I should say that in my illustration of the 2/6th London Regiment, I have depicted their battalion patch as a square. However, the IWM describes it as a
dark blue diamond (black was originally written but has been crossed out).
I think this entry at the IWM must be wrong. In the first place, the 2/6th Bn patch that the IWM has does not look like a diamond. The angles are all 90° and the diagonals are all equal etc. I am sure that sounds pedantic, but then I believe that the Army could be so too. All the other diamond patches for the London Regiment that I have seen
* are unmistakeable. It is possible that in France they may not have been so picky. I don't feel that this was the case though.
Furthermore, a diamond does not fit the pattern of patches used in the 58th Division. The order of seniority for the 173rd and 175th Brigade was 1) Vertical rectangle 2) square 3) triangle 4) horizontal rectangle. A diamond does not fit this scheme.
The envelopes these patches come with show the same handwriting of someone at GHQ. It is entirely conceivable that mistakes could have been made with such a volume of correspondence coming through. It is probably not connected, but I note that the 2/6th Liverpool Regiment had a dark green diamond as their distinguishing patch.
It would be good to try and get photographic evidence to back-up or disprove this claim.
Chris
Thanks again to Jelly Terror and Orasot for information from the IWM.
Edit: After double-checking, I found that there are in fact some 'square' diamonds present in the IWM collection. This perhaps invalidates my first point. However, I still think it highly likely to be a mistake due to reasons outlined in my paragraph about the 58th Division 'battalion patch scheme'.
*in photographs