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...has always had the mythological
figure "Mercury" depicted on our patches and badges.
Mercury, in Roman
mythology, was the messenger of the gods. The son of the god Jupiter
and of Maia, the daughter of the Titan Atlas.
Mercury was also the
god of merchants and of trading and shared many of the attributes of
the Greek god "Hermes". The worship of Mercury was introduced into
Rome in 495 B.C. when a
temple was dedicated to him near the Circus Maximus. His festival,
the "Mercuralia", was celebrated on 15th May...
From the Images shown on the right, it's
fairly easy to see where the inspiration for the MMCC patch may have
come from... We've had recent communication with Howard
Currie (no resident in New Zealand) who was a member
back in 1965... He has done some work to re-draw the original design
(as seen on
Bob McIntyre's helmet on the History page),
so now we're able to include that here too...
When the original (very "Art Deco" ) design
metamorphosed into the current patch is still unknown... But, if you know better, please
don't hesitate to
contact us...
When it came to celebrate the Club's
50th Anniversary in 1996, the Committee suggested that a new patch
be designed to commemorate the event... They met with
substantial resistance, until one proposal, that the current design
be retained and subtly modified,
met with reluctant approval...
The modifications were subtle and also
very traditional.
Taking the tradition of associating anniversaries with
material gifts, the 50th Patch had all the silver threads replaced
with gold. The addition of the dates 46 and 96 were all that
was required to make the patch complete...
So, when
the 60th Anniversary came around, it was fairly clear that the Club
was still packed full of "Traditionalists" who didn't want to move away from the
original design. Having the patch redrawn, using diamante
instead of silver, didn't seem quite the image our MCC (yours may be
different, friend...) was keen to perpetuate...
So, in order that we embraced the traditions of
the past, we retained the Club 's image of Mercury's profile and
added the required diamond... It wouldn't quite fit into a regular
octagon, so we used an irregular one, giving the result you see
below...
What we'll do when the next
"signature" anniversary (75th) comes around will (I
hope!)
be someone else's problem...
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