Ward - A Guide to Wartime Collectables

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright Arthur Ward 2013

HARDBACK ISBN: 978-1-84884-812-2
PDF ISBN: 978-1-47383-106-3
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-47382-687-8
PRC ISBN: 978-1-47382-643-4

The right of Arthur Ward to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Dedication

To the memory of the grandfather I never knew.

Horace Arthur Ward

February 2nd 1909 November 14th 1940

Private, Buffs. Army No: 6284725

Army Form B.200E simply records Died (result of accident).

The accident was the result of you being ordered against your free will to collect driftwood from a beach in Devon that you knew to be mined. Your violent death from a British anti-invasion weapon was made tragically ironic given your escape from advancing German forces during the retreat from France with the BEF only five months earlier.

From the wrong class, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

But you are not forgotten and one year, 1940, became the touchstone for my interest in history and a conduit for my life-long fascination with military reliquary.

Acknowledgements

Lots of people have helped me in a variety of ways; either supplying precious artefacts, wearing them in photographs, lending advice or translating foreign documents. Thanks to everyone, especially the following:

Mirella Aslar, Keith Badman, Luca Bisoni, Martin Brayley, Penny Breia, David Carson, Jim Daly, Peter Donaldson, Taff Gillinghmam, Paul Glennon, Fred Finel, Nick Hall, Gary Hancock, Dean Harvey, Phil Heycock, Jonathan Heyworth, Keith Homer, Richard Hunt, Duncan Hussey, Richard Ingram, Marek Kaszewski, Kent Battle of Britain Trust at Hawkinge, Graham Lancaster, Michael Larkin, Mike Llewellyn, Keith Major, Adrian Mathews, Glen Mallen, Stephen Maltby, Julian Money, Peter Osborne, Paul Phillips, Ron Shipley, Herb Schmitz, Nick Slee, Andy Smerdon, Roy Smith, Mick and Kath Sparkes, Bob Steadman, Darren Steed, Mark Taylor, Neil Thomas, Terry Voisey, Bob Whitaker, David Wickens, Colin Wright.

Introduction

A lthough warfare and military service is experienced by a relative few, its effects have a dramatic influence on all of us. Because the nature of armed struggle is so dramatic, it is not surprising that different elements of the milieu resonate with us in different ways. One component that continues to interest an enormous number of people concerns the regalia, arms and equipment of fighting men. Militaria is the catch-all term used to describe the study and collection of authentic items of vintage and contemporary martial artefacts.

Overall layout of various British and Commonwealth badges, including: bronze cap badges for officers Queens Army Service Corps (WWI vintage, winning the Royal prefix in 1921 and becoming the RASC); metal line infantry cap badges Buffs, Royal Fusiliers, Suffolks, East Yorkshires, Black Watch, Volunteer Battalion Post Office Rifles; WWII plastic economy badges Royal Artillery (bomb), Royal Engineers, Durham Light Infantry, Kings Royal Rifle Corps, Devonshire Regiment; corps badges Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, RASC, REME, ATS; foreign and Commonwealth Australian Commonwealth Military Forces, Free Dutch Volunteers (WWII); miscellaneous Royal Marine Other Ranks helmet plate, RM Other Ranks cap badge, RN officers beret badge and badge of the Palestine Police.

A broad-spectrum layout of military insignia awards and headdress, including: a WWII peaked cap belonging to a British staff colonel (note the red band); Kings Royal Rifle Corp khaki beret of WWII period; British caps badges: a generals, Queens Regt, Royal Scots, Manchesters, WWII Free Polish, RFC, German WWI Iron Cross 2nd Class, German belt buckle, Austro-Hungarian European medals and a WWI Prussian Pickelhaube helmet plate.

Nave and primitive toy tank. Being handmade and not mass produced, it is all the more desirable and one can perhaps imagine a veteran of WWI fashioning this representation for an eager child. It probably dates from the early 1920s.

Collectors confer high values on all manner of original military paraphernalia. Some things such as badges, for example, have a more general appeal but serious buffs collect them with a passion equalled only by philatelists. Today, intense competition in the market for authentic twentieth-century military collectables has not only pushed prices higher as the supply for genuine items dwindles, but has generated a thriving market in quality replicas. These honest imitations arent fakes and are especially prized by the growing band of re-enactors.

Fabric ARP badge worn on the overalls of men and women involved in air raid work.

Fought on two occasions (18801881 and 18991902) by the British Empire against the Dutch settlers of the independent Boer republics, the Boer wars introduced a century of remarkable change in warfare. As this Edwardian glass slide shows, gone were the scarlet tunics of the thin red line. Khaki was king and soldiers fought as individuals, falling victim to sniper fire from rifles or being cut down with alacrity by the new machine gun the deadly machine tool of the battlefield.

Its not just about war fighting either. Collectors eagerly include non-military items such as those from the wartime civilian Home Front amongst their most prized possession.

Though warfare is characterized by violence and suffering, it also reveals some of mankinds more noble qualities such as bravery, camaraderie, compassion and even inventiveness. Things naturally develop rather quickly in an emergency. For example, the Second World War saw the introduction of the jet engine, cruise missiles in the shape of the German V, and even the first ballistic missiles when the doodlebugs successor, the V2, was unleashed. There were new ideas in electronic early warning such as RADAR, ASDIC (known to the Americans as SONAR) and in computerized code-breaking such as ULTRA, the code name for the electronic decryption work going on at Bletchley Park that revealed the secrets of the German Enigma cipher.