South Staffordshire Regiment
 

Good afternoon,

found last month a press photo dated 21/01/1938 showing South Stafordshire Regiment mortarmen.

Laurent

Interesting to see the wearing of collar badges on battle dress blouses and regimental cap badge painted onto the steel helmet. Thank you for posting Laurent.

Pre BD issue, they are wearing SD still.

regards

They now have the beige colored oval backing to the collar dogs. When did this practice begin? Also note the decals of the regimental badge on the front of the helmets. Interesting in that most regiments wore them on the left side.

CB

2 close-up photos

Laurent

a very good photo. I have seen decals on the front of helmets in the pre or early WWII period

May I ask, how do you know, from the photograph, that the badge upon the helmets are actually painted?

Yes of course Simon, that’ll teach me to look beyond the web equipment!

It’s just what I see, albeit on a phone screen. It doesn’t seem 3-dimensional, so I perceived it as likely painted on. Perhaps they are decals, I don’t know.

Good selection of helmet decals/transfers in this album https://www.britishbadgeforum.com/fo...hp?albumid=663

The North Staffordshire Regiment is on page 2, I can't spot the South Staffords but it would seem likely that it existed.

Tim

Agreed, I'd be very surprised if they had actually been painted.

Very interesting to see them Tim. Decals seem to have been popular and of course they produced a consistent image that could easily be applied. I don't know the totality of units that used them. Some of the photos at the link refer to 'painted' decals, so I'm assuming the word was used rather loosely. The painting I was thinking of and have seen on just a few helmets used a stencil with paint applied by dabbing with a cloth coated in paint. It only worked with simple designs. I had imagined that the South Staffs uncomplicated badge of a Stafford knot with crown over was just the sort of emblem that was simple to do, but as you say, it could just as easily have been a decal used.

As we are a Forum that likes to get things correct could we stop calling these decals - an Americanism originally I think - and use the correct wartime term, water slide transfers - or simply transfers- please.

Gale & Polden were major suppliers of these although their instruction leaflet uses a longer more complicated name.

Pedantic rant over.

Jon

I’m quite happy to use correct terminology Jon, I merely referred to the word used by the preceding posters and those who posted the images, as to do otherwise would surely have been confusing.