During the spring of 1916, the War Office convened a small committee at Whitehall to impose order on an expanding constellation of campaign ribbons. Officers returning from the Western Front carried not just wounds but a crowded breast of silk — each stripe a different weave, each demanding its own position on an already overburdened tunic. The committee’s charge was deceptively simple: standardise everything, from thread count to the precise angle at which a gilt star was to be mounted above its ribbon bar.
Thread Counts and Colour Specifications
Colonel Sir Eustace Bellingham, who chaired the committee, insisted that every ribbon bar be woven to identical specification. The silk was to be grosgrain — not satin, not taffeta — with a thread count of precisely one hundred and twenty per inch. The crimson of the Victoria Cross ribbon was to be matched against a sealed reference swatch kept under glass at the College of Arms, replaced only when fading could be detected by the naked eye at a distance of three feet.
“A ribbon is not a decoration. It is a condensed history — a language of colour that any soldier can read at ten paces.”