This Officer Training Corps (OTC) cap badge of the University of London, dating to the First World War (1914 to 1918), was discovered by Murray while metal detecting in the Surrey Hills. Though modest in size, the badge carries powerful associations with a generation shaped, and in many cases broken, by the Great War.
The badge is formed as a crowned shield set upon a radiating starburst, a design characteristic of OTC insignia of the period. At its centre is the shield of the University of London, surmounted by a king’s crown, symbolising both academic tradition and service to the nation. Badges such as this were worn on the caps of university students who had joined the Officer Training Corps, an organisation intended to prepare educated young men for commissions in the British Army.
During the First World War, the University of London OTC played a crucial role in supplying officers to the expanding wartime army. Many students who wore this badge would have trained on home soil before being sent overseas, often within months of enlistment. For some, the badge represented ambition and duty. For others, it became a brief prelude to unimaginable hardship.
Its loss in the Surrey Hills may have occurred during training exercises, marches, or time spent away from the university environment. Surrey’s open countryside was frequently used for military drilling and preparation during the war, and the Hills themselves would have echoed with the movement of men learning the skills they hoped would keep them safe.
Now worn and weathered, the badge serves as a quiet memorial to those who trained not far from where it was found, and to those who never returned. Rediscovered more than a century later, it reminds us that the Surrey landscape holds not only medieval and ancient history, but also deeply personal traces of modern conflict, fragments of lives interrupted, ambitions unrealised, and futures forever altered.
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