Army Pay Corps cap badge produced as a restrike of the pattern worn between 1902 and 1920 by the Army Pay Corps of the British Army. This British Army corps cap badge displays the recognised pre-Royal APC device in clear relief, incorporating an Imperial King’s Crown as the principal device surmounting the interlaced monogram “APC”, the whole struck in brass as a single-metal construction. The King’s Crown distinguishes this pattern from any Victorian Crown predecessor examples, confirming production and wear within the Edwardian period and the First World War. The badge was superseded in 1920 when the Army Pay Corps was amalgamated with the Army Pay Department to form the Royal Army Pay Corps, at which point a new badge was adopted incorporating the Royal Crest above the corps monogram, later revised further in 1929 when the motto “Fide et Fiducia” replaced the monogram entirely under a new design approved by King George V.
The Army Pay Corps was formed in 1893 as an other ranks’ corps to support the work of the Army Pay Department, an officer-only establishment that had been constituted as an autonomous branch in 1878, itself descended from the Pay Sub-Department of the Control Department formed in 1870. Before 1893, the administration of army pay at the unit level rested with regimental paymasters and their clerks, drawn from within the regiment rather than from a specialist corps, producing inconsistencies in the keeping of accounts and the disbursement of pay across the expanding British Army of the late Victorian period. The Army Pay Corps was accordingly established to provide a pool of trained other ranks clerks and pay staff deployable across all arms and corps of the army. The corps served throughout the South African War of 1899–1902 and subsequently expanded enormously during the First World War to administer the pay of an army that grew from approximately 250,000 men in 1914 to over five million by 1918, a logistical undertaking of extraordinary scale that the corps fulfilled with sufficient distinction to earn the “Royal” prefix granted to the amalgamated Royal Army Pay Corps in 1920. The King’s Crown over monogram badge in this form was worn across the entire First World War period, making it the badge most closely associated with the corps’ wartime service.
Manufactured in brass as a single-metal construction consistent with British Army other ranks’ corps cap badge production of the Edwardian and First World War period, this restrike example provides a sharply defined representation of the Army Pay Corps headdress badge as worn from 1902 to 1920. Army Pay Corps King’s Crown cap badges are collected as examples of First World War British Army corps militaria, pre-Royal headdress insignia of the army’s pay and financial administration services, and uniform hardware of the wartime British Army.
Dimensions Approx. 42mm x 39mm
Condition As new
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