If you stick to one force, collecting uniform is not particularly fulfilling. On the one hand, there doesn’t generally tend to be much variation and on the other your collection won’t be that difficult to complete, or be that inspiring. For that reason, collecting other material and emphemera keeps the interest going and provides something more of a challenge in building the collection. There’s a degree of subjectivity to this, however, so I’ve tried to keep ‘uniform’ to what any ordinary person would think of as a uniform. This page has other types of working dress, but I happily confess that opinions may vary. If what you’re looking for isn’t here, it might be on another page – or I just don’t have it (yet).
This page is devoted to those ‘other’ bits of RUC uniform, but also unit t-shirts, the majority of which were collected or exchanged by RUC officers on detachment to the UN Mission to Kosovo. From memory, I believe that after the creation of the PSNI, the officers in Kosovo were the last police officers from Northern Ireland to wear RUC uniform on duty until their return to NI and the issue of the new uniform.
RUC Specialist Uniform
Pullover jacket from the OTU Boat Section.
Beret, as used by firearms teams and instructors. Baseball caps from Kosovo and for OTU staff.
Pilot’s Bone Dome
Dog Handlers Suit
Working Overalls / Boilersuit
SOCO Coveralls
Weather & Hi-Viz Uniform
RUC Station & Unit T-Shirts
Many units, training teams and inidividual stations produced their own T-Shirts, though the extent to which any of these were officially sanctioned I don’t know. Given that one t-shirt is pretty much like any other, the majority of illustrations below will be of the crest, logo or emblem, with a complete gallery at the end as per the other pages. While the majority came from the RUC, I’ve included some of their successor PSNI designs, as well as some foreign examples exchanged by RUC officers who served with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) from approximately 1999 – 2002.
MSU / TSG T-Shirts
Special Editions
Below, L Division rugby body warmer.
The UN Mission to Kosovo
The RUC sent several officers to serve with the UNMIK between 1999 and 2001 with the officers withdrawn in 2002, making them (to the best of my knowledge) the last PSNI officers to serve on duty in RUC uniform.
The collection of T-Shirts included below are not all police, but they were all brought back from Kosovo by serving RUC / PSNI officers and as some of them are quite unusual I thought I’d add them in here.
Above, generic UK Police T-Shirt issued to all UK personnel serving with the UN in various theatres. Below, Nordrheinwestfalen, Canadian and US Police emblems.
The next section of specialist uniform covers the Police Observers to the first free and democratic elections in South Africa in April 1994. These must be getting relatively rare now and comprise of white shirt, blue jacket and blue baseball cap with the logos of the International Electoral Commission and the EU.
Commemorative T-Shirts
This final section covers those T-Shirts produced to commemorate the passing of the RUC in 2001. These would not have been officially sanctioned and reflect the mixture of pride and sadness in the change to the PSNI. At the end there are a couple of extras – EOD and some ties and other bits n pieces to finish up.
Finally, a jacket labelled as a potential replacement during the planning for the new PSNI uniform (not adopted)
