RECORD MEDAL YEAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 October 1941, Page 7

RECORD MEDAL YEAR

EXPECTED AT ROYAL MINT AFTER WAR.

London's Royal Mint expects to turn out more medals in the year following the present war than at any period in its history; and in an average year it strikes some 34,000 of them and of decorations of all kinds. The Mint has been doing that continuously since 1643 when Charles I instituted the Forlorn Hope Badge. Meanwhile they arc busy making not only the decorations awarded during the war to the fighting services but the George Crosses and George Medals now for the first time in history awarded for valour to civilians.

It was the King himself who decided that the ribbon, which is blue, for the George Cross should be widened to the same length as that of the Victoria Cross. The monarch chooses all ribbons, and always has clone so. He is assisted by a committee to make sure that a design has not already been used either here or by a foreign power. The rainbow hues of the Victory Medal ribbon, now familiar throughout the Empire, are the result of the deliberations of an i inter-allied committee who sat to think out a ribbon incorpor" ating the colours of all the allied nations concerned in the last war. After the South African War, it was King Edward VII himself who decided that the colours of the Orange Free State should be those used for - the King’s Medal.