Greetings all,

I am searching for definitive info on when the various patterns of shoulder flashes were taken into wear on the CF green service dress and the CF green work dress. I have seen various dates when coloured SFs were worn on the greens but what about the yellow on black SFs with and without borders?

Thanks.

DT.

Hello Doug, Your quest will be long and probably fruitless. There is a derth of records for the CF titles,and it appears that the adoption of the CF titles was over a period of time. The titles were supposed to be in different shades of gold on CF green (not black, but some were made on black backing) and the abbreviated titles were also supposed to be made on CF green. There are long style patterns with and without embroidered / merrowed edges, and the same for the abbreviated titles. IIRC, the long style CF titles, without a border was intended for the CF dress uniform (pre 1988 ish, when the tans came into wear), the long style bordered titles were for workdress, and these came in bright gold and old gold embroidery. Regular force units began to get titles in the late 70's and the reserves sometime in the late 70's or early 80's. Many reserve units purchased their titles before they got a system issue. The PPCLI were the anomaly, with the white on red titles.
At one point there was supposed to be a title for each order of dress, so the bright gold long style titles were for the CF dress/DEU uniform, the old gold long style for the workdress jacket, the borderless bright gold abbreviated titles for CF shirt dress slip-ons, the old gold abbreviated for the workdress shirt slip-ons. However in practice this seldom worked out, and many units only had one or two of the CF titles, and wore them without respect to the order of dress. Eg the abbreviated bright gold titles were worn on the CF and wkdess shirt slip-ons.
To further confuse the situation, some units adopted coloured titles, particularly the reserves in Quebec, but the BCR's had silver wire embroidered titles. Then, the whole scheme was complicated more by the issue of garrison dress, where many reserve units wore the cadet fully embroidered titles, or had special titles made for that order of dress. And, many of these were made in a "subdued" colour scheme.
When I was doing the research on the combat titles I asked a lot of questions to DHH and there were not many answers. There was supposed to be an approval process, but it was not often followed.

No wonder the CF was in such poor shape; all the money was going into clothing and badges.

DT.