Next Exhibit Previous Exhibit
This month's exhibit is in an altogether more light-hearted vein than last month's grisly tale. In September 1999, John Clark at Hyde Lane found a badge while metal-detecting ... with permission ... in one of John Cook's fields. We set about trying to work out what it was.About 1 ¾ inch diameter, it showed an eagle with a square shield on its chest. In one set of talons it held a branch of something and in the other a bunch of arrows. A motto on a banner was completely illegible. The whole was enclosed in a circle. On the back were a short screw thread at the very centre and a short pin near the top.
The screw and pin were fairly obvious indicators that it was a cap badge - the screw holds it on while the pin stops it twisting round and turning upside down. The eagle is a motif from many countries and Hyde Lane which led to the field was home to a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. But there was no evidence of royal or fascist symbols with the eagle. This suggested it was from a republic and probably on "our side". A colleague at the Purton Probus Club told me he thought it was an American eagle and he'd seen the bunch of arrows somewhere before, perhaps with the US Signals Corps.
I next turned to the Internet. I found a page for the US Army Signals Corps and it even showed a regimental crest with some of the right symbols on it, although some might have changed over time. It also gave me an address at Fort Gordon in Georgia which I could write to.
They wrote back quite quickly and told me that the obscure badge we had been striving to identify was only the Great Seal of the United States! It goes to show we're not all totally immersed in the flood of US images on TV. The motto was of course, E pluribus unum, and the vegetation was an olive branch.
However the badge inside the circle has been current since 1944 for all US Army female enlisted personnel and is nothing to do with the Signals Corps per se. The only thing we now need to work out is what the young lady in question was doing in a field in Purton to have lost her cap badge!