This week’s postcard dates from about 1905 and depicts members of the Queen’s Edinburgh Volunteers practicing their semaphore signalling with large flags whilst at Aldershot:

The men are all wearing dark blue working uniforms with side caps, boots and leather anklets and each is equipped with a blue striped white semaphore flag:

One man stands to the side with his flag lowered and is perhaps the instructor:

Frank Richards was sent on a signalling course with the army in 1902:

In the middle of January 1902 about twenty of us were chosen from the different units of the battalion commenced a sixty days’ course of signalling under a signalling sergeant of the Gloucesters. He was assisted by an old signaller of our Second Battalion who had been invalided home from China. As I found out later a signalling sergeant always considered himself lucky if at the end of a sixty days’ course he could pick out five men from a class of twenty who were likely to make decent signallers. This class proved no exception to the rule. I was greatly interested in this course, but the majority of the class had put their names down for it only because for the time being they would be getting out of drill-parades and guards and pickets.