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Old 08-12-18, 02:05 PM
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Gurkha Gurkha is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2007
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Thought I'd wait until i'd looked in the loft for mine.
Here's my issued breast badge.
The history behind the Met badges is as follows. In the mid 70's there was a trial of a New style uniform up on 'K' divison (NE London). The trail uniform had the breast badge as part of the trial.
The uniform was not adopted one reason was that it was 'Too American' so that was it.

Traffic motorcyclists for wet weather wore a long rubberised Mac that buckled around the legs. You had to arrange the creases in a certain way or it leaked. These garments had epaulettes so you displayed your numbers on those.

In order to modernise our appearance, a stop gap jacket was introduced. This was in fact a commercial off the shelf black sailing Jacket with no epaulettes. So the clothing stores issued this badge from the trial. This was worn on the left breast. It has four bend over tabs on the rear which easily break and was never intended to be transferred between garments. No expense being spared our numbers were large dymo tape stuck on.

The sailing jacket was replaced by a Black Nylon Belstaff MC jacket with epaulettes so the numbers went back on the shoulders. Some of us put the breast badge on the chest pocket flap instead so we could use the jacket to and from work by tucking the flap in. The badge was never officially withdrawn as most of the tabs had broken off by then. When we got the Yellow MC jackets we never bothered with the breast badge. As far as I recollect it was issued to us trafpols from 76-79 although I wore mine until about 82/83. The badge on our Everoak open face helmets was the crest minus the tab on a Black metal back ground. One of my mates had transferred to Kent and was issued with one of their first breast badges which promptly fell apart the first time it rained as the wrong glue had been used!
Regards
Steve M
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