Quote:
Originally Posted by Phill Lockett
Thanks Jerry
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I've always liked to have , in my mind, a kind of chronology of a patch, badge like WWI , pre WWII , early WWII , late war , 1945-50 , 1950's to 60's to show variations of either manufacture, size colour , construction and of the insignia's changes and development.
With collecting US shoulder Sleeve Insignia it can get complicated due to manufacturers deliberately inputting their "signature" onto the patch and slightly changing the design from the original authorized OQMC design.
cheers
Phill
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Phil
with your comment of chronology in mind, with regard to Irish Guards shoulder titles, I had the following response to a query on the same on this forum in Nov. 2007 from member 82ndrecontbp;
"The Square-End (called box end back then) cloth shoulder titles were in service with the Irish Guards through their first tour in the Desert in WW2 but so were the rounded end.
It was common for the IG to "tack" sew just the ends of the titles onto their desert shirts which arguably were not supposed to have insignia to them by design. They wanted to be able to cut them off in a hurry should some officer or tactical situation require it. This led to many of them being ripped off from daily use and wear.
There is not an official "end date" for the square end cloth shoulder titles but the square end titles were not made during the war. Existing stocks were used (keep in mind that pre-war England "stocks" of anything were LOW and quality tailors and cloth mills were plentiful so there was no reason to have loads of them on-hand). They were not uncommon but by the time the Italian campaign opened, they were already rare. All economy (p40) battledress would have had rounded-end titles.
So in short, if you were not one of the older troops in the regiment, you would likely have been issued round end cloth shoulder titles. By the time the Northwest Europe Campaign (DDay) kicked off, no square end titles were used. The Guards are fanatical about unformity and only round edged titles were used.
However - you have two good examples of wartime style and post-war titles there. Notice how much more material is at the end of the modern style title. This often leads to the mis-read of b&w photos from the war where people think they are seeing examples of square end titles worn on wool battledress.
I suggest to all IG reenactors that they clip a bit of the material off the edge of the modern repro shoulder titles to match the round style your pic shows.
Does that help? I've served as a US attache to the IG on an exchange tour and have been collecting and reading and scouring the guards museum private collection by special permission since 1990."
attached the images from that thread (I believe the thread had been deleted).