A Naval Crown With Roman Roots
This week’s selection brings together a fascinating group of Merchant Navy and Royal Navy badges, including a Second World War service badge bearing the letters MN inside a rope border.
The badge may be small, but it represents the enormous contribution made by Merchant Navy crews during the war. Merchant ships carried food, fuel, troops and vital supplies across waters patrolled by enemy ships and submarines. The simple MN design became a quiet mark of service for the men and women who kept those routes open.
Another recurring feature across the collection is the naval crown. At first glance it looks like a conventional royal crown, but a closer look reveals a miniature fleet of sails, masts and ships worked into its design.
One of the larger examples shown here was used as a membership badge by the Royal Navy Old Comrades Association. More commonly, the crown appeared on Merchant Navy badges, cap badges and buttons.
The design has roots stretching back to ancient Rome, where crowns associated with naval victories were presented to successful commanders. Their decoration represented pieces taken from captured warships, providing visible proof of victory when paraded through Rome.
Over time, these captured ships and their fittings became stylised into the distinctive sails, sterns and mast-like points seen around the crown.
The naval crown had been used by Britain’s Royal Navy since the 1700s, but the Merchant Navy did not widely adopt it until after the First World War. Before then, merchant sailors generally wore the individual insignia of the shipping company or line they worked for.
That makes these badges an interesting record of changing identity. The earlier badges connected a sailor to one particular company. The naval crown helped create a wider sense of belonging to the Merchant Navy as a whole.
Also pictured are badges from individual ships and organisations, with anchors, ropes, ships’ wheels, waves and other maritime symbols picked out in enamel and metal.
They are modest objects, designed to be worn rather than displayed, but each carries part of a much larger story of ships, service and life at sea.
