CAP BADGE QUERY

[ace373]

Can anyone recognise this cap badge please?

[headgardener]

Royal Artillery (RFA, RHA, RGA), or HAC (Artillery)

[ace373]

Thank you headgardner.

He was a POW at Friedrichsfeld and was in the Coldstream Guards as a Machine Gunner. This photo is taken at Friedrichsfeld.

regards

Amanda

[john gregory]

Royal Artillery, RFA, RHA, RGA, HAC, cap badge on the photo is not the Coldstream Guards.

[headgardener]

I have a large collection of portrait photos of servicemen from WW1, including a very large number of POW's, and I can confirm that men would frequently wear the cap-badges of units that they never appear to have served with. It's difficult to say why; maybe their original equipment was lost or had been taken or traded with their captors, and perhaps they felt that their caps looked rather bare without some form of adornment (a bit like a formal white shirt without a tie?).

Impossible to say where they got their new cap-badges from; maybe they were traded with other POW's, or 'inherited' from men who had been exchanged or who had died, or maybe a couple of boxes of cap-badges would be sent to camps from time to time, but by the time the package arrived, some of the intended recipients may have moved on. Who knows?

Either way, your man is not wearing the badge of the Coldstream Guards, or the Guards Machine Gun Regt, or of the Machine Gun Corps.