Skins Officers Cap Badges.
 

Hi All,

I have been trying to establish exactly what the Skins Officers silver/gilt cap badges need to look like, I did briefly have a couple of "collar badges", as seen elsewhere, but these were not what I was looking for, of course!

Colin Churchill manages to muddy the water nicely in his section on the Skins when he says that several patterns of silver/gilt collar badges have been noted with Inniskilling under the castle, and that this same badge was also the Officers cap badge c1902-1927 occurring with both blades and lugs, he does not say, however, how these lugs were aligned.

I have been unable to find anything in print or anywhere in these forums about these lugs, but it does seem that the Officers silver/gilt cap badge should have EW lugs. I exchanged a few emails with my seller about this and he fine fellow that he is, promptly exchanged the badges that he had sent me, with the ones that I have attached. One of these, although it's a bit faded, even adds another kind of fixture altogether, discussed previously, I believe, in these forums.

These two badges will form part of my KC Officers cap badge collection, and I've attached a picture of the progress with that, at the end.

Officer's cap should look just like the fine examples you have shown. I think you are trying to make a little too much of this. Officer badges such as these are all private purchase from many makers, big and small, including jewellers. What fixtures they decide upon is up to them. There were no specific regulations in this regard. The small variations in style are also simply maker variations.

CB

Now then, CB, I've got nothing better to do than be OCD about all of this, I should most definitely get out more !!!

I got a PM from a forum member who was trying to work out how I'm arranging my KC Officers display, so, hopefully a few better pictures might make that a bit clearer. It's not easy getting decent daylight images of the whole lot without getting shadows, but I've given it my best shot

The badges are in order of precedence, of course, and noticeably in some cases it's been a lot easier to find the OSD badges than the silver, silver/gilt versions, Some, no problem, one OSD, one silver/gilt, sorted, move on to the next one! Others, not quite so simple, where are all the gilt/silver Norfolks and the silver gilt Welsh Fusiliers, for instance?

Some regiments changed their badges when they became Royal and suchlike, so for each of them, there's 4 badges to find, and there are often variations, as well. I suspect that there might well be 200+ altogether, and probably still be others that haven't been thought about.

There does seem to be fairly general agreement about the lugs on the Skins cap badges!