FROM LORD HAW HAW

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 January 1942, Page 3

FROM LORD HAW HAW

“TOBRUK RAT" MEDAL. AWARD TO SYDNEY DOCTOR. Captain Stanley Goulston, a Sydney doctor who is a medical officer in the Australian Forces overseas, has been presented by men of his battalion with one of the famous “Tobruk rat” medals. These medals were made by members of the A.I.F. during the siege of Tobruk from shell casings and other metal scraps and awarded to colleagues they thought worthy of them. Captain Goulston received his because during the six and a-half months he was with his battalion in Tobruk he did not lose a case through illness. Another was presented to the commanding officer of the A.I.F. in Tobruk, Major-General Morshead. The Australian troops decided to make the medals following broadcasts from Berlin by the English renegade Lord Haw Haw in which he described them as “the rats of Tobruk—Germany’s selfsupporting prisoners of war.”

Inscribed upon the strips of bronze and brass that take the place of the silk which attaches to the general run of medals are. the words “Presented by Lord Haw Haw to the Tobruk Rats 1941.”

The medal proper is triangular in shape, resembling an A.I.F. colour patch. A braSs rat is the central figure. Captain Goulston sent his medal to his father, Mr John Goulston, of Bellevue Hill, for safe-keeping.