Canadian Industries Ltd., makers of Dominion ammunition, sponsred a club oriented shooting program called Dominion Marksmen. After a shooting club signed up for it, CIL supplied the targets and gave out the awards. Only stipulation was you had to guarantee to use Dominion ammunition. The targets were shot under club supervision, signed by the shooter and two witnesses.
In sporting rifle, 22, it was four position; prone, sitting, kneeling and standing. To start with, to encourage beginners, almost any score would get the initial little badge. One for each position. After the badges were won, the next were patches for your shooting coat. ie, Ten targets of a certain score in prone got you the prone patch, and so on with the other positions.
After a shooter had won all the patches, he/she could shoot for the shields. The old ones were the silver shield, and when that was won, you could go on for the gold shield. The shields required twenty targets of a certain score, in each of the four positions. For the gold shield, I am pretty sure thescore had to be 100%! Of course, you could discard the targets that didn't make it, and keep shooting.
I got the silver shield in rifle and had about half, of the needed 100s standing, the tough ones, for the gold, when I moved from a club that had a rifle program.
The club in the new area I moved to had organized pistol shooting, so I immediately starated the Dominion Marksmen pistol program. This was in slow fire, timed and rapid. The badges and patches were for each of these three methods. To get the gold shield required 60 targets, twenty of slow, twenty of timed and twenty of rapid. The score required for one target of each position was 275, out of 300. I didn't think I would ever get the gold shield, because I shot a lot of targets before I got even one set of three that scored 275, or better!
However, I did get the complete set of everything offered, including the gold shield. Then, three of us in the club started from scratch and went through the whold thing again! Fortunately, the program had changed there patches and shields, so the new ones, which required the same scores, were considerable different in shape and composition.
Here is a picture of some of the shields. The four on the right with the galloping horse, was a similar program by Winchester, in 1967, in honor of Canada's 100th birtheay.
Many of my patches have gone where all things go, that have been played with by sons and grand children. This was an older picture I had, so I see it also has my hunter trainers badge.
I will post a pic of the shields on another entry here.
