Andy,
You are technically right in tems of officially purchased, but as a collector it can become somewhat difficult to decide what is correct. Are the purists who insist on the only the issued versions actually correct when as a collector are you then technically wrong for buying and selling a repro that you KNOW was actually the adopted pattern in a unit.
It makes the various debates on this and other forums something of a moot issue - how can an issued item that was rejected by the soldiers in a unit be a correct badge? That item surely then becomes the 'oddity', whilst the repro should be accepted as the definitive item for collecting.
Its a bit like the debate on Army boots - we all knew what the issued ones were crap and we rejected them for better after market boots. Does mean in the future that my actual worn uniform would be rejected by someone reconstructung uniforms of the 80/90's because I wore Lundhags and not the cardboard crap?
There is also the issue of qty on the market being touted as 'genuine'. If every so called 'genuine' WM, Br or BM sold at market was original, given the amount already in private collections, the amount 'lost' and already disposed of, the British Army would have at least quadrupled in size at any point in its history!
It is the reason I have shied away from WM etc. I have to accept that without any form of provenence all badges are technically suspect, or I simplly collect the cheaper honest repro pattern because I cannot actually prove others are not due to ingenious weathering, fading, rubbing etc.
I will be collecting HP centres soon, I know that 99% of those are going to be fakes as the odds of that number of genuine surviving is minimal. Most are in fact restrikes from the 20/30's! I just wish that the general market would stop touting them as originals and try to charge inflated rates. Actually, I would like to find the repro manufacturer and buy from trade as I actually want a set to display rather than try to find the real thing - I leave that to those with absolute detail knowledge and fat wallets...
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