The Stories We Tell About Ourselves...

... Aren't always true.

So I've been learning, in the aftermath of my previous post about the Royal Artillery cap badge supposedly worn during the Great War by my paternal grandfather. It turns out that pretty much every claim in that post was wrong.

Now, I did express some concerns, in that post, about how my grandfather could have come to wear a Royal Artillery cap badge. I just didn't express a sufficient number of them. And even the facts in that post that were correct were incorrectly described. So here's a summary of what I've learned over the past four weeks or so:

Not my grandfather's cap badge, it
turns out (photo Do-Ming Lum)

The cap badge could never have been my grandfather's. Sidney Skeet enlisted as a private and was a private when the war ended. The cap badge illustrated was an officer's cap badge, an assessment confirmed by multiple authorities.

There was no such thing as "powder blasting." The apparent discoloration of the badge is actually caused by a commercial process, called bronzing. According to the historical researchers at the Royal Artillery Museum (to whom many thanks for responding to my queries), "As a result of experience in the Boer War, [Royal Artillery] Officer’s No. 2 Field Dress cap-badges were bronzed.  This was a commercial manufacturing process.  (Boer sharpshooters had been a problem in regards to un-bronzed cap badges)." In other words, bronzing made it harder for the enemy to pick out officers for, shall we say, special treatment.

Example of the cap badge my
grandfather actually wore.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.

The badge is not necessarily that of the Royal Horse Artillery. As the quote in the previous paragraph implies, the badge belongs to the Royal Artillery. The same cap badge was worn by members of the Royal Field Artillery (by far the most numerous arm of the RA Regiment), the Royal Horse Artillery, and the Royal Garrison Artillery.

I had my grandfather's service history backward. This was just simple ignorance on my part. I misread the medal card, which turns out to show that my grandfather enlisted in the Army Service Corps (in 1914) and (at some unknown point) transferred to the Dorset Regiment. He was with the 4th (Territorial) Battalion of the Dorsets in Mesopotamia from the time of their arrival at Basra (February 1916) until the end of the war.

So how did I get so much wrong? The short answer is, don't believe everything you read. The badges and medals I received at Christmas 2018 were framed, and on the back of each frame was a description of the contents. Some investigation on my part shows the descriptions to have been written by a friend of my grandfather who was sometimes prone to tale-telling. I've investigated some of this gentleman's claims about his own military record and found them to be hilariously exaggerated, so I have no trouble believing the man provided my grandfather with a military history that was much more exciting than accurate. The man in question is long dead, so I'm not going to identify him publicly.

It gets more interesting. One of the medals I was given is the 1914-15 Star. This medal was awarded to every British (or Empire) serviceman who served in an overseas theatre of war before the end of 1915.* The problem is, my grandfather's medal card has no mention of him being eligible for this medal. So why does he have it? There's an obvious answer to this question, which I will try to go into at a later time.

My thanks to the experts at the Royal Artillery Museum and the Great War Forum for their (sometimes puzzled) assistance in my ongoing researches.

*This is a simplification of the actual criteria, but sufficient for current purposes.