A good example was offered by Mellors & Kirk (20% buyer’s premium) in Nottingham on June 8.
Sold for a within-estimate £2800 to an English private collector was the bronze memorial plaque and memorial scroll for Lilian Florence Harper of the Women’s Royal Air Force, addressed to Mr GSA Harper of 99 Market Street, Eastleigh.
It came for sale by descent to the present vendor.
More than a million of the plaques were awarded for men who lost their lives during the conflict, but only around 600 were issued to women.
Deaths up to April 1919 (and possibly later) could still lead to the presentation of a plaque, if either remaining in service or the death was accepted as war related.
Harper, who died on February 22, 1919, aged 18, was one of 41 members of the WRAF to be issued with a plaque. The separate women’s air service was only a wartime force, formed on April 1, 1918, and disbanded in April 1920.
A ‘Death Penny’ awarded to Violet Porter, WRAF, sold for £3500 at Spink in November 2019 (ATG No 2415). Born in 1899, Porter joined up in January 1918 and served at an aircraft repair depot in Chelsea. She died of influenza on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918.
Army nurse
First World War memorial plaque to Emily Davies – estimate £3000-5000 at Tennants on September 8.
A memorial plaque to an army nurse is estimated at £3000-5000 in Tennants’ Militaria and Ethnographica Sale on September 8 in Leyburn, North Yorkshire.
Alice Emily Dawes enlisted in the army on October 15, 1917 serving as a nursing sister with Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service before she died of influenza and pneumonia on October 23, 1918. She was buried in Bedford Cemetery in a Commonwealth War Grave.
The plaque is being sold with a fitted leather case and copies of research material.
