A fraudulent fire brigade & police cap badge dealer from Birmingham manufactured a large number of fire brigade & police fake cap badges & passed them off as "REAL" !!

In the 1970's & 80's he had a stall at London's famous "The Arches" market as well as other militaria fairs & was well known. He realised the potential to make good money by copying rarer cap badges & started to produce various other fictitious badges soon after. Attaching enamel spoon crests, police collar badges & other dubious crests to his own mass batches of blank fully pressed Home Office stars. He also attached similar to N.F.B.A & B.F.S.A officers wreath badges & ordinary officers laurel leaf chrome shoulder badges. He also did the same to pre 1941 blank fire brigade grenade cap badges by moulding a real one,making a casting & attaching similar to them. These can easily be spotted by knowledeable collectors, you can clearly see the casting marks where he copied the original, then mass produced it. 

This practice stopped upon his death & the dies he used to produce all his fraudulent badges were bought by a Fire Service Preservation member & historian. He locked them all away in a safe so they could never be used to dupe more fire badge collectors. There are many of these still in circulation & i have witnessed some sell for large sum's on ebay to unkowing collectors. As a collector myself who spends good money on original cap badges i want to share this knowledge & upload as many examples as i can find to educate my many collecting customers who visit my website. I have been collecting for over 40 years now & have a vast network of collecting friends worldwide. I've learned a great deal about collecting fire service cap badges & want to share that knowledge with collectors.

So here is one such example, a Wolverhampton Police collar badge attached to a standard economy issue J.R Gaunt Ltd Home Office star. You can clearly see the cut lug of the collar badge spread & "grip marks" where bent