Jerry B

No problem. Did you see the RA example I posted?

A WWI field grade officers forage cap for the RA territorial force, 1908-1917. The makers went out of business in 1917 and were well known suppliers of headgear and swords etc prior to their demise. The cap is sadly missing most of its chinstrap but other wise is in pretty good condition for its age and has the RA TF gilt officers badge with laurel leave upper scroll rather than the Ubique seen on normal RA badges. The maker of the cap, Hamburger, Rogers & co were well known military outfitters who had been in existence for many years, originally established in 1750, 1796 R. and H. Hewetson. 1814 Hamburger and Co. 1827 Hamburger, Harwood and Co. 1839 Hamburger, Rogers and Co. then from 1841 when Rogers joined as Hamburger, Rogers & Co, Kings st, London, until they went out of business in 1917, though some sources claim Rogers joined in 1839. They were best known for supplying swords and headgear, though originally they were renown suppliers of lace for the Royal family and for military uniforms.

Very nice. 1953 to 1968 as they were amalgamted that year to form the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. I have two for this rank for the RA, one Great war and the other second world war but othewise very much the same as they did not change much until the 70's.

When you can Simon would be fine. I knew the RN used them as did the Marines I think and by ground troops in NI in the 70's.

Thanks for the offer Stuart. At the moment I am holding back on the earlier caps, but if I decide to go for one I will contact you for your opinion.

Mervyn, the first one is for the Ngbandi tribe and is only one just shown with a montage of 3 views. The 2nd as you state is thought to be a throwing spear and is probably a Zulu type, though I am not at all any sort of expert on these so I have my information from other people. http://www.zyama.com/ngbandi/pics..htm

Not sure if these belong here, but two African spearheads from my collection. Ngbandi type indentified

Hi Stuart, the early type forage caps really do look the part and I have yet to add one to my collection, though I have recently been picking up items from nearer that period, with a few WWI period examples and a Late victorian Glengarry for the the Welsh. I noticed a couple of good looking Forage caps of this type on the bay recently, but not taken the plunge yet as the prices are a bit more than I am used to paying for headgear.

A stunning forage cap Stuart, very nice.

It is a mountain cat, the familly badge of the Sutherlands, the version I show is known as the fat cat, post 1902 among collar badge collecters.

I am not going to download the image but here is one from what you describe. Though it is a boars head from the ocat of amrs of the duke of Argylle. A&S Highlanders

Excelent displays Simon. What is the helmet next to the white top visor, a tankers lid? Any chance of some detail pics of the headgear?

Looks good as I said on the other forum. It did look whitened canvas in the sellers pics, so good to get that confirmed. I know with the officers white top visor caps the vinyl top was introduced in 1956.

Circa WWII as Mike has already stated, I am not sure when they stopped wearing these, but in theory the British stopped wearing the khaki side cap in 43-44 when the GS cap was introduced and I assume the NZ would have done the same.

Jock, I find the knocking of other forums that takes place on WRF and WAF rather pathetic and unproductive and as many members are on both it all seems a bit odd. A period image of the back of one perhaps? I have to admit that my first thought would be to be wary, and as it is not something I look for these days, it probably matters little what I think, but the imperfection is not what I would expect, that said earlier period transfer decorated wares often have mistakes on them, I have some Napoleon plates with errors on them.

The missprint on the Reich plate certainly seems to attract a lot of negative comments, though some seem to like it, but it is not what I would expect to see from the period. Probably one of those that will also attract differing opinions until solid proof can be found either way.

The way items travel the world should not really surprise us, as even back in the day souveneers were taken back home or swapped etc and more recently especially since the rise of the net anything from any period and from any country can be found h=just about anywhere these days. I bought this photo only yesterday in west Wales, how it got there is anyones guess and could be an interesting tale or more mundane, we will never know. Looks a good example, a nice pick up.

An officers Glengarry cap, which during the period was worn by most units of British infantry, officers had silk trim and OR's were leather trimmed but like the officers version had silk tails. On OR's version there was often not a backing for the badge, though this example has a red backing patch and the rosette that became common for all ranks in the later period, when this type of cap became something only worn by Scottish units to this day. The badge is in silver which denotes it was for an officer in a Volunteer battalion of the Welsh Regiment and dates to the period 1881 to 1896, though it is likely to be from nearer the end of the period, as it has the correctly translated version of the motto. This is a fairly rare cap, being more than circa 120 years old and as a collector of both headgear and Welsh items, I am very pleased and somewhat surprised to have picked it up.

Thanks for the information on this subject Simon, as I had previously mentioned this, but without the background to it.

Looks good Greg, a nice used example.

Very nice, both are stunning, the scarlet looks to be in very good condition. Very good to see a forage cap from that period.

Thanks Strapper and Mervyn for taking the time to read this and comment. Certainly a lot of history for an old cap and I have two books about the former owner on the way to me. Hopefully one of them will contain a photo of him wearing it.

Cruiser MKVI Crusader?

Some extracts from the links. The Tredegar house link Evan always looked ill. He had asthma and other complaints. In February 1916 he had pleurisy, a few months later he was operated on for an abscess in his ear and the following summer had damaged the cartilage in his knee. Evan began to receive a series of odd postings and attachments. These included being a King’s messenger (Carrying diplomatic papers to Embassies), finding himself on the staff of disgraced French General Robert Nivelle in North Africa and then back to convalesce in Oxford after some malady. This would be the chance for another opportunity to get an invite to Garsington Manor and a chance to rub shoulders with the in-crowd. It was probably on one such trip that he met with Robert Graves who had been hospitalised after being wounded in France. They had been canoeing together and the meeting would prove to be a very useful one to Graves some months later. Robert Graves and fellow poet Siegfied Sassoon were both serving officers in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Sassoon had been decorated for bravery, but was becoming increasingly disillusioned. He too was a visitor to Garsington and it may well have been on the trips that he was persuaded to write an open letter which was widely distributed and appeared in the press, condemning the war and announcing his refusal to take further part in it. Graves knew this would mean Court Martial and at least prison which he doubted Sassoon would survive. Therefore he got in touch with Evan to see if he could use his Cabinet contacts for Sassoon to be deemed medically unfit instead. Evan succeeded. The daily mail link He was one of the richest peers of the realm, a multi-millionaire with such a stash of inherited wealth he never needed to think about working. But Evan, Viscount Tredegar, was more than your average spoilt aristocrat — he was one of the most riotously outrageous and toxic eccentrics ever to emerge from the English upper classes. He studied for the priesthood, but practised black magic and befriended sinister occultist Aleister Crowley. Even though he married an English actress and a Russian princess, he was a promiscuous homosexual. He wrote poetry and dressed like Shelley, yet he was so juvenile that he trained his parrot Blue Boy to climb the inside of his trouser-leg and pop its head out of his flies. The bizarre viscount even ran a homing-pigeon scheme for military intelligence during World War II, but was court-martialled for revealing its secrets to two Girl Guides. And all around him, as he made his wayward path through life, friends had the mysterious habit of dying. ‘His friendship was a kind of curse,’ says William Cross, author of a new biography of the Welsh peer. Evan Tredegar became a figure of horrified fascination to High Society Britain in the Twenties and Thirties as he pursued his twin lusts — higher learning and sex. More... Smile that says he's on the mend: Prince Philip strides out... in his surgical stockings Beaming Queen flanked by Charles and William at Order of the Garter today as Duke of Edinburgh recovers at home 'Thieves, murderers, oppressors and infidels!' Why Nelson really did hate the French What else would you expect from a man whose mother believed herself to be a kingfisher and built bird’s nests big enough to sit in? The dystopian world that Evan Frederic Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar, built for himself was only made possible by colossal wealth. When he came of age, the vast Welsh estate his family had owned since the 14th century was bringing in the equivalent of £65,000 a day — or £24 million a year. Early life: Evan Morgan pictured with his father, the then Viscount Tredegar, when he was a 2nd Lieutenant in the Welsh Guards Home was Tredegar House, a ghostly, depressingly ugly pile near Newport in South Wales. Evan’s father had made himself useful during the First World War by handing over his private yacht to the Royal Navy — on condition that he was appointed its captain. Money rather than service bought the gold braid with which he festooned himself — so while he was still a schoolboy, Evan learned that a title, and colossal wealth, could get you anything you wanted. At Eton, he forged the friendships that were to shape his screwball life. His best friend Peter Churchill, a cousin of Winston, spent part of his childhood in North Africa and claimed to have sold sexual favours to men in return for pocket-money. W hile still at Eton the pair became pageboys to the royal court at Windsor at a time when, author Cross claims, ‘mothers of vulnerable sons were known to insist their cherished boys steer well clear of the well-known paedophiles at court’. But it was too late — both boys had already acquired a preference for their own sex, and before long Evan was kicked out of Eton under the inevitable cloud. It further counted against him that while at school he had created a circle of black-magic enthusiasts. Inspired by Peter Churchill’s tales from North Africa of temples, casbahs, souks and arcades where magicians and tricksters plied their trade, the boys dabbled in rites and rituals which were to become a central part of Evan’s life. With no need to work, Evan settled on becoming a poet. The first timer: Despite never hiding his homosexuality and having a constant string of illicit affairs, Viscount Tredegar married Viscountess Lois Sturt in 1928 Moving in the arty circle centred on the bohemian Cafe Royal in London, he became friends with the painter Augustus John and the writer Ronald Firbank, a dandy with red-lacquered fingernails. During this period Evan developed a taste for partying and buying sex from working-class rent boys. The viscount was no looker — Virginia Woolf described him as ‘a little red absurdity with a beak of a nose, no chin, and with the general likeness of a callow but student bantam cock that has run to seed’. And in the helter-skelter world of Britain after World War I, filled with flappers and cocktails and drug addicts, Evan was constantly in search of newer, darker, sensations. He was fatally attracted to dangerous people. The occultist Aleister Crowley was known to society as ‘the wickedest man in the world’ and in the Twenties people were genuinely terrified by the mention of his name — a byword for all that was mad, bad and dangerous to know. Born the son of a brewer in Leamington Spa, Crowley, who called himself ‘The Great Beast 666’, had built up a terrifying reputation as a disciple of the Devil. His stated purpose was to destroy the country’s religious and spiritual equilibrium. Number two: Princess Olga Sergievna Dolgorouky became Viscout Evan Tredegar's second wife Little wonder then that the vicious Viscount, with his schoolboy dabblings in the occult, should hasten to Crowley’s side — the pair met for the first time in Paris. Later Crowley went to stay at Tredegar House where Evan proudly revealed his Black Magick room — ‘far greater than I thought!’ marvelled Crowley. Despite his ostentatiously weird life — in his garden he kept a boxing kangaroo, a honey bear and a baboon, while in his bed he kept rabbits — Evan Morgan was still considered by ambitious mothers to be one of the country’s most eligible bachelors. Only when girls got close to him did they realise how completely impossible life at Tredegar House would be. However, Lois Sturt, daughter of the land-rich Lord Alington, was not so choosy. She had some of the same madness that infected Evan Tredegar and a whole swathe of the post-war Bright Young People. Needy, nervy, self-centred and eccentric, she was also pretty, sexy and willing to overlook Evan’s homosexuality.They married when she was 28 and he 35. But it was doomed from the start. Lois had already developed an addiction to drugs which would kill her before long. When they married in Knightsbridge, the crowds had to be held back by police, but the high-society union between Lois and Evan was not what it seemed. Each agreed the other could sleep with whom they pleased as long as it didn’t interfere with their life together. But Evan’s relentless all-male promiscuity and his love of rent boys soon rattled Lois, and before long they parted. Later he married the shapely Princess Olga Sergievna Dolgorouky, a refugee scarred by her escape from the Russian Revolution, but otherwise an innocent abroad. The marriage was annulled, unsurprisingly, on the grounds of his non-consummation after three years. Evan showed far greater devotion to his menagerie at Tredegar than he did to either of his wives. Easy life: Lord Tredegar, pictured at Tredegar Park near Newport with writer H G Wells, could live comfortably off his estate which brought in £24million per year Birds were a big part of his life. His Australian parrot, though described by Evan as ‘witless and uncontrollable’, was nothing of the sort. After teaching it the trick of crawling up the inside of his trouser leg and poking its head out of his flies, the Viscount promptly walked into the Cafe Royal and performed the routine in front of a packed house. One of the onlookers recorded that ‘the effect on old ladies present can be imagined’. Periodically, Evan would decide that he must do something serious with his life. When war was declared in 1939, he managed to get himself taken on by MI14, the secret service department detailed to handle carrier pigeons bringing back messages from frontline troops in France. So unused was he to the discipline which goes with military work, that he let two Girl Guides look at the map used to plan the 1942 Allied attack on Dieppe — which, coincidentally, turned out to be one of the war’s greatest military disasters. Such was the horror of superior officers when they learned that he had divulged highly secret troop deployment details — even though it was only to a couple of teenage girls — that Tredegar was court-martialled. Story of a life: Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar, died in April 1949, aged 55, survived by his beloved parrot He was found guilty and banished to an honorary post in the Welsh Home Guard, but even that small responsibility proved too much for him. Hopeless in war, the Viscount remained equally rudderless in peace. Throughout his life the ostensibly high-minded Evan described himself as a poet, modelling himself on Shelley and even dressing as the Romantic poet, but he failed to attract the praise of any but the most sycophantic critics. Rich though he was, Evan could not buy literary success — and rich though he remained, he could no longer buy friendship in the way he once had. Indeed, his friendship was something of a curse. Those who were close to Evan seemed to die in their droves — often tragically young. First was Guy Colebrooke, a fellow royal pageboy, who died aged 27. Then Ronald Firbank died of lung cancer at the age of 40. He was followed by fellow-drinker Sir Guy ‘Fatty’ Laking, who succumbed to alcohol poisoning at 26. One of Evans’s lovers, the Earl of Lathom, keeled over from tuberculosis brought on by a dissipated life, while another lover, the Hon James Rodney, was killed in a house fire. Friends Peter Watson, a wealthy art patron, and Sir Johnnie Philipps both drowned in their baths. And another friend, the artist Nina Hamnett, plunged out of a window, impaling herself on the railings 40ft beneath. There were suicides, too: the artist Kit Wood, the composer Peter Warlock, fellow Etonian Brian Howard and writer Richard Rumbold. Even his first wife’s brother, the Hon Gerard Sturt, killed himself. His sister Gwyneth succumbed to drug abuse and her body was found washed up on the Thames shore in 1924. And so the party — that gay, abandoned, reckless party of parrots, poetry and promiscuity — eventually ended. Evan Morgan, whose riches so completely detached him from life, finally parted company with it on April 27, 1949 — a victim to cancer at the early age of 55. The trouser-climbing parrot survived him. Not Behind Lace Curtains — The Hidden World Of Evan, Viscount Tredegar, by William Cross (Book Midden Publishing, £12), is available on Amazon. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2343546/The-devil-worshipping-viscount-VERY-naughty-party-trick-parrot.html#ixzz3BmzgAL00 Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

An interesting cap that has an appeal to me on for a number of reasons which is why I was pleased to buy it recently. It dates to the Great War period and is a Staff officers service dress cap, nice in its own right just because of this, though condition is somewhat surrefering because of its age, but still good to my eyes. Secondly it is named and the owner -the honourable Evan Frederick Morgan- was known to have served with the Welsh Guards from early in their formation in 1915 until his transfer to tbecome a staff officer, being personal private secretary to WC Bridgeman MP who was parlimentary secretary to the minister for labour. In this position he was able after being asked by his friend Robert Graves -the famous war poet and officer with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers- to help the Siegfried Sassoon -another famours war poet and officer with the RWF- avoid being court martialled for his anti war letter following his wounding on the Western Front. The original owner of the cap -it is named to him and also has a written short history of him stuck inside the celulose head liner- was the son of the 3rd Baron Tredegar who also served during the great war. After his death Evan F Morgan became the 4th Baron Tredegar -2nd Viscount- and they owned the stately home Tredegar House near Newport in South Wales. The 4th Baron was known for being a very colourful character-he was somewhat of an eccentric- and associated with Alistair Crowley the well known satanist and also the author H.G.Wells. The Baron was wellknown for keeping a boxing kangeroo as a pet and also kept a parrot with which he performed an infamour party trick and he was the subject of a book on his life -see links below. He married twice and his 2nd wife was a Russian princess. During WWII he worked in inteligence and was involved in work relating to the use of homing pidgeons and was also involved in the planning of the Diepe raid, the latter which got him into trouble as he confided in two teenage girls some of the details for the planning of the raid and for which he was sacked form his position. Local history article http://tredegarhouse.wordpress.com/ Daily Mail article about the book on him http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2343546/The-devil-worshipping-viscount-VERY-naughty-party-trick-parrot.html A painting of him http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1553476 Another painting of him http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1552383 Wikipedia link for him http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Morgan%2C_2nd_Viscount_Tredegar