Military Medal

A record take of £48m and a one-third increase in the number of lots available to bidders – ATG reviews a healthy 2019 for London numismatic saleroom

This bronze Albert Medal, awarded to Lieutenant John Edward Gibbons (1905-71) for saving life at sea, sold for £8000 (plus 20% buyer’s premium) at Bonhams Knightsbridge.

Peninsular War medals featuring 13 or 14 clasps – showing how many actions the recipient fought in – are impressive enough in themselves. But three of them awarded to brothers who served in the same regiment, offered as a single lot at auction, takes demand to a different level.

Top-seller at the latest sale of Islamic and Indian Art and antiquities held at Roseberys (25% buyer’s premium) in West Norwood was a 19th century Sikh enamelled and diamond-set gold medal.

Rare medals stolen from a car and found discarded in a park 10 months later have been reunited with their owner thanks to an ATG news story.

‘Highly unusual’ is how the Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) cataloguer described a Second World War medal group ahead of its sale in Dorchester on August 22 for £420, just over top estimate.

Just imagine: you have been through the horrors of the Battle of Waterloo in a regiment which suffered 217 casualties out of 396, and were wounded yourself, and then your career is ended by… a wheelbarrow.

It’s a simple message but a powerful one. The words Welcome Home are stamped on the front of a rare first World War tribute medal to J Day (believed to be John Day) issued by the Working Men’s Club for the Yorkshire village of Heckmondwike.

The ‘Forlorn Hope’ was well named: a band of soldiers, often volunteers, chosen to take the lead part in a military operation, such as an assault on a defended position, where the risk of casualties is high. Its usage was especially common in accounts of the Peninsular War (1808-14).

While some medal collectors stick rigidly to a narrow period or theme, others take a wider view. A broad taste is evident from a large group on offer in Salisbury.

A medal, silver cigar box and ‘oil lamp’ lighter sold at Ramsay Cornish's latest sale in Edinburgh had come by descent from Major Jonathan Leslie Dean (1859-1926). He was a key participant in the defence of O’okiep (1902), the small town in the Northern Cape that was besieged by Boer Commandos from April 4-May 4, 1902, towards the end of the Second Boer War.

Included in Weiss Auctions’ sale in Lynbrook, New York, on June 26 is this British Waterloo Medal for Henry Gronemann, who was in the 5th Line Battalion of the King’s German Legion.

The death of John Hayward on May 12 has robbed the world of medals and medal collecting of its most colourful personality.

A hunger strike ‘Fed By Force’ medal awarded to Suffragette Selina Martin (1882-1972) has been snapped up at auction by an Australian museum.

It is a quarter of a century since ATG’s first overview of London’s numismatic auction market. Here we review the heads and the tails of 2018.

MADAM – Here is a medal whose origin I can’t figure out (above). It was found in northern Norway.