Hello Dean & Bob
Glad to hear you found my long posting of interest Dean, and many thanks indeed for telling me about the piece in
Regiment: The Military Heritage Collection magazine about ‘The Royal Leicestershire Regiment 1688-1964’, which I’ve now had a good look at. The photo of Captain Colwyn William Vulliamy is a real cracker, and my understanding is that he is wearing the old style Victorian Peaked Forage Cap that I mentioned above, along with, as you noted, one of the silver and gilt star badges. I don’t know if you saw, but on p. 26, under the section for ‘The Royal Lincolnshire Regiment 1685-1960’ is a photo of “An officer wearing the 1st pattern officers’ khaki field dress uniform” (i.e. Service Dress) with a “bronzed” cap badge being a “Sphinx superimposed upon an eight-pointed star”. All of which appears to indicate that the Lincolns too had an OSD star badge around 1902 similar to your Leicesters one; though maybe someone on the Forum could confirm this for us?
It’s also excellent to see the two pictures you kindly put up Bob, of the officer in Service Dress from 1906 sporting an OSD tiger cap badge, and the ‘Winners of the Rolleston Charity Cup’ from 1905 with the officer on the left wearing what looks like the new style Peaked Forage Cap complete with tiger badge, because this does seem to add evidence that by around 1905 the officers were no longer wearing the star badges in their dress caps but had indeed gone over to using the tiger like the ORs. More interesting still is that it looks like the NCO on the right is wearing the ‘Brodrick’, but I can’t make out the badge? Is it a tiger?
Anyhow, by way of illustrating what I was saying about the changes in headdress, here are the pictures from the
Dress Regulations for the Officers of the Army of 1900, Plate 9, showing the Field Service Cap and the older Peaked Forage Cap, together with one from the
Dress Regulations For the Army of 1911, Plate 8, showing the new style Peaked Forage Cap that came into wear in 1902:
Field Service Cap, 1900
Peaked Forage Cap, 1900
Peaked Forage Cap, 1911
Anyway, thank you again Dean for letting me know about the article in
Regiment magazine, which I didn’t know about before, and I’m also particularly grateful to you Bob for sharing your photos, especially as the 1905 one shows a Leicesters ‘Brodrick’ in wear!
Best regards
Martin