During a recent clearout of stuff from my garage, I found this strange looking clip.
It had belonged to my dad and clearly dated back to World War 2.
But what is it?
With the imminent prospect of selling our house and moving on, we have been rummaging through our stuff, looking for things we could throw away, to lighten our load. We have raised a family in this 4 bed semi, and lived here longer than anywhere else, so we have lots of stuff.In a box that I had 'inherited' from my dad, containing half a dozen assorted wood screws, a handful of curved nails which had obviously been extracted from a piece of wood, and a few strips of well used sandpaper, I found this strange looking object;
Its made of a non-magnetic metal (probably bronze/gunmetal) has a tapped hole in the base and the Essex Regiment badge on the front face. The face is about 35mm wide by 60mm high, and it has an inner metal 'loop'.
A couple of hours after posting these images on the ww2talk forum, several people provided some answers.
Back in the 1940s, servicemen would have spent a lot of their free time sitting around smoking fags, so matches would have been a very important element in this. The general consensus is that this object is almost certainly a standing vesta.
In use, a matchbox was slid between its jaws and the central loop would force the box open, exposing the matches inside. It would have been attached to some kind of base to give it stability, and the open sides would have allowed the user to strike the match on the side of the box.
What I don't know is whether my dad made it in a Battery workshop, or whether another gunner specialised in making these, maybe for beer money!
Also, was this vesta holder left on a table for anyone to use?
The 'pocket vesta' was also popular around this time. These generally totally enclosed the match box, so useful when carrying around matches, especially the potentially dangerous red phosphorus ones, which could ignite on impact.