There's probably a Hereford 'holigan' out there somewhere who's award is still under wraps!

O-D

Possibly associated with the Air Cadets? I think Carol Vorderman (previously discussed here...) is another example.

OD - she is a member of No. 601 (County of London) Squadron reactivated in 2017 by CAS to "...tapping into the talents of leaders from industry, academia and research to advise and shape and inspire our organisation." announced by SofS in Jun 17. Actually does some good stuff too and has a US "flight" as well. IIRC Jo works for one of the big consultancy firms (PwC perhaps?) so would bring some much needed fresh ideas.

I just find it sad that families don't appreciate the medallic recognition of their forebears, and what those medals represent. I'm delighted that my son wants our generational collection ... I just wish I had one to add [apart from squllions of shooting medal, but thankfully one of those is hallmarked gold!].

Thanks 30mRad, I can see the logic of that. I worked for Andersen Consulting after leaving regular service and became a reservist of various sorts. Nobody ever asked my opinion (my wife says that's probably wise) and was never asked to be an Hon Gp Capt - perhaps I should embrace the modern ethos and complain!!

As to Carol Vorderman as an ambassador with the air cadets, she has been a roaring success and has embraced the role fully. When she steps down, she will be a hard act to follow.

Old Duffer

I have bequeathed my solitary GSM (for South Arabia) to my son, which he can eventually display with his somewhat more impressive group of seven! No shooting medals from me, though. Barn doors were always safe from me when I was in the vicinity with my service automatic!

Jo does work at PwC - in their HR consultancy bit, see here .

I think they were only one rank above when embarked.

Training Risky has a point.

When working for Andersens (now Accenture) the description of a consultant was: somebody who borrowed your watch to tell you the time.

I did reckon that often having an outsider to take a good look at what you were doing was no bad thing and questioning the WHY was a healthy exercise. In addition: WHERE, WHEN and HOW were also healthy questions for a business to ask and often better that it's done by somebody outside the firm. That said there were some eye watering sums of money spent on 'rebranding'. The amusing but sad reality was that the Firm's own internal processes left IMHO something to be desired.

O-D

That's essentially correct under the old system and applied to Royal Marine officers up to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel** but, conversely, when serving directly with Army units such officers almost invariably received local acting higher rank in order to make them directly comparable to their Army counterparts. Pay was not an issue.

Jack

** Of under six years seniority

The other point is that Lieutenant RM served eleven years in the rank before being promoted Captain RM. As this was at about the same time as Lieutenant RN would be upped to Lieutenant Commander RN the equivalence bit kicked in here.

An interesting point from the navy of old was that if an RM detachment aboard a warship was commanded by a Captain RM he would be called: 'The major' - another piece of staggeringly useless information!!!!!!!!!!!

Old Duffer

Agreed, but at least if somebody external has told you the time you can then blame somebody elses timekeeping, as opposed to your own, when it turns out to have been the wrong time :)

Sounds silly, but it's actually the logic used by a lot of very large organisations when it comes to spending vast sums of money on Consulting firms.

At the risk of ongoing thread drift, couldn't agree more with the sentiments expressed on the value of consultants. In my last unit we were subjected to a transformation programme managed - and I use that word in its loosest sense - by one of the big name consultancies who traditionally target military leavers. They were so bad they broke the organisation and ended up being fired by the 1-star who got so fed up that he thanked them for their work and suggested we had sufficient experience to take their recommendations forward. About 12 months too late to avoid catastrophic damage to morale.

Their expertise saw a manning structure devised on the basis of scouring an out of date email list with entries containing the 3 letters of our section. As a result they came back with all sorts of irrelevant names that were supposedly part of our organisation - if only - I would loved to have tried telling a US Army Lt Col that she now reported to me according to the consultants. At another meeting they came up with a revised process which enabled a rapid response to team generation in only 14 steps and about 4 days. My Colonel turned to me and said - Melchie, before we started this, how quickly could you pull a mission team together? To which I replied, 4 steps and a couple of hours - maybe a morning for a complex issue - as long as I was given authority to pull people I needed and to pause other lower priority Ops tasking. My Flt Lt and SAC even ended up learning to code to de-bug and re-write the task management system that singularly failed to achieve any of its objectives. All I can say is I hope our old 3-star kept the receipt for the services he procured. Not that he'll need it as he missed out on the recent Air Officer shuffling so will be Mr by summer.

The moral of my ramblings - I've always been against consultants to act as anything other than a Red Team. We have the experience we need in house, lets tap into it. Select experienced officers to be put through relevant management training and when they retire at 55, re-employ them as internal MOD consultants on projects. That way they would at least understand military concepts that seem to bypass external spreadsheet ninjas who know the cost of everything but not the value and for whom process rather than output is key.