Megan

Nice... tagged for later 🤓

Splendid stuff. Lebowa seems to have liked those scalloped edges... 🤓

By the way that kind of semi-circular indentation separated by points is called 'engrailled' in heraldry.

Off to scribble some more notes....

Thank you. I can work with that...

Fascinating... making notes furiously.

Seems I have managed to get a bit confused between the Order for Distinguished Leadership and the Medal for Distinguished Service - and ended up with the ribbon for the latter described as the ribbon for the former on my website!

Now to sort it out!

Archie, the ribbon for the Order for Distinguished Leadership, is that gold with a medium blue edged dark blue central stripe?

Did EVERYTHING from Transkei come in 2 types - 1976-1987 and 1988-1994?

Even more stuff to try and track donn.

Did they issue any documentation about their awards, regulations, that sort of thing?

Marcon1 - would you be so kind as to permit me to use your images, and if so what is your name for the acknowledgements (PM if you prefer)?

Very nice, thank you so much!

Brilliant stuff... scribbling notes furiously...

Anyone got decent size images they would be prepared to share? Rookie's  pictures are great for identification purposes but too small to be useful.

Your man-cave looks fantastic!

I collect information and images rather than things, but it all occupues quite a lot of storage. This dates back to a childhood fascination with medals and 1) having picked up one medal which neither the vendor nor the local museum could identify, the quest to find out what it was led to 2) the discovery that a book with information/images of lots of medals cost less than a single actual medal! Anyway I'd bought most all that I could find that I could afford on pocket money anyway.

In later years this new-fangled World Wide Web thing came along. Already in the computing trade by then, I found HTML (the basic code that websites are written with) is a very space-efficient way of storing images and information at a time when hard drives cost an arm and a leg! So Medals of the World was born...

Magic, thank you. I'm always looking for decrees and such.

So many beautiful images... I may have died & gone to heaven 🤓

Amazeballs...

Thanks... my italian is going to get a workout shortly!

Cannot justify cost/storage space for the dead tree version, or even handle it comfortably. these days, alas.

Thanks.... bit hard to see at a distance especially as Charlie flew in the face of tradition and is looking the 'wrong' way.

More medals to hunt down a Charles III version of....

Whose head is on the OSM?

Is this a 'dead tree' publication or is it available as a PDF?

The April 2024 issue of Soldier magazine has this:

New Medal: Hit or Miss?

A NEW medal that recognises deployments on operations such as Cabrit is in danger of being loved and loathed in equal measure by personnel, thanks to its qualifying criteria.

The Wider Service Medal recognises 180 days’ of aggregated service on certain qualifying missions that do not necessarily fall within the traditional medallic criteria of risk and rigour. The MoD announced it will limit the number of applicable operations to begin with but it will be expanded later. However, eligibility will stretch back only to December 2018, when Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II approved the idea of the award. Op Cabrit began in 2017, leaving a substantial cohort of British soldiers who were deployed out in the cold.

“I understand there has been a different focus on Eastern Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine but we faced the same threat and harsher conditions,” Maj Nicholas Hedges (Rifles), who served on the first Cabrit tour, told Soldier.

“Clearly the medal is very welcome but in my view it should apply to the deployment from day one – it should be all or nothing.”

WO2 Sam Coote (RLC), attached to 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, added: “I think it’s a positive step forward as we face many different challenges and this will recognise ops below the usual threshold.”

Lt Col Nick Zorab, commanding officer of 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, also believes personnel will feel encouraged overall.

“I served on an earlier Estonia deployment as a company commander and was struck then by how important medallic recognition was to troops,” he said. “We were deployed for nearly eight months and it’s right that sacrifices such as being  away for long periods are recognised.”

Lt Col Zorab said the qualifying criteria might prove divisive if soldiers on the first tours were ruled out, but he added: “You have to draw a line somewhere.”

Dang... more stuff to research!!!

I have both of those books as well. The pages in the original query do not come from either...

I still remember almost 20 years ago, I was attending a reception at the University of Durham and the head of the hospitality staff was wearing a miniture of the MBE. I sidled over and congratulated him on it and he almost burst with pride and delight that someone had noticed!

Having a long-lived monarch has been a bit of an issue... all these jubilee medals! That's given a lot of people a row of medals with no greater effort than staying in the job for a few years. Maybe the Victorians had the right idea - if you got the Jubilee Medal in 1887 and qualified for the next one in 1897 you got a bar to the 1887 one rather than a second medal.

To be honest I actually like the East German approach: whatever trade you engage in, there are medals for merit and long service for that trade. What do you think?

They are no more deserving than others who do not get such recognition - e.g., the letter carriers and refuse collectors who provide essential and often poorly-paid services to the public.

In many nations there are more general 'long service' awards that people who have spent a long time in ANY job are eligible to apply for, they don't even have to be in public service. Maybe that is a better route to go down.

And please moderate your tone. Your comment comes over as aggressive and dismissive of a thought you do not happen to agree with. This isn't antisocial media, it's a gentlemen's club

Wonder how obscure they intend to go with long service medals? Armed forces and emergency services make sense... but now it seems that everyone and his dog gets one!

Who's next? Civil Servants? Teachers? Refuse collectors? Letter carriers?

Anyone know where it sits in the order of wear?

Thank you... must have missed that due to hungry husband turning up looking for lunch!