‘Black-on-Khaki’ shoulder titles

Today has been a day where I have finally been able to put another piece of the Suffolk badge jigsaw into place.

The previously rare, but now more common ‘black-on-khaki’ shoulder title slip on have previously been thought to have been introduced at the beginning of the Second World War to be worn on battledress instead of the traditional brass shoulder titles were not designed to be worn with it (They were intended for wear in service dress). However it has often been assumed that when white on scarlet printed cloth shoulder titles appeared in 1941, that these titles ceased to be worn.

The numbers of these titles now emerging, leads my cynical head to say that they cannot all be early-war stock and that production must have continued for sometime after the scarlet titles were introduced?

Some years back, in the album of Suffolk National Serviceman, Ken Ambrose, (who served with 8 Platoon, ‘C’ Company), he had just such a title pasted in, which he was adamant that he’d been issued with when he received his jungle greens on the journey to Malaya in 1951, but there were sadly no photos in his album to confirm its wear in Malaya.

Fast-forward a few years to when I was compiling my book on the Malayan Emergency, and I came across several photographs of men wearing these black-on-khaki slip-ons on their ‘smart’ jungle greens; supporting their use long after many of the badge collectors said they were no longer used.

I have since found photographs of the 8th Battalion in Bermuda in 1947-48 wearing them, so there is much evident to support that they were worn (and possibly also manufactured) after WW2, which is interesting as I have not yet seen any photographic evidence of the 1st Battalion wearing them as part of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) in 1939-40 - the period when they were supposed to be worn!!!

Today, the final proof came when I was able to purchase a title with a National Service-era service number written on the rear. This number ‘22456016’ squarely plants this title into a Malayan Emergency timeframe, one now has to find out just who it belonged to…..