British para beret badge...how to mount?

[Peter Laidler]

Over the past 15 years or so the crunchies have taken to shaping their berets to look like sacks of potatoes and the badge seems to be wandering round to the left so that it falls midway between the centre line of the eye and centre line of the left ear. Unless the senior NCO's start getting a grip of the situation, the badge will be over the left ear'ole before long. The brass badges need to be easily removed to clean them fairly regularly to prevent brasso getting onto the beret - a major sin, believe me! You can use what we used to call a 'button stick' to prevent this. But with modern anodized alloy badges, that's the end of cleaning thank god! It was a bit pot luck whether the badge fixing was like that shown or fixed with two hoops and a cross pin - a bit like a split pin. I always retained my RAEME badge from Australia in my beret and nobody ever noticed the small extra 'A'. Made from Gilt and Silver

REME Armourers were always re-fixing the broken tabs from the rear of the brass or nickel badges shown by Gil, with a blob of soft or silver solder for a donation of a jar of coffee or box of tea bags......, you know the sort of thing. The old sweats usually had the privately purchased brass/nickel ones while the newer lads got the alloy ones they were issued with. The Corps 'shop', or the PRI usually had stocks of the brass/nickel badges in stock and at my last SASC and nearby REME unit I would stamp the rear bar with the soldiers regimental number in very small number stamps as a permanent keepsake because I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that you always kept your hat badge when you left. I did!