When medals are awarded they come in two sizes, full size
for normal wear and miniature for wearing to a dinner function. It is easy to
identify who was awarded the full size medals as there name is on them.
Identifying who received a miniature group is close to impossible. It is only
when other evidence about the veteran is included do we have a chance. This was
the case the miniature medals awarded to
Lieutenant Owen Dawes where the medals
came with his card and a letter from him. Unfortunately, I have received many
other miniature medals that I have no hope of successfully returning.
However, in the same vein as the Dawes return, Bill has a
story of his own about miniatures.
With the growing appreciation in families of their parents
military service, the miniature medals that were issued to accompany their
larger counterpart, once often overlooked, have now come to the fore. This is
as families realise that there are two sets of medals in the family not just
one and which are just as important.
But researching miniatures or even attempting to carries its
own special set of problems, firstly they are not engraved, so that unless you
are very lucky and you find documentation that accompanies them, then finding
the original recipient or their next of kin, becomes remote. Often they end up
in RSL clubs, sometimes on display sometimes not, but essentially unknown,
unacknowledged and forgotten. That I find incredibly sad, it is to me,
unacceptable.
Our last foray in regard to a set of miniatures, to
Lieutenant Owen Dawes took over five years and that was even with a card that
had his name printed on it.
However, the situation with the receipt of the medals of
VX24886 Jack Thomson, was different. As different as it
could be arriving as they did inside an old spectacles case, which in turn
had been wrapped in the perennial brown paper parcel. Luckily, what was included
in the case was the RSL life Membership Card of the recipient, Jack Thomson.
Along with a cryptic note asking for the medals to be returned to Jack’s
family.
Well first thought: “Glyn’s record is about to be broken”.
Surely the RSL Membership Card would assist? First the club administration - “No,
his membership was archived, and never put on computer”
Then the members - but the simple task of just asking
old members of the club “do you remember Jack Thomson?” Usually brought forward
the following:
“He was a lovely bloke!”
“Big fella, had a terrible sense of humour”
“Was in a retirement home around here?”
“I think he died some time ago, didn’t he?” a comment often
expressed to those quietly sitting around.
But no one actually seemed to remember when or from whence
Jack passed away.
The end result being that after several days of going
nowhere and with Glyn’s record well and truly preserved, I reverted to what
would have been my normal mode of operation, and in retrospect should have
been, if I had not opted for what I thought would be an easy option, of taking
the RSL Club route.
So then it was:
Check with War Graves for possible date of death (28
December 2005).
Check Ryerson for Death and Funeral notices.
Success! The Age and the Herald Sun provided 6 between them.
So now to the State Library and its newspaper archives, to
look up the newspapers. First to look up the funeral directors and secondly to try
and determine the rest of the family and their possible locations.
It was this after several hours of cross referencing back
and forward between old newspaper entries and the BDM’s that finally led me to
Jack’s son, Kenneth who now lives in NSW.
Ken was amazed when I rang, He thought Dad’s miniatures were
with the other medals which are with his brother in Darwin, whom he planned to
ring the moment we hung up.
But first came the inevitable series of questions. Of which
the best was “What was my dad’s medals doing in Kilmore? We have no relations
there, never have.”
But as is so often the case at the end of a search when I
sit down and review the search, the $64 question, and the one that Ken asked,
nearly always arises. How did the medal of an ex-serviceman who died in 2005,
in Bundoora get to Kilmore from whence they were sent to Jack’s old club in
February this year (2013)?
Well I can’t answer that question, and I am not going to
try, it may sound as a cop out but after more than a decade of returning medals
it is a question, whose path I now studiously avoid.
What is important is that Jack’s medals are going back to
his family, and as searches go I do not think I can ask for much more.
The returned medal tally is now 1262.
