Great War British Medal Trio

As some may know, I am a huge militaria buff, especially when it comes to Imperial British medals. I am going to start a little series on the medals, I only have pictures for this trio, so it will be another week until I do more.

The three medals from left to right are the 1914-15 Service Star, the War Medal (made of sterling silver), and the Allied Victory Medal. I will make posts about the individual medals, later on, some of them have a lot of backstory of how they came to be. These medals were given the nickname of Pip, Squeak, and Wilfrid after a comic book strip in a newspaper made around the same time they came out.

This trio is rather worn, quite common for these medals, soldiers were rather proud of these and would polish them when they started to lose their luster. Finding original ribbons for British Great War medals is also somewhat harder to do, as replacement ribbons were used quite often. Another side note, Great War medals usually were not handed out until a few years after the war, the British medals were awarded in the 1920s.

This medal belonged to a Royal Navy Lead Stoker named Ernest Frederic Woolcock born in 1895 in Cornwall. He survived The Great War, but died by a U-boat attack on the HMS Courageous in 1939 during the Second World War, he was 44.

A stoker was the man who shoveled coal in the steam engines, it was a particularly dangerous job because doing it incorrectly could cause incineration, the pay usually reflected this fact. As steam engines that used coal were being phased out of the Navy, many took on the roles of mechanics instead.

Next week I'll have some more on Great War medals for you! Hope you enjoyed!