Rank and Rate: Royal Navy Officers' Insignia Since 1856

I chose this book because I am interested in the Royal Navy.The book was pleasant to me. I will recommend it to my colleagues

The prestige and heritage of the Royal Navy in full colour, for the reader, to witness.

The military uniform can be a byzantine subject in the best of circumstances, and the British Royal Navy's uniforms can be an utter nightmare to the uninitiated. This guide is laid out in a fairly chronological fashion, with the peciliarities in titles and insignia explained in plain language. The illustrations--a mixture of period images, color photos and very high-quality color illustations--complete an excellent work that is an absolute must for the collector and researcher alike. It has a companion, Volume II: Insignia of Royal Naval Ratings, WRNS, Royal Marines, QARNNS and Auxiliaries.

Mainly a picture book for quick reference. It could have gained a reputation as a standard referece source, if the author would have taken the trouble of mentioning the exact dates and numbers of the Orders and Decrees (as foot notes or in an appendix). Now the introduction dates remain some what obscure. However, the coloured images are a great help (but not "invaluable") for collectors, to identify their insignia.The binding and paper are of good quality and even in the hands of "heavy users" will last. In that perspective the price (19.95 GBP) is not bad at all!

This and it's sister publication 'Naval Ratings & Marines Insignia' are what collectors have been waiting for.Never seen better information on RN Insignia.

Excellent book

excellent

This book is something of a curate's egg - it is most definitely good in parts, and it looks good. But there is much that a publisher and editor should have improved before going to print - the devil is in the detail. As a naval officer, the author should have cast his seaman's eye over the book before its final proof was signed off.The title itself is odd - Rank and Rate. In the Royal Navy, officers have rank and the sailors of the lower deck are ratings, the term coming from their serving in rated ships such as, for example, the First Rate (ship) HMS Victory or the Fourth Rate HMS Leopard. Yet this book is entirely about the rank lace and other insignia worn by officers and, thus, the book has nothing to do with Rate (which is covered in a second, sister volume).Disappointing is the very short introduction when much more could, and should, have been written about the story of rank and insignia. The even shorter introductions to each 'chapter' are peppered with dates and, thus, the book would have benefitted from a Chronology. The book certainly needs an Index - why are authors and publishers so lazy about indexing these days?There are many photographs, inevitably mostly black and white, and these are essential so that the reader gets a sense of how all the various isignia came together on the uniform of a Royal Navy officer. However, while a few of the subjects in the photographs are named, the vast majority are not and the author has ignored the inevitable curiosity of the intelligent reader. This really is frustrating. Curiously, it is the more modern photographs that are the poor quality and this in inexcusable (e.g. Royal Navy officer, 1993 on page 47); the old photographs are generally of a high quality reproduction.Worse, the author has not had the courtesy to acknowledge the source of the photographs so that one cannot follow up with research if one wished and, indeed, there is no bibliography and no acknowledgements at all. For a book like this the sources of information and illustration are very important!There are irritating mistakes, such as the title on page 20 (officer should be plural) and the photograph on page 43 is repeated on page 47. During the Second World War some officers wore their stripes only half way round the cuff, an economy measure presumably, but I can find no mention of this. Bad page design means that it is not at all clear that the two-star and one-star shoulder boards at the top of page 68 are those of 2004 onwards only and there is nought in the text to explain these changes, which are significant and important (the reason was, presumably, to bring the number of stars into line with NATO standard practice). Elsewhere, the illustrations beg questions that are not answered, such as the seeming three and a half stripes for Flag Officers worn between 1901-04 (page 34). I am perhaps suspicious of the three pages on swords, for I have a book on naval swords and it takes a lot more pages to cover the subject but I am yet to compare the detail.I also wanted to know rather more about the author than is told in the one sentence here. On the back flap of the dust jacket are a few lines about E C Coleman but, surely, in a book on the subject of insignia, the reader may expect to see a photograph of the author as a Lieutenant and to know what insignia he wore? We are not even told his branch!I have no doubt that this book is a useful contribution to the history of the Royal Navy and it will be helpful to those trying to identify photographs and the details of family history where an ancestor wore the uniform of a Royal Navy officer. But it is sometimes difficult to follow, hence my wish for more text and for a chronology and index. Given my criticism it's rather pricey a book too.