Robert Mackie bonnets on Ebay

[BobF]

I am admittedly quite uneducated when it comes to these bonnets, but I recently bought a used glengarry on Facebook Marketplace from someone selling off ex-pipe band items, and having seen the labels I’m now thinking I got a pretty good deal on a Mackie. All I have done to it was to wash it gently in tepid water with mild soap, I touched up a few white worn spots on the cockade with a black Sharpie, and added the hat badge in honor of my Donald ancestors (sort of illegitimate; my third great-grandmother Mary Brown was a milkmaid and apparently had a dalliance with the farmer’s son Robert Donald, producing my second great-grandmother Mary Donald. Any clan affiliation is dubious, I assume, as the farm is in Kilwinning in North Ayrshire, and those Donalds were in Ardrossan before that).

Can this be confirmed as a Mackie product?

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Not that it matters, but is there a way to estimate the age?

The cost (minus the badge) was $10 plus $5 postage.

[OC Richard]

Yes indeed that's a Robert Mackie label.

It has the firm's logo (that stylised thistle) but not their name.

They used this label for at least a half-century, and all the Ebay bonnets I've listed here have it.

Being adhesive, unfortunately many genuine Mackies have no labels.

Here it is on a bonnet from the 1980s



Here's a bonnet I bought around five years ago. As you see it has their traditional adhesive label, and in addition a new label sewn into the binding



Here's a yet more recent bonnet showing new labels. Note the traditional label now lacks their thistle logo.

Plus there's a new label with the Mackie name and an even more stylised thistle.