced semi-annually by a company called Survival Aids.
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