Medals

James Watson’s 1962 award for his work on DNA set a world record price for a Nobel Prize Medal at Christie’s in New York when it sold for $4.1m (£2.6m) hammer.

Christie’s New York are offering the 1962 Nobel Prize gold medal awarded to Dr James D. Watson, one of the world’s greatest living scientists.

The Christopher Foley collection of British commemorative medals will be sold at Salisbury auctioneers Woolley & Wallis on October 16. The sale is the most comprehensive of its type seen for a century or more.

A Nobel Peace Prize medal stolen from the Lord Mayor’s Mansion House in Newcastle is still missing despite a 21-year-old man being jailed for the theft.

Rare items stolen during a robbery at the Lord Mayor of Newcastle’s Mansion House include a gold Nobel Peace Prize awarded in the 1930s to Arthur Henderson, a pioneer of the Labour Party and campaigner for disarmament.

This group of orders and medals were awarded to Sir William Smart KCB, a Naval Surgeon and latterly Honorary Physician to Queen Victoria.

Medals and other material relating to George William Hutson, a British athlete who served in the First World War, will be offered for sale at Peacocks on February 1 in Bedford.

This is the season of agricultural shows and so Duke’s of Dorchester’s June 20 sale of British agricultural medals was well timed.

London auctioneers Morton & Eden, in association with Sotheby’s, have included in their May 31 sale this silver medal awarded to a steward aboard the RMS Carpathia for his help in rescuing passengers from the Titanic.

ICONIC is the only word to describe two gold medals offered at a recent sale by Noble Numismatics of Melbourne, Australia.

THIS 15th century bronze portrait of Cecilia Gonzaga is one of more than 2000 medals in the collection formed by New York collector and former Hollywood actor Michael Hall to be offered by Baldwin's in London in 2010.

ON December 9, Morton and Eden are to offer what is possibly the most important collection of Renaissance medals to come onto the market in decades.

THE first Conspicuous Gallantry Cross group to appear at auction also became the highest-priced lot to sell via ATG's live bidding platform the-saleroom.com when it was hammered down for £88,000 at Dix Noonan Webb on September 18.

This rare medal by the Glasgow silversmith Robert Gray & Son from c.1807 commemorates a successful campaign of the previous year to resist imposition of duties on the local tobacco trade.

This rare medal issued to those involved in the 1916 Easter Rising is up for grabs in the collector’s auction at Plymouth Auction Rooms on February 16.

A recent federal law, designed to preserve the integrity of United States medals and decorations, is creating chaos within the militaria collecting field.

THE Paris firm of Bourgey was founded in Paris in 1895. Now under the direction of the granddaughter of the founder, Sabine Bourgey, it is still going strong if the recent sale on June 3 is anything to go by.

LONG before Heineken, Allsopp & Sons’ Burton ale had a claim to be the beer which reached the parts other beers could not reach – bottles of it accompanied Sir George Strong Nares’ expedition attempting to reach the South Pole in 1875.

This Women’s Social and Political Union medal for valour was awarded to Mary Richardson, the Canadian-born militant suffragette who, in protest at the re-arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst in March 1914, slashed the ‘Rokeby’ Venus with an axe at the National Gallery.

Italian Medals – c.1530-1600 by Philip Attwood, British Museum Press. £250 hb, two volumes. ISBN 01741 08618. Available from Oxbow (+ 44 [0]1865 241249) or Thomas Heneage Art Books, 42 Duke Street, London SW1 6DJ (+ 44 [0]20 7930 9223.