Arms, Armour & Militaria

Bram van der Stok MBE was not only the most decorated aviator in Dutch history and one of just three men to successfully flee POW Camp Stalag Luft III in the ‘Great Escape’, but also a proud member of the Caterpillar Club.

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

When Alan Wardle’s niece searched online for family history she uncovered his father’s long-lost First World War presentation pocket watch coming up at auction.

The new terrors of the First World War also encompassed gas. The initial major attack was launched on the Eastern Front by the Germans in January 1915, then on the Western Front at Ypres three months later against French colonial troops.

In April this year Spink held an exhibition to mark the centenary of the founding of the RAF, ahead of a dedicated section in its two-day Orders, Decorations and Medals sale the same month.

If anything sums up the sense of slaughter that came from the British experience of the First World War and how that affected so many families, it is a lot coming up in Bonhams’ November 21 Medals, Bonds, Banknotes and Coins auction.

In this year also marking the centenary of the RAF, Bosleys’ (20% buyer’s premium) fourth annual sale of aviation collectables on September 13, held in conjunction with (and at) sister auction house Marlows in Stafford, included a large number of related items.

Before the Iraq invasions in 1991 and 2003 Britain was involved in military operations in the region in both world wars.

A Distinguished Flying Cross medal group offered at Stroud Auctions (18% buyer’s premium) on November 7-8 underlines the sometimes rudimentary nature of the embyonic early war in the air.

C&T Auctioneers’ (20% buyer’s premium) November 6 sale titled After the Great War Centenary also marked the final slice of a three-part offering of what specialist Matthew Tredwen called “one of the finest collections of First World War German militaria to have been sold at auction in the UK”.

The Hundred Days Offensive broke the back of German resistance in 1918 and by November the Allies were surging well beyond the once static Western Front.

This classic First World war recruitment poster with the Old Lion of Britain calling on the Young Lions to answer the call to fight is estimated at £200-400 in Onslows’ poster auction on December 14.

A popular form of gift or memento to loved ones as troops left for the front was a ‘sweetheart brooch’.

British Empire soldiers included more than a million Indian Army troops serving overseas.

Such was the scale of the Great War that the Cameronians regiment alone raised 27 battalions from 1914-18.

As soon as the devastating power of machine guns in the First World War became clear, the British Army abandoned its earlier policy of attaching a section of just two guns to each infantry battalion or cavalry regiment.

It was a British engineer, Robert Whitehead (1823-1905) – working in Austria at the instigation of the Austrian Navy – who developed the first self-propelled torpedo in the 1850s.

The centenary of the Armistice has been marked by the appearance of some poignant lots at auction revealing the human cost.

The ‘heroic age’ of Polar Exploration coincided with the First World War. Shackleton’s perilous 1914-17 expedition was conducted against the backdrop of war in the northern hemisphere, while other earlier Polar explorers found themselves caught up in the conflict.