Name/Title
Sussex Police male Volunteer Cadet cap 2010 to presentEntry/Object ID
2176Description
Blue wool cap with blue cotton hat band, plastic chin strap and fitted with star shaped voided enamelled Sussex Police coat of arms badge without a crown marked "Sussex VCC". Marked with a date stamp inside the leather headband "9 Feb 2010"Use
For use by a male Volunteer Police Cadet in Sussex PoliceContext
The original police cadet system was first established in 1948 in the Metropolitan Police with youngsters being employed full time from the age of 16 to 19, in a uniform support role and given the option of becoming full time constables when they were old enough. The scheme was introduced in an attempt to increase levels of recruitment to the regular force, by attracting school leavers who were not yet old enough to become constables. Similar schemes operated with some changes in many other police forces until the 1980s when the paid schemes were discontinued.
From the late 1980s the paid police cadet schemes were discontinued. Volunteer schemes were retained or begun for younger children, operating purely as youth organisations on similar lines to those run by the military. These schemes now fall under the national Volunteer Police Cadet programme and are organised on a local territorial police force basis.
Paid schemes were run in Sussex before and after the 1968 amalgamation, and cadets have always had similar headwear to that used used by full time officers but not helmets, with the exception that they have blue hat bands instead of either black or chequered ones.
Sussex Constabulary, whilst having a paid scheme, also introduced a volunteer cadet scheme in January 1969, aimed at younger children and run along the same lines as the scouts and military cadets. To begin with the volunteer cadets wore a version of the old paid cadet uniform from the 1950s, consisting of a blouson style jacket and berets for headwear. When the berets were replaced with caps, the volunteer cadets had purple hat bands to distinguish them from the paid cadets who had blue cap bands. When the paid scheme was discontinued in the late 1980s, initially purple bands were retained for use by the volunteer cadets, though eventually they changed to blue bands in line with the national scheme.
Until 1995 cadets in Sussex used the same EIIR cap badges as constables and sergeants, but when an enamelled coat of arms badge was introduced for all ranks, a modified version without a crown was introduced for cadets, which omitted the word 'Police", replacing it with "VCC". The 1995 badges had solid centres but in 2002 voided versions were introduced for both officers and cadets.
This particular cap has both the blue band and VCC badge which are still in use within Sussex Police. The badge is of the type in use from 2002 and the hat is actually dated 2010. Occasionally cadets are shown with the regular all ranks cap badge with the crown, presumably to cover shortages of the VCC version. Until 2018 the blue band on hats was used exclusively by cadets in Sussex, but since then it has also been adopted for Police Community Support Officers in the force, in line with national policy.