Bags (real name Ben) was born in Cambridge, England where he attended school before undertaking an engineering degree at the University of Edinburgh. In 2007 he joined the British Army and attend the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst before commissioning as an officer into the Royal Tank Regiment. Between 2010 and 2013 he deployed multiple times to Afghanistan in a variety of roles, the last being as the alarmingly titled 'Battle Captain' for Task Force Helmand.He retired from the regular army in 2015 in order to start Bare Arms which is a company that helps support film and television productions by supplying training, advisers, kit, equipment, vehicles and military trained special action extras. His breakthrough as an adviser came after being asked to help the BBC with the scripts for the second series of the hugely popular Our Girl (2014). Later, Bare Arms accidentally fell into supplying difficult to obtain military equipment after Universal's The Mummy (2017) required parachutes and precision hi-tech optical equipment, which then led to the ITV requesting a fleet of Spitfires for their WW2 drama The Halcyon (2017).Bags has appeared in a number of productions in front of the camera, including the BBC's production of the Len Deighton novel SS-GB (2017) where he appeared a number of times as a German Wermacht soldier, and a couple of appearances in Hello Carter (2013) where he walked down the same corridor 80 times in an afternoon as work experience...He now splits his time between London and Wiltshire, where he is a part-time assessor at the Army Officer Selection Board in Westbury where he assess the potential of candidates to attend the prestigious Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.