Quote:
Originally Posted by Guzzman
I have my doubts about this tally being genuine. It just doesn't look right and the material it is made from seems very thin. There is also the problem of the missing dot after the name.
During the 1960s it was the 20th anniversary of naval actions during the Second World War. Many veterans wanted to purchase tallies from their old ships but there simply weren't enough original tallies to go round. So many companies produced new tallies for them bearing their wartime ship's names - but none of these bore the dot after the name as the originals would have done. Sometimes they were produced using a cheaper material than the originals. It is now 60 years since these reproduction tallies were made and they will have aged considerably!
It looks to me as if someone has taken one of these reproduction tallies and tied it to an older cap. As Nozzer states, whoever tied it was obviously no sailor. It looks bloody awful! And anyway the fashion for wearing tallies pre-war and during the war was to tie the bow over the left eye. Quite illegal but that was the fashion!
'Dotted' tallies were the norm for naval tallies for from the time they were first introduced in the 1860s (though I do have one or two Great War tallies that were produced without them). At the start of the war ratings were allowed to continue wearing their named tallies until stocks were used up - they were then supposed to wear 'H.M.S.' tallies. Named tallies with dots returned after the war but by 1947-48 these were being replaced by tallies without dots. However just to confuse things, in the early-1950s some tallies were made with dots after the name for larger new warships such as the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle. But after a year or two these were also replaced with undotted tallies. Undotted tallies have remained in use ever since.
Pete
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Thanks for your GREAT explanation to teach myself