The Wilson has a small but significant collection of medals. The main part of the collection consists of medals awarded to members of the Whinyates family, who lived in Cheltenham during the 19th century. These cover a period in England’s history when the country was almost permanently at war. The remainder of the collection is made up of medals awarded to other local people for many of the major conflicts of the past 200 years.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815)
The idea of awarding a medal to all soldiers for a specific battle did not come into being until the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. This was the first occasion that every officer and soldier present received a medal simply for his participation. The museum has the Waterloo medal awarded to Captain (later General Sir) Edward Whinyates. In 1847 the Naval and Military General Service medals were issued to cover a whole series of actions going back as far as 1793, but these were only available to living claimants! The museum has three examples of these medals.
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General Edward Whinyates' Waterloo and Military Service medals.
The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny (1854-56 & 1857-59)
The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny are both well represented within the collection. Of especial interest is the group of three medals awarded to Lieutenant Frederick Whinyates, whose troop of horse artillery was ordered to accompany the Light Brigade in their famous charge at Balaklava. They were later withdrawn, but not before they had lost one man.
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Lieutenant Frederick Whinyates' Crimea medals.
South Africa: the Kaffir and Boer Wars (1834-53 & 1899-1902)
The medals to Paymaster FitzGerald of the 60th Foot cover the Kaffir Wars in South Africa between 1834 and 1853.
Despite his Irish surname, Sergeant Charles O’Hagan was born and bred in Cheltenham. He served in the Boer War with the Dublin Fusiliers and later went on to serve in France during the First World War, where he earned a Mention in Dispatches.
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Sergeant O'Hagan's medals for the Boer War and First World War
First World War (1914-1918)
During the Great War, hundreds of local men fought and died in France and Belgium, but sadly the museum only has a small representation of their medals. Lieutenant Colonel Percy Lloyd-Jones of the Army Medical Corps earned the Distinguished Service Order as well as other medals for his devotion to medical services. Lieutenant Biden earned the Military Cross on the Somme in 1916, but was to die a year later from wounds received in the battle.
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The Military Cross won by Lieutenant Biden and the Distinguished Service Order for Lieutenant Colonel Lloyd-Jones
Second World War (1939-1945) to the present
Unfortunately the Second World War is a big gap in the museum’s collection and this is the focus of current collecting, together with medals from more recent campaigns.
In 2007 Major Mike Atkinson, formerly of the Army Medal Office, presented the museum with an unnamed Iraq medal; it is his design that is on the reverse side of the medal.
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An unamed Iraq medal designed by Major Mike Atkinson
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