Although the British Army had been experimenting with Staybrite buttons from about 1947 onwards, most uniform and badges used by the military were still brass when Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne. This means that certain cap badges from the 1950s can be found with the new sovereign’s cypher and the queen’s crown but made of standard stamped brass rather than staybrite. Today we are looking at one such cap badge from this early period in the Queen’s reign in the form of a brass Royal Army Service Corps badge:

The design of the badge was essentially unchanged from the previous monarch, with an eight pointed star with the royal cypher in the middle and the crown above, except of course that EIIR has replaced GVIR and the crown is the St Edward’s crown rather than the Tudor crown used by the Kings of the previous fifty years. Like most cap badges at this period, the badge has a vertical slider to allow it to be worn on a cap:

The Royal Army Service Corps would remain a separate entity until 1965 when it merged with elements of the Royal Engineers to create the Royal Corps of Transport which itself would be amalgamated into the Royal Logistics Corps in 1993.