Military Medal

THE Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft has reportedly paid nearly £1.5m for the only double Victoria Cross awarded during the First World War.

PICTURED here is a medal commemorating the taking of Porto Bello by Admiral Vernon in 1739. It was among the items stolen from a country house museum in south Derbyshire on the afternoon of May 20.

A VOLUNTEER at the Royal Signals Regiment Museum in Blandford, Dorset, has been jailed for 12 months for stealing £33,000 of medals and selling them on eBay.

LORD Ashcroft’s Victoria Cross collection – the largest in the world – is to go on public display following his £5m donation to the Imperial War Museum. The news comes as the museum has also received a donation from the Art Fund to purchase an important watercolur by Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) at auction.

Lord Ashcroft has been at the centre of a successful bid to recover 96 medals, including nine Victoria Crosses, stolen from a museum in New Zealand in December.

Two medals awarded to the same man during the Crimean War, but separated for many years in different collections, have been reunited after selling to the same buyer at Smith & Wilde’s March 21 auction of militaria at the Royal Armouries in Leeds.

Spink are to put the unrivalled Victoria Cross collection of Lord Ashcroft on display in an 11-day exhibition in their main gallery in April. The exhibition is a forerunner to what is expected to become a permanent public display in two years’ time.

THIEVES have stolen a collection of war medals Ð including five Victoria Crosses Ð awarded to 12 of New ZealandÕs most highly decorated servicemen. The burglary took place shortly after 1am on December 2 at the Army Museum in Waiouru.

CHARTERHOUSE auctioneers in Sherborne, have broken the auction record for a Military Medal group only two months after the previous one was set.

“WE will make a name for ourselves and Australia tomorrow.” This was how Captain Shout fired up his band of troops the night before the assault at Gallipoli in the First World War.

Few will be unaware that 2005 is the bicentenary of Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar, given the number of celebrations and exhibitions commemorating the event.

IT was just three weeks into the First World War when British destroyers engaged the enemy off the Heligoland Bight near Denmark.

DREWEATT Neate’s sale on 23rd March at Donnington Priory offered a 100-lot section of coins, banknotes and medals which produced a 100 per cent take-up.

THERE have already been two major sales at Dix Noonan Webb (DNW) (15% buyer’s premium) this year. The first concerned war medals and took place on March 2.

History is the new ‘cookery’ on TV, and the adventures of Rifleman Sharpe have brought the Peninsular War to more general notice, but that is hardly enough to explain why military medals, for all their echoes of glory, have become a real boom area in the antiques and collectables market.

IN late autumn there were three major sales of Orders, Decorations and Medals. Their combined total was £1,373,461 with 2592 lots offered. This compares with a total for 2004 of just over £6m and 6219 lots offered by the London auction houses. (The 2004 annual tabulation for numismatic sales will appear in a future ATG.)

Wallis & Wallis, Lewes. November 23. Buyer’s premium: 15 per centSales of arms and militaria can, with their beautifully chased old flintlocks and exuberantly decorated uniforms, somehow skate over the fact that often what is on offer is, or was, associated with the darker side of humanity.

SALES of Victoria Cross groups continue to set new auction records.

There has been considerable reportage on the subject of commemorative medals at auction recently, and the considerable museum participation in auction sales. So spare a thought for the dealer who issues fixed-price lists. Two fine English fixed-price catalogues have recently thudded through my letterbox.

THE seven medals and insignia right are a stirring memento of one of the greatest moments in British military history. They are the service medals and awards, including the G.C.B and K.C.B of the Order of the Bath, Netherlandish Military Order of William and Russian Order of St Vladimir, presented to General Sir Peregrine Maitland.