Medal

If you want to complete a collection of Olympic participation medals, then one in particular – that made for the 1904 Games in St Louis – is going to cost you a lot of money.

Of more than 2000 different recorded horse brass designs, the most desirable are traditionally the so-called ‘merit awards’ given as prizes at working horse parades.

THE uplifting story of how West Auckland FC won ‘the first world cup’ has gone down in the annals of English football.

MAKING £160,000 hammer at Convery Auctions last week, Nobby Stiles' 1966 World Cup winner's medal eclipsed the £140,000 made by team-mate Alan Ball's medal at Christie's South Kensington in May 2005 and set the highest price seen for a '66 medal so far at public auction.

IN a week when the 1968 European Cup winner’s medal awarded to George Best sold for £130,000, the appearance of more blue-chip sporting memorabilia on the auction market has been announced.

SPORT is never far from controversy these days. So it was no surprise when the news that George Best’s and Nobby Stiles’s most valued medals and trophies were to be sold that there was an outcry in certain sections of the media.

SPECIALIST dealers believe fake medals from the XXIXth Olympiad in Beijing are appearing for sale on eBay.

HUDDERSFIELD Town may not feature on Sky Sports as much as Manchester United nowadays, but back in the mid-1920s it was the Terriers rather than the Red Devils who were the team to watch.

SETTING an auction record for a golf medal, Willie Fernie's 1883 Open Championship winner's medal sold for £48,500 at the sale held by Maxwells of Wilmslow, Cheshire on July 15. In good condition and in its original box, the silver-gilt medal was won by Scotland’s four-times runner-up in his only Open victory at Musselburgh.

This year’s FA Cup was seen as something of a turn-up with Portsmouth and Cardiff, two teams from outside the Premier League’s top four, reaching the final. But there was a time when the now-mighty Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal were nowhere to be seen in the competition.

British medals are realising ever higher prices and it seems that buyers almost invariably hail from these sceptred isles.

The date of November 5 seemed apt for Spink’s (17.65% buyer’s premium) 623-lot sale of Orders, Decorations Campaign Medals and Militaria (ODM), the fireworks of Guy Fawkes Day recalling the whizz-bangs and crashes of wartime when many of these medals were won. Some of these bangs and crashes left themselves to metaphor, as records were falling all over the place.

Well, it’s happened at last! The first £1million sale of campaign medals and awards (ODM) has taken place. It took Dix Noonan Webb (15% buyer’s premium) 1155 lots to disperse this assemblage. The total was £1,013,510 and this is the hammer total so there was no fudging with the buyer’s premium to jack the total over the magic number.

Apart from their specialist commemorative medal sale, Morton & Eden (15% buyer’s premium) busied themselves with a general 1025-lot sale on May 21 which made a total of £592,877. This fine result was coupled with a reasonably small failure rate of just 12 per cent. This is about the norm for more specialised events but hard to achieve in a general sale.

While Pelé’s shirt received nearly all the post-sale plaudits, it wasn’t the only piece of football history to go under the hammer at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) last week, and CSK was not the only London room offering a sale of football memorabilia.

ITALY: MINIATURE-like, this (33 x 47mm) silver medal of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-37) made Li950,000 (£315). The Imperial Crown on the reverse is preserved in the Hofschatz in Vienna.

FRANCE: THE dispersal of the Paul Amos collection of French medals, under the auspices of expert Sabine Bourgey at Piasa (10.854 per cent buyer’s premium) in Paris on March 8 represents an event for which we have to go back some years to find anything comparable.